SOCIAL NETWORKS INFLUENCE IN COLLABORATIVE LEARNING

Nowadays, social networks represent a mechanism to enhance communication among a group of people and cooperation in common tasks. Moreover, they allow these people to feel part of a community. These features seem appropriate for educational environments encouraging several aspects like: active participation of students in the learning process, self-learning, interaction and motivation of students and the creation of networks to cooperate and interchange ideas. However, the use of social networks in the university environment raises several questions: Does the use of social networks help in the collaborative work? Do students interact to improve the learning process? Is it a suitable mechanism to improve communication? Do appear new roles for students or teachers? In this paper, we aim to solve these questions and study the influence of the social networks in the university environment. Therefore, we present an experiment in which the use of social networks, specifically Facebook, has been analyzed in the educational scope. For this experiment, two collaborative tasks were proposed to the students implied in the experiment. These tasks, that have to be done at home, not in class, are based on the total participation of all the students, in which they must complete a specific issue within the task. As a conclusion, it must be said that social networks cause an extra benefit in teaching and learning but they must be a complement, not a replacement, of classroom teaching.