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Gradually, closed spaces (Facebook, Ning, even Google if you understand what they’re up to) have become the norm, as have monetized sites. The spaces that were free are no longer free, although many of us freely contributed our own work to these sites, providing the basis of their popularity in the first place. Crowdsourcing, celebrated in story and song, has become the exploitation of the work of others in order to make money or provide cheap customer service. The use of personal information for marketing purposes is widespread, and creative people are leaving the platforms that brought everyone into the agora in the first place. Scholars at first enthusiastic about the future now see it as a lonely place. And I see conversations where people who care deeply about the web, education for the 21st century, and learning theories are beginning to back away from proselytizing about academic openness.

it’s about users becoming the products in the marketplace and the amusements in the panopticon

Where before it might have made sense to say we should make sure everyone is web literate, now such literacy extends beyond critical thinking about websites into a deeper understanding of what the using the web means for individual privacy and independence. This time, the enemies of openness and freedom won’t need to argue their philosophical reasons – they’ll argue that they’re protecting people. And the trouble is, they may be right.

Evidence has shown that teenagers rely on college visits and Web sites to learn about colleges, rather than social-media outlets. When it comes to Twitter, students are barely on the site at all, let alone for college research purposes.

Rebecca Whitehead, assistant director of campus visits and engagements at Winthrop University, maintains the admissions office’s Twitter account, which currently has 373 followers. She says she uses it largely to connect with other higher-education professionals, to find out about upcoming events or research.

M.I.T.’s bloggers, who are paid $10 an hour for up to four hours a week, offer thoughts on anything that might interest a prospective student.

“High school students read the blogs, and they come in and say ‘I can’t believe Haverford students get to do such interesting things with their summers,’ ” he said. “There’s no better way for students to learn about a college than from other students.”

“We saw very quickly that prospective students were engaging with each other and building their own community,”

no connection between time spent on social-networking sites and academic performance

The trouble with social media is it stunts the development of social skills. Now we learn that time spent on social media does not damage GPA, which implies it's benign. What a tragedy. And precisely the mistaken impression that social development stunting craves.

The study in question focused only on first-year students, and traditional ones at that. (A read through of the study revealed the sample included mostly 18- and 19-year-olds and a few (3%) 20-29-year-olds).

"Montaigne was living his skepticism, daring to show how a writer evolves, changes his mind, learns new things, shifts perspectives, grows older—and that this, far from being something that needs to be hidden behind a veneer of unchanging authority, can become a virtue, a new way of looking at the pretensions of authorship and text and truth. Montaigne, for good measure, also peppered his essays with myriads of what bloggers would call external links"

Honesty

Openness