Social Media Use in University Studies

Book excerpt: This book highlights the phenomenon of social media use in university studies based on its participants’ lived experience. It will appeal both to academics and practitioners interested in the human factors in the study environments saturated with technologies of social media. This book reveals multiple, sometimes contradictory dimensions of the phenomenon. The contradictions acquire a binary Janus-faced characteristic of uncertainty and paradox. Social media use in university studies also causes changes in experiencing time, space and relations. Teacher research participants sometimes perceive their time as stress or an additional load, which shows that social media use in university studies demands a new approach to teacher workload and its regulation. There is also the necessity of the sensitive democratic teacher—student pedagogical relationship. This book proves that the pedagogical relationship and human creativity essentially belong to the human living world and are still at the heart of the technological “cyborgian” existence.