I suspect that if I were any other teacher at any other school, I’d absolutely agree with your not seeing the pedagogical purpose for Facebook in the classroom.

Well, I’ve used it. It worked. I teach English 10 and 11 and an advanced Art History class at a teeny private ski academy in northern Vermont. Classes physically meet about half as regularly as normal schools, students are often in exotic locales ski racing while I lecture, and I dorm parent to add to the fun.

I had no intention of utilizing fb, but the fact that literally all of my students had an account and were an absolute nightmare when it came to checking their email or an unhip utility (I unsucessfully tried livejournal and blogger). So, my academic facebook groups were born–totally invisible to non-students, and hidden from their group lists so as not to appear nerdy. It’s worked beautifully, and although it’s weird to have all my students show up on a feed, it’s probably a good idea to have at least one boarding staff member with a modicum of oversight.

My school year just ended, and I’m leaning toward trying wikispaces for next year. The thing is that my school’s board of trustees just culminated another of their witch hunts and decided teachers shouldn’t use social networking sites for their classes–it’s so arbitrary that they have yet to determine which sites and establish an actual reason.

Regardless of what I do, though, I question which utilities out there really are 1) safe in the privacy they offer 2) effective in that teenagers will actually use them. Any insight?

Also, how does get the attention of 30 teenagers at once without the aid of facebook? Have you had any luck?

Schools that took an active role in building an online community, could influence the way kids form groups online. I’ve yet to see a school recruiting for sports teams on facebook for example. Or to encourage sports teams even.

And while facebook might not rock the classroom, Google sites definately will!

People are generally reducing “SNS’s in the classroom: to “friend relationshps between profiles representing the students:. There are many other possibilities.

This debate illustrates one: SNS’s ability to provide extensible, largely-self-documenting objects of study — participatively created, and so with a shared experience base and vocabulary. Properly annotated, this debate is great fodder for classes on journalism, sociology, business (“can ‘old media’ ever get the online world?”), race and gender studies, pedagogy, and so on. It’s also a useful case study for radicals operating within the system, detourning media events that appear to be stacked against them. None of this requires people subjecting themselves to panoptic environments.

Or consider AIC, a “web-mediated character-playing simulation for high school and college students” that focuses on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Here, profiles represent the real-world actors. Representing and providing access to the different connections between them (friend, enemy, relative, business partner, supporter, same political party, served in same army unit, …) brings in the social network. [I'm not sure how much of this is in the current version of AIC; please treat it as a thought experiment.]

As well as deepening people’s understanding, this adds a lot to the simulation. More easily being able to see “friends in common” (or “enemies in common”, as the case may be) makes a big difference when you�re trying to discover paths to open communications. Or imagine updating your status (visible only to your friends) to say “I’m off to the meeting, wish me luck” — and then realizing that one of your friends is a reporter, and the meeting’s supposed to be secret.

A variant based on my personal experience: I was involved in the constitutional convention for free-association (a very small non-commercial, open-source-based SNS). It was a pretty amazing experience, combining threaded discussions and the ability to get a better understanding of the people involved and the relations between them. Consider extending this to a simulated historical constitutional processes in which the “members” are the personas of the different participants — perhaps by reusing and extending AIC’s engine.

While Dr. Bugeja and others raise some very valid concerns, I don’t see these as fatal. The study and simulations I describe above could be accessed via shared logins (even using Tor if anonymity is particularly important), or run as a private and advertising-free network using Ning or an open source base. And as long as computing resources exist, it would cost virtually nothing to run — free-association has run for two years with no costs other than web hosting.

But I am not sure how you get from that realization to finding no evidence that social networking systems belong in school.

Teaching students how to navigate society seems a proper task for educators, surely a more important topic than, say, algebra. Thus teaching students to use social networks, to evaluate the information contained there, to process that information effectively, are certainly vital, especially when joined with the inherent qualities – that is, the ability of students to hear and understand (and debate and challenge) diverse and authentic voices not typically published by the corporate interests involved in textbook design.

- “PostColonialTech”

I have been a member of facebook for sometime, I joined for two reasons, first I am living in a foreign country and want to share my experiences with others like myself, second I have a company with several employees that use facebook and wanted to see what risks my company was being exposed to.

Firstly there is nothing educational about what goes in on facebook, it is nothing more than any other thing a 15 year old would use as distraction to fill empty time, while some people and discussions are interesting, the noise level is too high for anything productive or educational to happen, anyone can, and does join and participate.

Secondly I decided it was a fairly serious security risks to my company, I found people talking about their jobs and companies a lot, and depending on a person posotion with a company some of that blah blah I may not want my competition to be finding out about, because you can never really be sure who the other person is that you are talking to.

I am a parent and I will limit my children’s use of these social networking sites, and discourage their use in general, they are not very useful, there are much more productive ways for children and myself to kill time.