Can We Make Students Lifelong Learners Through Social Networks?

The Accreditation Board for Engineering Education and Technology (ABET) criteria require engineering programs to demonstrate that their students attain “a recognition of the need for, and an ability to engage in lifelong learning”. Online environments provide a great deal of access to self-learning resources but such access is typically limited to the period of formal education. Extending availability of such resources beyond formal education period is neither feasible nor ideal as they are mostly strictly configured to support many other aspects of education that go beyond self-learning. We believe more generic solutions that are available during and after the formal education periods should be sought to engage students in lifelong learning. This paper focuses on use of social networking tools (SNTs) as the medium for collaboration in education. The advantages of SNTs to lifelong learning are twofold. First they provide easy and fast access to relevant information even after formal education. Second they allow keeping social ties with people having similar professional interest and possibly access to their extended network. This paper will focus on a senior year Plastics Engineering course students’ utilization process of discussion boards in dedicated and generic technological platforms, alongside their challenges, response and overall reaction to social network based learning platforms.