Abstract:

The development of new technologies and the social networks is causing a revolution in today´s society. Its impact in the organizational world is relevant, especially at enterprise level. However, its development in the Spanish educational environment has not been so important.
Despite this situation, our group has been an innovator in the educational use of these technologies, with an extensive implementation of social networks in classroom´s tasks. After previous experiences and knowledge in educational innovation, this work analyses its use, and it explores, with its implementation in the subject “Administración de Recursos en Unidades Informativas” (a compulsory course of the degree of documentation) how to combine the new tools in order to improve the case study methodology.
The case study is one of the most important active methodologies implemented in the educational world. This methodology has been implemented in various disciplines such as law, medicine, psychology, etc. The introduction of the case method, as a teaching method in management courses, was held at the Harvard Business School (Copeland, 1954:25-33). Since then, this method has been used extensively in most universities and business schools worldwide, as a teaching method for learning basic decision making, as a complementary tool to traditional teaching methods (Cragg, 1954; Reynolds, 1992), as well as a research method (Stake and Easley, 1978; MacDonald, 1983).
The classical procedure to be followed in the case study is as follows: 1) the lecturer brings the case, the guide for analysis and readings relevant to it, 2) preparation of the case and materials necessary for its resolution, 3) individually, students read and study the material prepared by the lecturer, they search for complementary information, and finally they prepare their reports for discussion in subgroups, 4) sharing of individual analyses, and joint case discussion and adoption by the subgroup of a consensual solution to the problem, 5) the lecturer as facilitator and coordinator of the final analysis of the case, leads the sharing of opinions among the groups, he comments the unanimous decision reached by the students and gives his opinion on the resolution of the case (for a description of the case method see Cuadra, 1960:5-11).
Following this scheme, in our work we have considered the reconfiguration of the design and implementation of the case method in the classroom, using social networks and virtual communities as instruments to help the development of the case study method. In particular we have tried to implement new opportunities, which have been created with the development of virtual communities and social networks, and are allowing organizations, as well as education units, to develop innovative management processes of information collaboration and communication (Stewart, 2007)

Keywords:

Social networks, technology, case study.