Social networking is a phenomenon in which individuals use Internet-based tools to communicate with each other, sharing both text-based and multimedia-based information. Social networks have been increasingly used in educational contexts to support learning, professional development, and extracurricular functions. A wide variety of social networking tools are available, and they generate a great deal of data that can be used to better understand how people interact and learn online.

Although social networks have been referred to as communities, Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman, in their 2012 book titled Networked, suggest that social networks are not the same as communities, but rather, they represent the diverse groups of people who somehow touch our lives. At the core of social networking is the network itself: the group ...

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