Can Facebook make you a better college student?
By Kukil Bora, SiliconIndia   |   Friday, 29 April 2011, 03:15 IST   |    25 Comments
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Bangalore: Are you a student addicted to Facebook? If you are asked to assess its impact on your student life, how will you rate it? With students keeping up with social events, reading campus news, and even collaborating on projects on Facebook, the social network has become integral to college life now. But have you ever thought about its effect on actual studies? Can hanging out on Facebook keep college students from dropping out? Or, it's just another distraction? Well, the answer is not that simple as the question. When it comes to India, the country's Facebook population has crossed the 25 million base mark. And among all the age groups, the younger generation between the age group of 18-25 has formed 53 percent of the total number of Facebook users in India. Apart from that, most of the Indian college campuses today are covered by WiFi networks and students use much of the bandwidth on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Hence, the effect this has had on students has been an issue of heated debate. The infographics below are an attempt to figure out the positive and negative aspects of social media among the student in U.S.
Here, the emphasis is on how social media affects student's grades. It shows that classes that use twitter typically have grades up half a grade point. It is also directly tied to students collaborating online with 75 percent saying that they would engage in online collaboration. What is surprising is that students who try to multitask between Facebook and studying are having lower grades.

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