Social media in higher education. How Italian academic scholars are using or not using Web 2.0 tools in their personal, teaching and professional practices

The paper reports the main results of a survey addressed to Italian academic scholars with the aim of researching how the latter use Social Media tools for personal, teaching and professional purposes. The survey, which was adapted and translated from a previous questionnaire, was administered to the entire Italian university scholar population and obtained a rate of response of 10.5%, corresponding to 6,139. The study has specifically investigated how university teachers use these tools in their teaching practices and eventual obstacles that may hinder their adoption. Results show that Social Media use is still rather limited and restricted and that teachers mostly prefer traditional forms of teaching, mainly face-to-face based, to collaborative and distributed practices. Overall the results emphasize ambivalent attitudes towards benefits and challenges of these tools in the context of higher education as already pointed out by the literature.