Samy S. Abu Naser et al. Int. Journal of Engineering Research and Applications www.ijera.com ISSN : 2248-9622, Vol. 4, Issue 11(Version - 6), November 2014, pp.129-133 www.ijera.com 129 | Page Using Social network in Higher Education A case Study on the University of Palestine Professor Samy S. Abu Naser*, Mahmoud Abu Ghosh **, Rasha R. Atallah** *(Faculty of Engineering & Information Technology, Al Azhar University, Gaza, Palestine) ** (Department (Faculty of Information Technology, The University of Palestine, Gaza, Palestine ) ABSTRACT The users which are using social networking sites nowadays by various strata of society such as students, teachers, engineers, housewives and elderly people are increasing. So the goal of this paper is to invest social networking in education especially at the universities. Student spending more time on the social networking sites than on the e-learning programs, so social networking can be used in a useful way to support e-learning. 54% of people who were surveyed about the usage of social Networks said they used Facebook daily while 9% used MOODLE. So this paper uses the social networks for e-learning as a case study on the university of Palestine. Keywords – Sochical Network, e-learning, education, Facebook, Twitter I. INTRODUCTION The 21st century continues to usher in technological advances that adjust the nature of communication, socialization, firstly began with web1 , then web2 in which many technologies appeared such as social network and blogs . Nowadays the vision change to how to use the social network on business, education, training not only for entertainment. The term social networking is called on a group of sites on the World Wide Web, enables communication between individuals in a virtual community[1,2], united by interest or belonging to a country or a school or a particular class, in a global system for the transfer of information, as examples for the various social networks: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as shown in Fig 1. According to the result of a questionnaire which was done for this paper, 91% of users are using Facebook in Gaza strip. From the result of questionnaire, we began to think of a mechanism to take advantage of the Facebook in particular and social networking sites in general. II. RELATED WORKS Yu-ching Chen found that Facebook provided a common interaction environment which helps in problem solving and reasoning of the people Figure1: Examples of Social Networks which was reflected by the user satisfaction of Facebook and improved academic performance of the students. The study also found that students found Facebook simple, suitable, user friendly and effortless for academic discussion[3]. The study by Madgea et.al proposed that Facebook can act as an important tool to assist students in settling in the classroom. They also proposed that Facebook can improve their team work and organizational skills [4]. Dunn said that experimental group (28 undergraduate students) used a closed Facebook group to share ideas, thoughts and resources for a period of six weeks. 16 of them offered feedback for this study. RESEARCH ARTICLE OPEN ACCESS