Sharing as Educational Practice: A Case-Study from University of Udine

Social media websites and new practices associated with the increasing use of the Net are deeply affecting many aspects of daily life, including at least some aspects of the education process. They have a strong influence on the lives of millions of users, many of whom are students, who spend a lot of time interacting online with their peers. Scholars and researchers for some years have begun to think about possible positive spillover effects within the educational context. This paper is focused on an experimental project implemented at the University of Udine in the course Theory and Techniques of the New Media. The class in question was comprised of approximately thirty students; half of them were following the lessons in co-presence with the professor in Pordenone and half were following the lessons from another site of the University situated in Udine. The distance learning was supported by several technologies. However, the fact that the class was made of two different parts, one in Pordenone and the other in Udine, and that the distance learning had severe constraints at the structural level, risked to be obstructions of the efficiency of the learning process and students’ socialization. To overcome this difficulty and create a place of debate, internal socialization and organization shared by all the students, we activated two platforms: Facebook and GoogleDocs. The analysis of our case-study highlights, that the use of familiar platforms can have positive effects in education and represent excellent resources for professors and students