(1409) USING SOCIAL MEDIA TO SUPPLEMENT TRADITIONAL UNIVERSITY LEARNING IN THE ICT SECTOR: THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING UP TO DATE IN THE TELECOMMUNICATIONS ENVIRONMENT

摘要

Teaching subjects related to ICT imply a very high level of exigency for the lecturers involved. Due tothe breakneck speed at which advances telecommunications sector it is of great importance to be upto date with the news of the field, providing a relevant and valid transfer of knowledge. The traditionalteaching of telecommunications involves the transmission of certain knowledge of static character.However, vast majority of the ICT-related technologies and knowledge is constantly evolving. Thisgreatly hinders the teaching of subjects related to telecommunications and the lecturer is faced withthe problem of constantly changing and updating the contents, since the objective is to teach an up todate course. This way, several subjects depend on the technological situation of the current moment.The use of social networks, which are so widespread among university students, may be a suitablesupplement for students to be able to acquire up to date information. This way student's complementtheir knowledge acquired in classroom and keep up contact with ICT and new and emergingtechnologies, favouring the continuous immersion in the telecommunications sector. This situation isuseful because the objective is to provide the students the necessary tools to keep up to date and intouch with ICT.The overall objective of this paper is to show how the different social networks under study allow thestudents learning by interacting with the current telecommunications sector news. Moreover, socialnetworks provide a common discussion forum among students, lecturers and anyone interested in theICT sector. This way, a collaborative learning network is created.Over the last years we have been using several interactive and social tools, evaluating the interactionof students with different platforms in order to reveal which one was more suitable for our task. That isto say, which one is able to allow a richer transfer of information for students.In this work we have used as tools a blog, a wiki (Wikitel), Moodle work environment and a twitteraccount (@telecoua). From all of them we have analyzed which one provides the best resultsnowadays.The results obtained are totally revealing, due to the popularity of smart phones and tablets nowadays.As a conclusion, this work is the result of various learning research projects in which the authors haveparticipated previously. All of them teach several subjects in the finishing years of the Degree inSound and Image Telecommunications Engineering and the Master in TelecommunicationEngineering, courses that are taught at the Polytechnic School of the University of Alicante.