A social network for Nigeria tertiary institutions

Abstract

This paper present the development and implementation of an academic social network application for Nigeria University students using the Rational Unified Process. Java Enterprise Edition was used as the language of implementation, MySQL was used as the database System. Experimentation was done using students of the University of  Port-Harcourt. The application reduces the negative impact of social networking, while using it as a tool to facilitate collaboration amongst Students. It enables students to solve academic and research problems. It has a powerful in-built app called  “Gradiometer”, which keeps track of Students’ grades, plots a chart of Students’ grade points against courses and automatically calculates their Cumulative Grade Point Average. The results obtained from this work shows that social networking can be used as a tool to fix the missing link in the education sector of Nigerian Universities; which is collaboration amongst students, while reducing the negative effect of Social networking.

Keywords: Academic Social Network, Java Enterprise Edition, Collaboration and Cumulative Grade Point Average.