Sixth International School On Mind, Brain And Education
2011 August 3-7
Education in the
Digital Era
Directors: Antonio M. Battro and Kurt W. Fischer
Program officer: María Lourdes Majdalani
University Milano-Bicocca, Italy
University students and social media: reflections from an empirical research
The debate on the relevance of the "social networking " and “2.0 tools in education have been characterized by a kind of disproportion between the emphasis on the relevance of the phenomenon, also in scholarly literature, and the limited availability of a empirical data and surveys. In this paper we present some exploratory data from a survey conducted in 2008 and 2009 on a sample, of students enrolled in Bachelor degree courses at the University of Milano-Bicocca. The results we obtained seem to show how the enormous spread of specific instruments of "social networking" and Web 2.0 tools within the younger generations of students can’t be taken directly correlated to an “expert” and “critical” of this use for educational purpose of ICT. Moreover the use for recreational purposes is still widely prevalent, than the possibility to exploit the latest features to support shared learning processes.
Keywords: social web, digital natives, collaborative learning, personal learning environments, media diet.