The use of tools and services for file sharing and collaboration at a higher education institution

This article reports the results of a study about the tools and services that students at a higher education institution used during the previous academic year (2009/10) to share files and collaborate online. The study aims to find out what tools and practices were used by students in activities related to learning and day-to-day (leisure and socialization) activities, trying to establish a relationship between social and academic use of these tools. The results point to a distinctive use regarding the two types of activities, with a preference for traditional means of interaction in the classroom and the access to traditional contents in a passive way. These results confirm recent studies that say that the generational split between natives and digital immigrants is a myth, and that the skills and enthusiasm for Web 2.0 tools of the digital native students are overstated and that the generation gap is not observed in learning activities.