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Social media have been a powerful source of social and cultural change in the past few years, reframing the ways in which we communicate, interact with information, and build knowledge. In a higher education context, they have had a significant impact in breaking down the walls of traditional classrooms and closed online environments (LMSs). By combining formal and informal contexts and interactions, and enabling the dialog with wider audiences, they bring affordances such as transparency, real-life communication, meaningful tasks, and conversations, which result in a stronger engagement on the part of the students and a better, more diversified learning experience.

In this chapter, I describe the ways in which social media were used in an online master's degree on e-Learning Pedagogy, at Universidade Aberta, Portugal, in an effort to move toward the networked class. Tools and services used include Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and Diigo, blogs, wikis, and Second Life, among many others that students have been using to perform their tasks and publish their work.

This volume is aimed at instructors in schools of education and those who support them. It is meant to be a window by which the decisions, experiences, and evaluations of your colleagues’ use of social media in teaching can be examined. Rather than a recipe book with specific steps, it is meant to be a sauna that gets your creative juices flowing. Social media are used by people of all ages in the second decade of the 21st century, so having your learners get involved in using Facebook events for service learning projects in your town can be applicable for when they move onto teaching learners at other levels.

Malik Aleem Ahmed is a Ph.D. candidate in the Values and Technology Department (Section of Philosophy) and Infrastructure Systems & Services Department (Section of Information and Communication) at Faculty of Technology, Policy, and Management at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. He has earned a masters degree in Business Administration with specialization in Information Technology Management from Pakistan. His areas of research interests are ICT and Ethics, ICT for Governance in developing countries. His Ph.D. research concerns the usage of ICT for better Governance in developing countries. The main emphasis of the research is on the public sector institutional strengthening with the help of ICT in the developing countries and the effect of intercultural variations of values. He has worked in different capacities in the field of Information and Communication Technology for seven years in Pakistan. His last job was in the capacity of “IT Advisor” for a USAID sponsored project (Pakistan Legislative Strengthening Project) in Pakistan. He has also been involved in the field of teaching at University level. He is also serving as the webmaster of this 3TU.Centre for Ethics and Technology website.