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My question is why we keep putting so much of this discussion in the context of crime and victimization?" asked Anne Collier of ConnectSafely.org. "The vast majority of the behavior we're talking about is adolescent behavior and risk taking. It's not criminal behavior."

For years we've been telling parents to put the computer in the living room, keep and eye on what your children are doing, go and hit the history button and review where they've been," Balkam explained. "Well all that advice holds true but it gets completely upended by mobile phones, PDAs, and anything that can walk around."

A recent survey indicates that as of last year, 71 percent of teens 12 to 17 own a mobile phone (that's up from 45% in 2004). Eighty-seven percent of 17-year-olds and over half of children 12-13 years of age have one.

The phenomenon is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation.

Psychologists expect to see teenagers break free from their parents as they grow into autonomous adults, Professor Turkle went on, “but if technology makes something like staying in touch very, very easy, that’s harder to do; now you have adolescents who are texting their mothers 15 times a day, asking things like, ‘Should I get the red shoes or the blue shoes?’ ”

Instead of these technologies being used to usher in a new age of youthful activism in Iran, they now serve as a window for the entire world into the repressive tactics of the regime.

It is difficult to tell what the ultimate impact of these technologies will be for Iran. Nor is there any proof publicly available to support the claim that the vote was rigged in Mr Ahmadinejad’s favour. But the regime’s reaction to both the accusations of foul play and to the young people who demonstrated both in the streets and on the internet, is telling. As hard as a government tries to stifle dissenting voices, those voices will only try harder to be heard, and there is little that Iran can do to stop them. Technology always seems to be one step ahead of the censors.

Did you know that 42% of kids have been bullied while online?  Did you know that 35% of kids have been threatened online?  Did you know that Palo Alto is home to the most popular Social Networking site in the world, Facebook?  Did you know that the Palo Alto School District DOES NOT have a cyber-bullying policy?  Surprised?  Me too.

By Monday morning, over 100 high school students, equally represented between Palo Alto High School and Gunn (2 nationally recognized schools) had joined this "I Hate" group.

"Sorry...can't do anything about it.  It was done off campus."  You know what?  So is plagiarism.  And, what about the negative websites students make about teachers?  That is almost always done "off campus" too and I'll bet they would track down the culprits and bring them to justice ASAP.  

Attendees at the 2009 National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) will examine what it means to live in a digital world, and will discuss the best ways to prepare students to become global citizens.

"How do we prepare students for living and working in a global society and increasingly complex world? What new knowledge and skills are needed for productive collaboration in the 21st century?  And what types of learning environments foster the development of those skills?"

A schoolboy who announced his imminent suicide on Facebook was saved when a friend across the Atlantic in America read his threat and raised the alarm.The 16-year-old, from Oxford, sent a late-night message on the social networking website to a girl sitting 3,400 miles away at her computer in Maryland. The teenager had been speculating about taking his life and shortly before 11.30pm on Wednesday wrote: ‘I’m going away to do something I’ve been thinking about for a while then everyone will find out.’

Educators, however, find themselves with mixed opinions about the role of social media in higher education and its importance in the classroom. Some see it as the technology of tomorrow, an important piece to the puzzle of connecting with students, while others try it doubtingly in their classrooms, assuming that the traditional face-to-face contact cannot be replaced.

Some people find social media to be a positive experience for education. "We’re globally connected,”  said Jason Ohler, a former professor of education technology at the University of Alaska, now a media psychology professor at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, Calif. “It only makes sense to be globally connected when we pursue education."