Group items tagged

But we adults are afraid. This is not the way we grew up. We had our group of friends, our own little group. Now, the groups to which today's young people belong are hundreds and even thousands strong. Their "friends" lists go on for pages, many of them hundreds or thousands of physical miles away. This is so far from the way we communicated and learned about each other, that we cannot understand it. So we do what most people do with things they do not understand. We ignore it. If it intrudes on the way we do things, we find ways to block it.

Eighty-one percent of kids have visited a social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook. Yet more than 50% of schools block social networking altogether and over 80% block instant messaging and chatting services. These statistics tell us that our students are accessing these types of services regardless of our efforts to block them.

ith over 80 million users on MySpace alone, social networking is not going away. And that National School Boards Association report said that 50% of students using these services are specifically talking about schoolwork using these social networking tools.What? Students are talking about schoolwork? Yes. Just as we used the phone (despite our parents demands to hang up!) students today are using social networks. They are asking each other questions and discussing homework besides planning to go out. This is their way to communicate and as much as we have difficulty understanding it, it is 24/7 and schools can take some advantage of that.

Lance Armstrong loves it. Oprah’s all over it. Ashton Kutcher found a million people to follow him on it. Heck, Barack Obama used it to get elected president. So why is Twitter in trouble? According to David Martin, Vice President of Primary Research at Internet traffic monitor Nielsen Online, the site suffers from a retention problem. From month to month, Nielsen data says, just 40 percent of Twitter’s users return to it.