Teachers in Facebook: Information Retrieval, Informal Learning or Extension of the own Social Network?

It is well-known that learning is a field that embraces not only dedicated teaching environments, but also informal contexts: it is worth considering how much we learn from everyday situations such as exchanges with family and friends, travel and surfing the Web. This paper aims to study the Facebook pages of two Italian professional communities "Orizzonte Scuola" and "La Scuola che Funziona". It wants to understand how necessary, in our case studies, Facebook spaces are for professional development and informal learning. We adopted a quali-quantitative research methodology: 20 structured interviews were conducted to members and founders of the spaces and a communication analysis was made of the posts published on the Facebook wall. The results revealed some interesting topics such as: members perceptions of informal learning, strengths and weaknesses of online spaces, "depth" of communication and other professional topics.