Abstract:

This work has the goal to enumerate several possible uses of social tools and their use in the learning process.
Information and Communication Technologies are being increasingly used to create richer learning environments. In all sectors of education from primary schools to adult education, in schools for pupils with special education needs and in colleges and universities, technologies are being used across the curriculum to enhance students’ experiences.
However, technology is not enough. The creation of high quality content is essential if the potential of ‘e-learning’ is to be realized in a way that stimulates and fosters Life Long Learning. It is important to train teachers how to design and develop their own content and generate learning materials that can help their own students and can also be freely exchanged with others.
Constructivism suggests to create environments where learners "are required to examine thinking and learning processes; collect, record, and analyze data; formulate and test hypotheses; reflect on previous understandings; and construct their own meaning" . However, learning at a distance makes it difficult to create such an environment because of the transactional and geographical distance (which may cause alienation and may hinder the creation of a learning community) and of the additional effort required for course management and delivery (which imposes to focus more on organizational and technological aspects than on pedagogical issues).
On the other hand, if pedagogical goals are carefully taken into account during the development of the learning environment, information and communication technologies can be suitably applied to bridge the transactional gap of distance learning .
The use of tools created for other purposes than learning but nonetheless used in education are sometimes challenging for teachers. In this work one analysis several possible situations and uses of different tools in different areas of knowledge, such as wikis, collaborative documents, blogs, APIs, social networks, twitter, mobile phones among others.

Keywords:

Social tools, e-learning, Instructional design, collaboration.