An Analysis of the Graduates Students Approach towards Web 2.0: A Case Study of the Library and Information Science Students in Mashhad

The main objective of this paper is to determine how familiar the Library and Information Science graduate students at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (FUM) and Payame Noor University of Mashhad (PNUM) are with capabilities of Web 2.0. We will also indicate the results of our study on the attitudes of the student on the use of web 2.0 capabilities. In order to do so we chose all Library and Information Science graduate students at FUM and PNUM to construct the unit of our analysis. Then a sample extracted from our unit of analysis which reached to 140 graduate students from FUM and PNUM. Then we used the researcher-made questionnaire to collect the necessary data. The questionnaire was then distributed among the sample members, based on the stratified random sampling and eventually some 76 valid questionnaires were collected to be suitable for further analysis. Some of the research findings indicate that the most popular Web 2.0 tools used by the research samples from FUM and PNUM turn out to be Weblog and the least popular one was social cataloging sites. Also, the most used Web 2.0 tools among FUN students were Wiki while PNUM students used Weblogs. It should also be noted that there was a significant relationship between the type of university the graduate students studied in and their familiarity with Web 2.0 tools. This is while no significant relationship existed between the type of university and the use of Web 2.0 tools. The findings also indicated that two research populations had considered the impact of Web 2.0 tools on knowledge sharing to be a moderate impact. They instead considered the impact of Weblogs on knowledge sharing to have been above average.