Experiences of students regarding the use of Facebook for mentoring : a case of a writing centre
Over the last 15 years, many South African universities have established Writing Centres as places to provide academic writing support to their students. The services offered are mostly free and voluntary and as such, there are no strict regulations regarding who should use them, and how often they should visit. Consequently, writing centres especially the newly established ones struggle to monitor the progress of the students they have helped once they have left the place, or even reach students in the places where they continue to write in order to offer additional support to students, which could positively influence their writing self-efficacy. This design-based research case study reports on an intervention run by one such writing centre where social media, specifically Facebook due to its popularity among students, was explored as a technology that can be adopted to reach and offer help to students beyond the confines of its physical space.
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations