Towards a Hybrid Federated Social Networking Architecture. A Case of Zimbabwe’s Higher Education

The study had its motivation established on the readiness of Zimbabwean universities to adopt a Hybrid Federated Social Networking framework (FSNS). In that respect, the study pursued a mixed method research design, based on a pragmatist philosophy, which therefore provided a basis for an exploratory multiple case study pursuing five universities in Zimbabwe. In addition to that, ethnography, interviews and survey were adopted for data gathering. A total of 45 respondents were exposed to purposive sampling technique, while 748 contributed to an online survey. Findings from ethnography revealed that universities were ready to embrace the future of social media technology borne of a hybrid FSNS. The survey noted that there is a strong positive relationship between FSNS adoption and opportunities presented by eLearning in higher education. However, there are some inborne bottlenecks identified in the Zimbabwean higher education environment, which includes poor networking resources, lack of clear eLearning policies as well as the underlying technical architecture of the social media sites which includes agreed protocols, shared infrastructure. In line with that the study proffers a set of recommendations, as well as a proposed hybrid FSNS framework for adoption in higher education.