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When a business contact from the LinkedIn world wants to become your friend on Facebook, do you accept the invitation, giving them access to the photos on your Facebook profile from last summer's rowdy beach party?

And what about the person you don't really know who wants to be your friend because you have some friends in common? According to Hoffman, that new friend may just be mining your social circle for information. As networks grow and more friends of friends (and their friends) are accepted by users, it's unclear who can be trusted.

According to Acquisti, people are more likely to divulge key personal information -- their photo, birthday, hometown, address and phone number -- on social networking sites than they would on other web sites

In one study, Acquisti found that that people will divulge information when they see others doing so. That tendency, he believes, may explain why so many people are willing to dish out personal information on the networks.

Holy Grail for marketers is to track consumers and their friends -- and what they say about a product -- via social networks. "People are more willing to divulge information for social purposes, and the lead users are 18 to 25 years old," Bradlow notes. "The social norms around privacy aren't going to be what they were before."

Historically, new media first appear to the vast majority of us in read-only form because they are controlled by a relatively few technicians, developers, and distributors who can understand or afford them. The rest of us only evolve into writers once the new media tools become easy to use, affordable, and widely available, whether these tools are cheap pencils and paper or inexpensive digital tools and shareware.

Thus, a new dimension of literacy is now in play—namely, the ability to adapt to new media forms and fit them into the overall media collage quickly and effectively.

n the mid 1960s, Marshall McLuhan explained that conventional literacy caused us to trade an ear for an eye, and in so doing, trade the social context of the oral tradition for the private point of view of reading and writing. To him, television was the first step in our "retribalization," providing a common social experience that could serve as the basis for dialogue in the global village.2  However, television told someone else's story, not ours. It was not until Web 2.0 that we had the tools to come full circle and produce and consume social narrative in equal measure. Much of the emerging nature of literacy is a result of inexpensive, widely available, flexible Web 2.0 tools that enable anyone, regardless of technical skill, to play some part in reinventing literacy.

What is new is that the tools of literacy, as well as their effects, are now a topic of literacy itself.

Students need to be media literate to understand how media technique influences perception and thinking. They also need to understand larger social issues that are inextricably linked to digital citizenship, such as security, environmental degradation, digital equity, and living in a multicultural, networked world. We want our students to use technology not only effectively and creatively, but also wisely, to be concerned with not just how to use digital tools, but also when to use them and why.

The fluent will lead, the literate will follow, and the rest will get left behind.

They need to be the guide on the side rather than the technician magician.

Right answers: School teaches that there are right answers.

But, in real life, there are very few right answers.

Bullying and peer pressure

In school there are always other kids telling you how to dress, how to act, how to be cool.

Stifling of curiosity: Isn’t it obvious that learning is really about curiosity?

Adults earn about things they want to learn about. Before the age of 6, prior to school, one kid becomes a dinosaur specialist while another knows all about dog breeds. Outside of school people drive their own learning. Schools eliminate this natural behavior.

Subjects chosen for you:

Classrooms:

Classrooms make no sense as a venue for learning unless of course you want to save money and have 30 (or worse hundreds of) students be handled by one teacher.

Schools cannot work as places of learning if they employ classrooms.

Grades: Any professor can tell you that students are pretty much concerned with whether what you are telling them will be on the test and what they might do for extra credit.

Parents do not give grades to children and employers do not give grades to employees. They judge their work and progress for sure, but not by assigning numbers to a report card.

Certification: We all know why people attend college. They do primarily to say they are college graduates so they can get a job or go on to a professional school.

Confined children: Children like to run around.

Of course in school, sitting still is the norm. So we have come up with this wonderful idea of ADD, i.e. drug those who won’t sit still into submission. Is the system sick or what?

Academics viewed as winners: Who are the smartest kids in school?

Those who are good at these subjects go on to be professors. So those are certainly the smartest people we have in our society.

But, I can tell you from personal experience that our society doesn’t respect professors all that much, so something is wrong here.

Practical skills not valued: When I was young there were academic high schools and trade high schools. Trade high schools were for dumb kids. Academic high schools were for smart kids.

The need to please teachers: People who succeed at school are invariably people who are good out at figuring what the teacher wants and giving it to them.

In real life there is no teacher to please and these “grade grubbers” often find themselves lost.

Self worth questioned: School is full of winners and losers.

In school, most everyone sees themselves as a loser. Why do we allow this to happen?

Politicians in charge: Politicians demand reform but they wouldn’t know reform if it hit them over the head.

Major learning by doing mechanism ignored: And last but not least, scholars from Plato to Dewey have pointed that people learn by doing. That is how we learn. Doing. Got it? Apparently not. Very little doing in schools. Unless you count filling in circles with number 2 pencils as doing.

Government use of education for repression: As long as there have been governments there have been governments who wanted people to think that the governments (and the country) is very good.

School is about teaching “truth.”

Discovery not valued: The most important things we learn we teach ourselves.

This kind of learning is not valued in school because it might lead to, heaven forbid, failure, and failure is a really bad word in school. Except failure is how we learn, which is pretty much why school doesn’t work.

Boredom ignored: Boredom is a bad thing. We drug bored kids with Ritalin so they will stop being bored.

What they mean is that school should be like they remember rather than how it is now