Social Network Applications for Education: The Case of College Connect

Abstract

In this chapter, the design, implementation, benefits, and challenges of using a Facebook application, College Connect, are presented. College Connect was designed to address the persistent educational problem of college access in the United States, part of which stems from students’ lack of social capital, the human and information resources available to them in their social networks that can provide needed information, such as how to apply to, enroll in, and pay for college. College Connect, a social networking application which runs on Facebook, the parent platform, was designed to help address this problem by creating a network visualization of each student’s Facebook Friends network and showing the student who within the network has college information in their Facebook profile. In this chapter, we explain the theory and procedures that led to the design of the College Connect application, the process of launching the application, and the benefits and challenges of implementing it with adolescent students preparing for college.