This paper reports on a long journey by the Stellae Research Group to make teaching at the university a place where learning is paramount. It began some time ago with the development of portfolios in blended learning experiences. It has continued without interruption and with increasing intensity to create teaching and learning environments that promote the development of virtual learning communities and social networks to capture the processes of teaching and learning from the perspective of protagonists.  We have gone from a predominantly transmissive education (teacher-centred), to education with a focus on learning (learning-centred or student-centred pedagogies).  Starting in 2006, we have used a platform to host a social network to develop our research on technology integration at the university, as well as our experience regarding e-portfolio elaboration and teacher training.

The introduction of social networking in education is a relatively new phenomenon. The emergence of social software that emphasizes communicative and collaborative aspects (Dabbagh & Reo, 2011), while enabling the transformation of consumer users into producers of all types of content, has already advanced considerably in recent times. Blogs and wikis burst onto the scene in the educational field in the first decade of this century but social networks still have only a timid impact on formal academic spaces (Hamid, Waycott, Kurnia, & Chang, 2014).

The social network technological environment generates conditions forthe development of learning; students can accept others and exchange ideas and experiences (Hew 2011); develop self and socio-regulated learning (Dabbagh & Kitsantas, 2012) and produce an increase in the level of learning perceived by students (Thoms, 2011).

The benefits are being obscured by the strong presence of social networks like Facebook, which have a detrimental effect on use as a tool for formal learning. Problems include privacy issues, imposed advertising (Zaidieh, 2012), or the superficial view of content that produces a dichotomous structure of reality based on "like" and "don’t like" (Dussel, 2011).

On the other hand, academic social networks are characterized by two aspects: first, learning is the explicit goal of the community, and second, digital technologies are used to carry out some type of education (Bustos & Coll, 2010). These networks are overcoming the reluctance to using their communication environment for teaching proposals where students make decisions regarding their process and exchange their learning products with one another.

At play here are the use of an academic social network as a collaborative environment for consultation and information in order to build knowledge, the confluence of different learning resources that blur the boundaries between formal and informal contexts, and the use of individual spaces for posting opinions, readings, text analysis, and so on (blogs, micro blogs, personal files, bookmarks, pages, etc...). All of this results in the formation of personal e-portfolio where it is possible to visualize the knowledge students have built and demonstrated. The proposal is based on the idea that the less structured the activity, the more learning strategies are put to use (Järvelä & Järvenoja, 2011).

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