A murky business: the ethics of conducting educational research in Facebook groups

Perryman, Leigh-Anne and Coughlan, Tony (2014). A murky business: the ethics of conducting educational research in Facebook groups. In: Proceedings: Challenges for Research into Open & Distance Learning - Doing Things Better – Doing Better Things, European Distance and E-Learning Network, pp. 277–289.

URL: http://www.eden-online.org/publications/proceeding...

Abstract

Facebook is undoubtedly the face of online social networking and is transforming ‘the ways students communicate, collaborate, and learn’ (Tess, 2013) within higher education. This paper builds on existing research on the use of Facebook in educational settings, taking as its focus the ethical challenges of researching within Facebook - a topic that receives little attention - asking the overall research question ‘what are the ethical challenges of researching social network activity in an educational context?’. The paper is informed by two phases of our own reflexive research on the educational practices of formal and informal learners both in online forums and in Facebook groups: our developing and piloting the ‘public open scholar’ role (Coughlan and Perryman, 2012) within UK voluntary sector communities and Commonwealth autism-focused Facebook groups; and our more recent research around formal learners participating in public Facebook groups about specific UK Open University (OU) courses.

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