132 © 2017 The authors and IJLTER.ORG. All rights reserved. International Journal of Learning, Teaching and Educational Research Vol. 16, No. 10, pp. 132-148, October 2017 https://doi.org/10.26803/ijlter.16.10.10 The use of Social Networks by the Students of a Mexican Public University Juan Ignacio Barajas Villarruel, María Gregoria Benítez Lima, Ricardo Noyola Rivera and Juan Manuel Buenrostro Morán Facultad de Contaduría y Administración, Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí San Luis Potosí, México Abstract. The purpose of this study was to determine the relation between the students’ use of digital social networks and the variables of age, time, gender, reasons and their Bachelor’s Degree program, in the context of the Faculty of Accounting and Administration (FAA) at a Mexican public university (MPU).The specific objectives were: determine the places and devices used to access their preferred digital social networks; their use and motivations to use these tools. The design of the research was non-experimental with a correlational quantitative focus. An instrument was designed, validated and applied to 842 students of a population of 3670. A descriptive analysis was done and, Spearman’s Rho, ANOVA and student’s t tests were applied. The results determined that Facebook is the most popular social network, followed by YouTube; the main significant reason was leisure. Also there is no influence among the age of the students of the FAA and the time that they spend on digital social networks; the gender of the participants does influence the reasons why they take part in the digital social networks. Furthermore, neither their BA programs, nor the reasons why they take part in the networks, influence the type of digital social networks they use. Keywords: ICTs, Digital Social, Digital Social Networks, Users, Higher Education, Web 2.0. Introduction One of the main changes in education is the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the teaching-learning processes; which have modified the forms of interaction between the students and their classmates as well as teachers. Prensky (2001) considers that students think and process information in a significantly different way from their predecessors and named them the “Digital Natives” generation. Also, Gardner and Davis (2014) identify them as the “App Generation”, as they believe this age group masters a