Institutionalizing Social Network Solutions in Tertiary Educational Institutions
Abstract:As
in other socioeconomic spheres, social networks and media are veritable tools
for education as they provide easy channels for information and knowledge
exchange and their trendy nature make them very attractive and portable among
the young and old. However, these applications are fraught with security
challenges ranging from surveillance to invasion of privacy and unwarranted
tampering with user data regardless of the seemingly impressive underlying rights
of users as claimed by the vendors as to user accounts. Various vulnerabilities
are reported daily as well as data leaks. There appears to be no end to these unwarranted
infringement on rights of users. Sadly, majority of the popular social
networking platforms irrespective of their modus operandi are guilty of this
silent crime. Users of such applications are often carried away with flashy
features without paying reasonable attention to the security and privacy of
their data. In many cases users appear to have relinquished their privacy
rights to these platforms owing to the fact that many users who suffer data
breaches are either ignorant of such or may not have the wherewithal to
challenge the vendors through legal actions. Interestingly a large chunk of
users are unaware of their fundamental rights on such platforms. This paper
underscores the relevance of social networks and social media in tertiary
education vis-à-vis the popularly used social networks and advocates for the
evolution and institutionalizing of specific tertiary education social network
(TESN) that captures the unique demands of students and lecturers. The rapid
application development paradigm is used to demonstrate a prototype of a TESN
that ensures privacy and security of user data. It is concluded that this
application presents a comparative performance while offering institutional
data protection, privacy and security of user data.