WHAT CAN SOCIAL NETWORKS TODAY IN OUR SCHOOLS? NETWORK GROUPS AS VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES OF EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES.

The scenarios of spread of current technologies lead to the recruitment of new spaces and new social-technological environments, such as social networks, which can be considered real forms of virtual learning communities. Unluckily, the educational potential of social media within formal educational settings, such as university educational contexts, are yet little? unexplored. This contribute aims to fit within this research interest, describing the experience of a research of international significance conducted in the academic year 2013-2014 in the Laboratory of Epistemology and Educational Practices (LEPE) of the Department of Humanities at University of Naples 'Federico II'. This research has allowed us to empirically show the educational potential of the use of a very common Social Network, Facebook. That was possible thanks to the creation of four secret virtual groups, which were important to implement lectures and laboratory activities, that were carried out face-to-face. For the research an evaluation questionnaire was adopted and administered to participating students: the questionnaire was developed by the research group of LEPE. The questionnaire is characterized as a structured set of questions that explore different dimensions. Facebook seems to be a virtual space and a platform for open educational practices, which are not only informal, but mostly formal, as a sort of virtual research community where educational materials can circulate, where it is possible to co-construct knowledge and to share doubts and questions about the contents, to discover an active and critical mode of online learning and integration of social networks. Therefore, our research, based on critical pedagogy principles, brings into play a variety of issues: -the relationship between theory - practice - theory, particularly referring to face-to-face and virtual types of education, -the possibility of inclusion of social media in university teaching curricula, -the new languages of education, more and more high-tech and digital, -the construction of virtual shared knowledge