Will Social Media Replace Face-to-Face Interactions in International Collaboration Discussions?

Abstract

Within the education-research cooperation AustrIndia-4QOL, 102 teenagers from Austria and India jointly conducted research on the topics ‘quality of life' and ‘sustainability'. While the collaboration was mainly carried out via social media, some of the teenagers took part in an additional one-week face-to-face collaboration. This chapter offers insights into the effects of the collaboration on students' concepts of the quality of life perceptions of teenagers from different socio-cultural backgrounds and on their awareness of the importance and impact of environmental aspects on quality of life and their willingness to act towards more sustainable lifestyles. Social media enables learning experiences that cannot be facilitated within classical educational settings and should therefore be afforded greater attention in formal education. However, examination of the AustrIndia-4QOL project shows that social media collaborations have their own limitations and that the total removal of the opportunity for live face-to-face interactions is questionable.