Abstract
During the last decade the application of the concept of social media in the context
of higher education emerged from an informal mean of communication to a strategic
educational tool. Social media offers the possibility to create and share various
content through web related applications. Furthermore, it is a communicational
platform and a tool which could be used for interpersonal communication,
information exchange, and discussion over a range of topics. This qualitative study
provides a limited insight into the usage of social media in formal/informal learning/
teaching and for the interaction between a student and a lecturer in the context of
Croatian higher education. Through a series of in-depth interviews with both
undergraduate students and lecturers, a current practice and behaviour related with
the use of social media is being investigated. As it was expected, various types of
social media are generally more popular among students, while among certain
proportion of lectures social media is usually considered as an informal media whose
role in higher education has yet to be defined. This study revealed certain
disproportion in the usage and attitudes towards social media among students and
lecturers. Students highly appreciate social media as a communicational and content
sharing tool. While the most popular social media platforms for students seem to be
Facebook and Wikipedia, lecturers prefer to limit interaction via more formal
applications such as Blackboard or WebCT, which are under more or less strict
control by the educational institutions.