Abstract:

The digital technologies are moving faster, can education keep up with all those changes? The higher education institutions needs to take into account students habits, to meet students in the environment they are currently living. How can Universities make capital out of this social force for learning while attending to some persistent concerns? More and more, teachers and universities are attempting to leverage the qualities of social media for use in the classroom and even more, they are trying to use it to connect teachers, students and parents in a way they couldn’t achieve before. Social media is where students live, it’s part of their digital footprint, it’s not just where their friends are, it’s where they want their teacher to be and to be able to learn.

This paper is aiming to present the experience of the Department for Distance Learning, University of Bucharest, Romania, in promoting social media in education.

Chapter 1 includes information from the literature about this subject; the authors were looking for “good practices” all over the world.
Chapter 2 presents authors’ experience and how the students responded to surveys conducted by the department teachers.
Finally, the conclusions and references.

The Department for Distance Learning, University of Bucharest, Romania started the activity 15 years ago and the main focus was on designing, implementing and development of the distance learning system of education within University of Bucharest. One particular aspect of the Department for Distance Learning activity, during these 15 years, was the continuous adaptation to new technologies in order to support the specific distance learning. Ad-hoc surveys, performed by the authors, revealed the following facts: ALL the students have electronic equipment (terminals) with Internet connection; ALL the students declare they spend many hours per week on social networks (Facebook, Google Plus, YouTube etc.).

Teenagers are tweeting, posting, LIKEing, SHAREing and commenting all across social media and it doesn’t seems to be an end of it.

Keywords:

Social media, digital technologies, education, e-learning.