University Student Communities and Media Habits: From Formal LMS to Social Networks

According to Wenger (1998) communities of practice are important, not only for the profiles of professionals, but also for university students that do not know each other personally, but nevertheless share a “common practice” (Brown, Doguid, 2000, p.205) in order to activate dynamics to exchange knowledge and help each other (Trentin, 2004). Between2005 and2011 the Department of Education of University of Milan – Bicocca opened four student communities, using a Learning Management System, for the purpose of answering students’ orientation needs and engaging students in discussing university issues. The first surveys confirmed the positive acceptation of the communities as an important place to discuss issues, share common goals and find important information about the degree programs. From 2012 due to the growth in the number of social network users (CENSIS 2012, Nielsen 2012), the students of the Department of Education began to spontaneously create Facebook groups and to move slowly to them from official communities. In this research we present the results of a longitudinal study on comparing the use and perception of quality of communities implemented in LMS versus those of Facebook groups. This analysis is the reason the department decided to adopt Facebook groups to develop student communities. The results of this research highlight the importance of media habits over other factors also in the presence of processes where there are high levels of quality realized in less used media.