Educ Inf Technol (2012) 17:451–464

DOI 10.1007/s10639-011-9169-5

How are campus students using social media to support

their studies? An explorative interview study

Stefan Hrastinski & Naghmeh M. Aghaee

Published online: 13 July 2011

# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011

Abstract Social media hype has created a lot of speculation among educators on how
these media can be used to support learning, but there have been rather few studies so
far. Our explorative interview study contributes by critically exploring how campus
students perceive using social media to support their studies and the perceived benefits
and limitations compared with other means. Although the vast majority of the
respondents use social media frequently, a “digital dissonance” can be noted, because
few of them feel that they use such media to support their studies. The interviewees
mainly put forth e-mail and instant messaging, which are used among students to ask
questions, coordinate group work and share files. Some of them mention using
Wikipedia and YouTube for retrieving content and Facebook to initiate contact with
course peers. Students regard social media as one of three key means of the educational
experience, alongside face-to-face meetings and using the learning management
systems, and are mainly used for brief questions and answers, and to coordinate group
work. In conclusion, we argue that teaching strategy plays a key role in supporting
students in moving from using social media to support coordination and information
retrieval to also using such media for collaborative learning, when appropriate.

Keywords Social media . Online education . Higher education . Student perceptions

1 Introduction

Social media have potential to support learning in ways that are not restricted by
time and place (Contreras-Castillo et al. 2006; Hrastinski 2006). Although emerging

S. Hrastinski (*)
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Lindstedtsv. 3, SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden
e-mail: stefanhr@kth.se

N. M. Aghaee
Stockholm University, Forum 100, SE-164 40 Kista, Sweden
e-mail: nam@dsv.su.se
452 Educ Inf Technol (2012) 17:451–464

social media have the potential to support learning in new ways, we still know
little about how social media are currently used to support students’ educational
learning. For example, many of the papers in chronicles and journals on online
learning provide conflicting advice, often based on anecdotes and personal
preferences rather than rigorous research. Examples of suggested benefits,
reviewed by Selwyn (2009), include that social media will support students to
“invest time and energy in building relationships around shared interests and
knowledge communities” (Maloney 2007, p. 26), promote “critical thinking in
learners” (Bugeja 2006, p. 1), offer educators a forum for “easy networking and
positive networking with students” (Lemeul 2006, p. 1) and will “radically change
the educational system … to better motivate students” (Ziegler 2007). There are
also those, who fear that using social media will “contribute to the intellectual …
depowering of a ‘Google generation’ of learners incapable of independent critical
thought” (Ziegler 2007).
Prensky (2001) put forward the dichotomy of “digital natives” and “digital
immigrants” when arguing that technology has dramatically changed the way students
in higher education live and learn. Other terms include the Net generation (Tapscott 1998),
Millennials (Oblinger and Oblinger 2005), Homo Zappiens (Veen and Vrakking 2007),
Generation M (Ziegler 2007) and Generation Y (Weiler 2005). A growing body of
literature is questioning whether there is really a sharp and fundamental break between
young people and previous generations (Bennett and Maton 2010; Jones and
Czerniewicz 2010; Judd and Kennedy 2011; Selwyn 2008). There are many perceptions
of the role of social media in education, some of which are myths and others are
realities. As suggested by Bennett and Maton (2010), we believe it is time to go
beyond the simple dichotomies of the digital natives debate in order to understand
how emerging technologies, such as social media, can support students’ learning.
We need to move forward from saying that “students learn in new ways” towards
conducting rigorous research that can help us understand the role of social media in
educational settings.
Caraher and Braselman (2010) report that students use social media to connect
with classmates, to work on assignments and, to some extent, to connect with
faculty. Their quantitative findings could, however, be extended by gaining a more
detailed understanding of how social media are used to support connecting with
peers and teachers, and working on assignments. Selwyn (2009) and Madge et al.
(2009) argue that students primarily use Facebook to exchange social support and
coordinate their studies, rather than engaging in collaborative learning. Could this be
the case for other media as well? We hope to fill these gaps of knowledge by
addressing the following research questions: How do campus students perceive that
they use social media to support their studies? Which are the perceived benefits and
limitations of using social media for educational purposes as compared with other
means? We conduct an interview study in order to better understand the perspective
of students and their perceptions of using social media to support their studies.
This paper is structured as follows. First, we discuss previous research on social
media with an emphasis on its potential in higher education. Then we present our
research method, followed by a presentation of the results. In the final sections, we
discuss our findings, reflect on the limitations and future research opportunities, and
put forward conclusions.
Educ Inf Technol (2012) 17:451–464 453

2 Social media in higher education

The term social media has been defined in many ways. Based on a literature review,
Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) define social media as media “that allow the creation
and exchange of user-generated content” (p. 61). This essentially means that all
media that are used to support exchanges among people, including e.g. e-mail, wikis,
blogs, content sharing and forums can be used as social media. It is the users that decide
whether a medium is used in social ways or not. Most social media promote interaction
among people, which is often argued as having positive impacts on learning outcomes in
higher education settings, measured as perceived learning, grades and quality
assessment of assignments (Fredericksen et al. 2000; Hiltz et al. 2000).
Caraher and Braselman (2010) surveyed more than 1,000 college students in the
US. They found that “64% of students use social media to ‘connect with classmates’
to study or work on class assignments at least several times per month. Forty-one
percent use social media to ‘study or work on class assignments’ at least several
times per month. Twenty-seven percent use social media to ‘connect with
faculty to study or work’ on class assignments, at least several times per month”
(p. 13).
The web is characterized by decentralization of authority in knowledge creation
and technology ownership. This could enable new forms of collaboration and
knowledge sharing for learners. However, the use of social media in higher
education has been quite limited (Margaryan et al. 2011). Anderson et al. (2010)
investigated the use of social media among self paced learners in Canada. They
found that a majority of the students were interested in using social media in
educational settings, but that the students with most experience of social media were
more interested in using it to support their studies. About half of them were
interested in using social media to support collaboration with other students.
Anderson et al. concluded that students and teachers need support to gain
competence, to find potential educational applications and to learn the potential
pedagogical benefits of such media.
Selwyn (2009) focused on the use of Facebook among 909 undergraduate
students in a UK university. By conducting a qualitative analysis of their comments
and messages, he found that these could be characterized as reflecting on the
university experience, exchanging practical/academic information, providing moral
and social support and often included ironic, sarcastic and humorous comments.
Thus, the students primarily exchanged social support and coordinated their studies,
rather than engaging in deep or collaborative learning. Similarly, Madge et al. (2009)
found that British undergraduate students used Facebook as “social glue” that helped
them settle into university life.
Jones et al. (2010) found that students perceive a distinct divide between their
learning space and their personal space. They argue that educators need to address
individual student preferences to combine or separate the two domains. Clark et al.
(2009) mapped the technology landscapes of young learners (11–16 years).
They coined the term “digital dissonance”, which describes the tension between
learners’ in- and out-of-school use of social media and related technologies.
Clark and colleagues conclude by calling for more research on the transfer-
ability of social media skills and how such media can be used to support
454 Educ Inf Technol (2012) 17:451–464

formal education. Some argue that teachers play an important role in inspiring
students to use social media to support their studies (Alexander 2001), while
others put forth that excessive instructional control may lead to boredom and not
feeling motivated (Dron 2007).
A study of multitasking, which “refers to the act of attending to two or more
parallel tasks” (Judd and Kennedy 2011, p. 625), of over 6,000 sessions among
undergraduate medical students found that students engaged in these activities less
frequently than “digital native” rhetoric implies: infrequent and low-level multi-
taskers vastly outnumbered multitaskers (Judd and Kennedy 2011). Eynon and
Malmberg (2011) have developed a typology of young people’s Internet use, based
on a survey of 1,069 participants. They identified four types of Internet usage
profiles: the peripherals, the normative, the all-rounders and the active participators.
Moreover, Judd and Kennedy (2011) and Anderson et al. (2010) complement the
“digital native” rhetoric by recognizing that it is important to contrast infrequent and
frequent social media users in order to gain a deeper understanding. Drawing on this
research, we categorize our respondents as “the infrequent users”, “the medium
users” and “the frequent users” in order to provide an understanding of our
population of social media users.

3 Method

We investigated an emerging topic and therefore decided to conduct an exploratory

study. Exploratory research initially employs a broad perspective and, as it
progresses, the results crystallize (Adams and Schvaneveldt 1991). Most previous
research has mainly been conducted through surveys (e.g. Anderson et al. 2010;
Caraher and Braselman 2010; Jones et al. 2010; Madge et al. 2009), although
exceptions include Margaryan et al. (2011) that combined questionnaires and
interviews, and Selwyn (2009) who conducted content analysis of Facebook
comments and messages. While survey data can be useful to identify and quantify
patterns and perceptions, qualitative data can offer more detailed and nuanced
understanding (Hargittai et al. 2010). Since this study was conducted from the
perspective of students, and we wanted to understand student perceptions of social
media, it was important that they would decide what is social media and what is not,
and what is “educational” and “personal”. Therefore, we did not provide a formal
definition prior to the interviews, as their view on these terms is one of the
contributions of the study. A consequence and limitation was the interviewees had
quite different perceptions of these concepts and it was somewhat difficult to keep
the interviews focused. Thus, there is a risk that students had different perceptions of
what a social medium actually is.
Eleven open questions were used to guide the semi-structured interviews. These
aimed to shed light on different dimensions of the research questions. We explored
student perceptions and experiences rather than using many predefined, structured
questions. Examples of probing questions include: Give examples of the social
media that you use most frequently. Give examples of how you use these media to
support your studies? Which are the benefits of using these media to support your
studies? Which are the limitations of using these media to support your studies?
Educ Inf Technol (2012) 17:451–464 455

We interviewed twenty arbitrarily selected students, who were doing group

assignments, chatting or just intended to start studying at Uppsala student unions,
cafeterias and libraries. We can note that the responses could be biased towards
perceptions of computer science and economics students, since almost ten students
that were approached from the other majors, were not interested in participating. The
interviews were conducted in English and supported by an interview guide. As the
interviews were opportunistic, most of them were rather short with the average time
of 20 min. However, some of the interviews were up to 2 h. All answers were
transcribed verbatim, though not recorded. There are both benefits and limitations of
this type of spontaneous, brief interview. On the one hand, we got a rather shallow
understanding as we could only approach individuals for a brief interview. On the
other hand, if we invited students to participate beforehand, there is a risk that those
most interested in social media would be more inclined to participate.
All interviews were approached in the afternoon in four different days in May
2010. Nine interviewees were female and eleven male; ten of them were graduate
students and ten undergraduates. Their ages ranged from 19 to 39 years old with a
mean age of 25 years. They studied business administration (n=1), computer science
(n =4), history (n=1), hydrology (n=1), human-computer interaction (n= 2),
economics (n=4), international business (n=1), microbiology (n=1), Nordic
languages (n=1), organic chemistry (n=1), political science (n=2) and social media
(single-subject course) (n=1).
We created summaries of each interview, as a way of getting an overview and an
understanding of the data in the interview transcripts. By creating summaries of the
collected data, the researcher can focus on the key points and principal themes that
emerge from the interviews (Saunders et al. 2007). The analysis procedure involved
four main activities. These activities are categorization of data, unitizing data,
relationship recognition and, finally, testing and drawing the conclusions. We
organized the interview data according to the interview questions, and categorized
the responses according to the three categories of users: frequent, medium and
infrequent users. Frequent use is defined as “more or less every day”, medium use as
“several times every week” and infrequent use as “weekly or less”. Then, the
categorized interview data was reviewed and categories were iteratively identified.
Some of these categories were broadly defined, i.e. perceived benefits and perceived
limitations, while the others concerned specific types of social media use. The
second author created a first set of categorizations and, then, the first author refined
these categories. This was followed by iterative further development of the
categories by both authors until agreeing. Finally, conclusions were drawn based
on the identified categories and patterns found in relation to each category of social
media use and category of user.

4 Results

In the first section, we describe student perceptions of the frequency of social media
use to support their studies. Then, we describe the interviewees’ perceptions of
social media use, which were iteratively identified and organized in eight categories.
Finally, we describe perceived limitations.
456 Educ Inf Technol (2012) 17:451–464

4.1 Frequency of social media use

All but one of the interviewed students use social media roughly every day, although
they perceive that their use is often not related with their studies. As discussed
above, we distinguished three different types of social media users based on
how often students perceived using social media to support their studies. The
first group are frequent users (n=5), who use social media everyday for both
personal and educational purposes. The second group are medium users (n=7),
who use social media very often for personal purposes but not as often for
educational purposes. The last group are infrequent users (n=8), most of whom
use social media frequently, but rarely to support their studies. Mean ages of each
group are 25 or 26 years. More detailed data for each individual student is
presented in the Appendix.
Most of the students put forth the benefit of being able to connect anytime and
anywhere, which is consistent with previous studies of online media (e.g. Kearsley 1995).
The majority of students also mention efficiency and time-saving as other key
benefits. Many of them argue that they prefer using social media as a
complement to, rather than replacement of, face-to-face education and group
work meetings. All interviewees use the formal learning management system
(LMS). They consider the LMS to complement social media for downloading
course guidelines, lecture notes and other information regarding courses. It
should be noted, however, that the LMS is mainly used for information retrieval
and rarely for communication among students. As described below, the students
prefer social media for certain types of communication, such as brief questions
and answers, and coordination of group work, and face-to-face meetings for other
types of communication, such as collaborative group work.

4.2 Perceptions of social media use

By iteratively analyzing the interview data, seven perceptions of how social media
are used to support studies emerged. These are illustrated in Fig. 1 and discussed
below. It should be noted that the identified categories are student perceptions of
how they use social media as support for their studies and do not necessarily
reflect their actual use. For example, few respondents mention Wikipedia and
YouTube, but this does not necessarily mean that they do not use these media for
e.g. personal purposes.

E-mailing Most students (n=17, 85%) mention e-mail when asked to describe the
social media that they use. E-mail is primarily used for communication among
students, many also use it to share documents, and three students mention using
e-mail for communication with teachers. The two latter categories are described
below. Other uses of e-mail are to share ideas, arrange appointments, manage
tasks and submit papers to teachers.

Instant messaging Most students (n=16, 80%), especially frequent and medium
users of social media for education, use instant messaging systems. They mainly use
such media to get a quick answer and to coordinate class work. One student
Educ Inf Technol (2012) 17:451–464 457

Fig. 1 Student perceptions of social media use to support their studies (n=20)

mentions that instant messaging is useful “to get straight answers from the other
students, when you have a question or want to arrange group meetings”.
According to a student, “if one of the group members cannot come to the
meeting, then we can be online and still keep in contact with the missing
person”. Voice-based or video-based media, such as Skype, is mostly used to
enable mediated group meetings.

Sharing documents Many of these students (n=14, 70%) mention that they use e-mail
to share documents. For instance, one biology student says, “e-mail is used to forward
data from experiments”. A business administration student also mentions, “when we
want to send documents, we use e-mail”.

Connecting Five students (n=5, 25%) mention that Facebook can be useful to find
course peers and group work members, as a way for initiating communication. One
student says, “students can communicate via Facebook to ask concrete questions and
get quick replies, since students are used to check their Facebook often”. Another
student mentions that they “make closed groups for arranging appointments for
studying together”.

Student-teacher communication Students (n=3, 15%) rarely mention that they use
social media to communicate with their teachers by using e-mail. These respondents
are medium and infrequent users of social media. However, none of the frequent
users mentioned teachers when describing how they use social media.

Wiki reading Two students (n=2, 10%) mention Wikipedia, which is used for
information retrieval rather than taking part in collaboratively creating content:
“Wikipedia is a good resource to get a general idea about things and getting hints
what to search about in articles”. However, none of the respondents mentioned that
they take part in creating Wikipedia content.
458 Educ Inf Technol (2012) 17:451–464

Video watching Two students (n=2, 10%) mention YouTube, which is used to view
videos but not to produce and upload videos. For instance, one student used a
YouTube video of an Obama speech in a leadership course to support a presentation.
A computer science student mentions that watching video-based tutorials from
YouTube is often easier and faster rather than reading books.

Project collaboration Two students (n=2, 10%), both from the frequent users group,
use project tools, i.e. Google groups and Google documents, for collaboration on
group work.

4.3 Limitations of social media use

Although all but one of the interviewed students use social media actively in their
private lives, many of them are quite critical about using such media in education.
Some describe the use of social media as leading to less “human interaction”, which
is perceived as important in educational contexts. Many feel that social media is
reducing spontaneous interaction and student collaboration, since students work on
different parts of a project separately and they do not therefore engage in
collaborative learning. Another common hesitation is that some students feel that
they or their peers rely too much on information available from social media, such as
Wikipedia, without being critical.
Most of the respondents say that using social media is not as efficient as face-to-
face contact, leading to problems such as misunderstandings, less knowledge sharing
and less creative thinking. Some suggest that there might be less creativity when
students do not work together face-to-face at the campus. They also mention that
doing different parts of an assignment and sending the work to others by social
media has negative impacts on student collaboration, as compared with meeting
face-to-face. Many of the students argue that traditional lectures or seminars are
more effective than using social media. Several students bring up that guidelines or
similar from teachers can help students to use social media to support their studies in
productive ways.

5 Discussion

The aim of this paper is to explore how campus students perceive that they use
social media to support their studies and the perceived benefits and limitations as
compared with other means. All but one of the students interviewed are frequent
social media users and use such media roughly every day. Nevertheless, only five
of them use social media frequently for academic purposes to support their
studies. The rest use social media mainly for personal communications with their
friends, family and other contacts but not so much related to their studies. When
the interviewees use social media to support their studies, it is mainly for quick
questions and answers or coordination with other students. As mentioned earlier,
Clark et al. (2009) coined the term “digital dissonance” to describe the tension
between young learners (11–16 years) in- and out-of-school use of social media.
Educ Inf Technol (2012) 17:451–464 459

We also found this tension among the interviewed higher education students of
this study.
The students use different social media for different purposes. When we asked
students which social media they use to support studies, most of them mentioned
e-mail and instant messaging. The students that need to get in touch with their
teacher primarily use e-mail. In line with the findings of Margaryan et al. (2011), we
found that e-mail is still the main tool for communication between teachers and
students. E-mail is also commonly used to exchange files among students. Many
students mention instant messaging as the means to support group work but the
medium is used for quick questions and answers, group work coordination and
exchanging files, rather than collaborative learning. Although most of the
interviewees do not communicate with their teachers in other ways than using
e-mail and LMS, few seem bothered by this.
Surprisingly, not many of the students mention popular social media, such as
Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube, when discussing social media for educa-
tional purposes. Instead, many name media such as e-mail and instant
messaging. They regard Wikipedia and YouTube as information retrieval media
as they do not use these to create content in collaboration with others.
Facebook is regarded as a medium for making contact with other students they
do not know well, e.g. when they need to initiate contact with peers in a new
course. Similarly, Selwyn (2009) and Madge et al. (2009) studied Facebook use
among students and found few examples of collaborative learning. Instead,
students focused on exchanging practical and academic information and
experiences and social support. Very few students provide examples of
collaborative tools, such as Google groups, for sharing files and collaborative
work and learning.
As we have learnt from this study, the interviewees actively use social media
to connect with peers, but rarely use LMS for such purposes. For instance, one
interviewee in this study prefers asking her question on Facebook to get a faster
reply, since she believes that students check their Facebook more often than
LMS. Some would argue that we should take advantage of these tools rather
than try to develop similar tools as part of LMS (Tucker 2007), which Weller
(2010) has labeled the centralization dilemma in educational IT. Face-to-face
meetings are regarded as superior to support education, especially spontaneous
interaction and collaborative learning in group work. Many also appreciate
traditional teaching methods, such as lectures and seminars. In Table 1, we
summarize student perceptions of the benefits of LMS, social media and meeting
face-to-face.
It is apparent that the students under investigation perceive that face-to-face
meetings, the use of LMS and the use of social media, provide distinctly different
benefits. Jointly, these three means constitute the educational experience of
campus students (see Fig. 2). Although many of the postulated benefits of
educational social media have not been realized, social media are already
important in supporting the exchange of brief questions and answers, coordina-
tion of work and retrieval of information from external sources. The LMS is
perceived as useful for retrieving teaching material, such as guidelines, lecture
notes and other information regarding courses. Face-to-face meetings are
460 Educ Inf Technol (2012) 17:451–464

Table 1 Student perceptions of three means of education

Mean Student perceptions

Face-to-face Collaborative learning.

Traditional education, such as lectures and seminars.
LMS Retrieve information, such as guidelines, lecture notes and other
information regarding courses.
Social media Quick questions and answers.
Coordinate group work.
Retrieve information from external sources.
Share documents.

appreciated in terms of traditional education, such as lectures and seminars, and

for collaborative learning.

6 Limitations and further research

This study explored how campus students use social media to support their
studies in Uppsala University. This is an explorative study based on a limited
number of interviews, many of which were quite brief. Thus, the results should
be regarded as tentative and the research questions need to be further examined
in future research. As discussed in Section 3, we let the students decide what is
social media and what is not, and what is “educational” and “personal”. An
advantage of this approach is that we got a better understanding of student
perceptions of these concepts. A limitation was the interviewees had quite different

Fig. 2 Face-to-face, LMS and

social media dimensions of the
educational experience
Educ Inf Technol (2012) 17:451–464 461

perceptions of these concepts and that it was somewhat difficult to keep the
interviews focused.
The needs of these campus students are, of course, different from those of online
learners who rarely or never meet face-to-face. There is a need to understand how
students use and would like to use social media to support their studies in different
settings. One example of a complementing study is a recent survey on the use of
social media among self paced learners in Canada (Anderson et al. 2010). According
to the empirical findings, almost half of the students think that communication is less
effective when using social media, when compared with face-to-face meetings. The
students argue that this leads to problems such as misunderstandings and less
knowledge sharing and creative thinking. Massey and Montoya-Weiss (2006) argue
that co-located participants are more likely to be skeptical towards online media, as
they also have the possibility to meet face-to-face. In further research, it would be
interesting to examine social media use among geographically dispersed students,
who are more dependent on online media and might also use it more effectively for
collaborative learning.
In this study, we focused on student perceptions because understanding
perceptions of social media benefits and limitations in higher education can
further the design of the next generation of learning. An important next step is to
understand the perspective of teachers and other designers of online learning in
order to gain understanding of their successful and unsuccessful experiments in
using social media to support education. Early work in this area includes
Margaryan et al. (2011).

7 Conclusion

We have explored how students perceive that they use social media to support
their studies. One might expect that students frequently use social media to
support their studies because it is a central part of their lives. However, we found
that the educational benefits are not apparent to many of the interviewed
students. A significant “digital dissonance” can be noted between the personal
and educational use of social media, which has been showed to be the case for
young learners as well (Clark et al. 2009). The students under investigation
perceive that face-to-face meetings, the use of LMS and the use of social media,
provide distinctly different benefits. Jointly, these three means constitute the
educational experience of campus students
Our findings underline that the campus students in this study need support to
find potential educational applications and to learn the potential of social media
in higher education. This finding is corroborated by Anderson et al. (2010),
who studied self paced learners. More specifically, campus students seem to need
support in order to take advantage of the complementing opportunities for
collaborative learning that social media has the potential to facilitate, as
compared with face-to-face meetings. Teachers will play significant roles in
supporting learners when moving from using social media to support brief
questions and answers and coordination, to using such media for collaborative
learning, when appropriate.
462 Educ Inf Technol (2012) 17:451–464

Appendix

Table 2 Frequent users of social media to support studies

Age Subj. discipline Academic social media use Limitations

22 BS, Political science MSN to support cooperative learning, Less effective, more
divide tasks, share files misunderstandings,
and create groups. connection problems.
23 BS, Economics E-mail and instant messaging to Difficult to separate personal
communicate and send documents, life, academic studies.
Facebook to make students’
groups and locating students.
24 BS, Business studies E-mail, Google docs, Skype to Less interactive and less
communicate and share documents effective.
with students.
26 MS, Human-computer Skype for voice and video Less effective, too much
interaction conference. Google groups to reliance on online sources,
make a group and sharing files. less creative thinking.
Facebook, e-mail.
28 MS, Computer science E-mail and Skype to contact Less personal contact and
students, YouTube for knowledge sharing.
video tutorials.

Table 3 Medium users of social media to support studies

Age Subj. discipline Academic social media use Limitations

21 MS, History Skype/MSN or Facebook to contact Too much reliance on online sources,
students. E-mail to contact teachers. quality reduction.
23 MS, Hydrology ICQ to get a quick answer. Facebook Difficult to share formulas.
to make groups with other students
and to locate students.
24 MS, Economics E-mail for contacting teachers and Too much reliance on online sources.
share documents, MSN, Skype, and
Facebook to find students.
25 BS, Social media E-mail, Google talk. Less creativity.
26 MS, International E-mail, MSN to communicate with Fewer discussions, more
business students. Wikipedia, YouTube misunderstanding.
to access content.
26 BS, Economics E-mail, MSN to communicate Platform incompatibility, less
with students. collaboration.
29 BS, Economics E-mail to communicate with Less activity and communications.
teachers and students.
Educ Inf Technol (2012) 17:451–464 463

Table 4 Infrequent users of social media to support studies

Age Subj. discipline Academic social media use Limitations

19 BS, Nordic language E-mail to share documents. Connection problems.

21 BS, Political science E-mail, and instant messaging. Too much reliance on online
sources, less creative thinking.
22 BS, Microbiology E-mail, Wikipedia. Easy to get distracted.
26 MS, Organic chemistry MSN for communication with Less social, less effective.
students.
26 MS, Human-computer E-mail, Facebook to find students. Too much reliance on online
interaction sources, less innovative thinking.
28 BS, Computer science Instant messaging to contact Too much reliance on online
students, e-mail to contact sources, formal lectures are
teachers. complementary.
30 MS, Computer science Skype for group assignments. Platform incompatibility.
39 MS, Computer science E-mail to contact teachers. Less spontaneous contact, too
much reliance on online sources.

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