Dottorato in TECNOLOGIE INNOVATIVE NELLE MALATTIE DELLO SCHELETRO,
DELLA CUTE E DEL DISTRETTO ORO-CRANIO-FACCIALE

Titolo della tesi: Social media and audiovisual learning in the study of human anatomy Study of a group of students on Facebook and Youtube

The development of social network sites (SNS) has been one of the most influential phenomena of digital technology in recent years. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center on the use of SNS in the United States (Smith, 2013), two-thirds of adults use tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Myspac and Linkedin and 60% of mobile applications used by smartphone owners are linked to the social network. The growing interest of Internet users for SNS is also confirmed by one of the latest Nielsen studies (2011). According to this study, Internet users in Europe spend more and more time on social networks and blogs: for example, Italian users spend 31% of their total time on the Internet by visiting these categories of services. Among the various SNS, Facebook is now the most popular, with over 900 million users, of which over 500 million access via mobile products (Facebook, 2012). " Social Media" refers to a wide range of applications that allow users to create, share, comment and discuss a multitude of digital content. Social media is considered "dynamic", "interactive", "democratic", "people-centred", "volatile", "social" and "adaptive" (Manca & Ranieri, 2016b). Another aspect of SM that is often overlooked is its ability to transform teaching/learning into a more social, open and collaborative activity. Researchers have used many theories/models to determine the feasibility of using social media for educational purposes. With the exponential growth of social media and the ease of information flow, new horizons are opening up, as the technological progress that allows the teacher to create a student/group on a social media platform and motivating learners to ask questions at any time to clarify their doubts. In addition, teachers can regularly provide parents has been with immediate feedback about the students’ progress. The use of social media, especially Facebook and Youtube, has boomed in the field of education. Thanks to Youtube videos, students can learn through sight and hearing by fixing and memorizing the key concepts of what has been acquired. Multisensory learning, as the name suggests, is the process of learning a new topic through the use of two or more senses. Sensory integration occurs in the central nervous system where complex interactions such as coordination, attention, emotions and memory are processed to give a meaningful response. This can include the visual and auditory combination. By activating brain regions associated with hearing and vision, they indicate a direct relationship between knowledge and sensory mechanisms in the brain. In this study I have examined with particular attention the relationship between technologies, digital media and the learning process. In the first part of the work the theoretical frame of reference is outlined for reconstructing the transition from a monosensory society to a multisensory society increasingly dominated by digital artifacts. The second part focuses on the results obtained by answering the question: "How do social media affect the visual and auditory learning of anatomy?" A multisensory integration model has been developed and there is a clear evidence that this model, based on social media Facebook and Youtube, has improved students’ performance in anatomy. Perceptual learning is a good testing ground for the multisensory as it is typically very slow, it requires many days of training and has been shown to be mediated by early visual areas of the brain traditionally considered to be highly unimodal. An auditory-visual study has been chosen because visual motion stimuli are typically accompanied by sounds and because there is anatomical evidence in animals and human neurophysiology studies indicating that hearing-sight interactions affect visual processing in the primary visual cortex as well. This study aims at the following: - investigating the role of the visual element in the study of anatomy thanks to the use of Youtube; - exploring how Youtube and Facebook technology have played a role in enhancing students' learning skills - shedding new light on the importance of Youtube and Facebook as fundamental teaching tools and as a resource for both teachers and students. This empirical research shows the positive results achieved using SNS and multisensory models in both higher and university education.