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I don’t see a problem with accepting a students’ friend request. And you can do so as a professor, and still make your profile as personal as you want it for your friends. How? Facebook has amazing privacy settings. You can make a friend list (all students, for instance) and then restrict how much of your profile they can see, and how much of your activity they can see. Students can see my basic work, school and contact info, but cannot see my status updates, photos tagged of me, or what my friends write on my wall.

There are ways to interact with students via Facebook without being friends. Facebook provides the Groups feature, but I recommend building your own application or choosing an application provider like ourselves. Applications allow users to interact with one another outside of being Facebook Friends. In our app, Instructors can send gifts, post on walls, share links, see status updates, and play a name game — all without being friends.

As someone who has built an LMS on Facebook, I can tell you the more you move towards “instructional tool” the more resistance and less use you will end up with.

lonely people ripped from their social ties.

Second, the main instantiation of educational activity in SL seems to be the recreation of the classroom in virtual space.

Third, efforts to introduce games and problem-based instruction as educational strategies have focused on adding a “game layer” on top of the SL environment rather than using the environment itself as a game.

I’ll be anxious to see how long it takes the educational community to realize that SL affords capabilities that transcend and exceed the capabilities of the classroom.

Fourth, my sense is that educators are generally tourists — outsiders looking in, just visiting — in the environment.

Few hold jobs. Comparatively few even “get off the island.” This is especially true of those educators who participate through the auspices of a private island. They’re very busy controlling the environment to suit their own purposes without really taking the time to understand the culture and environment. It’s no wonder they’re unable to recognized the inherent value of the space.

Fifth, everybody is interested in the space as an educational environment and almost nobody is looking at it as a learning environment.

They still think that there’s a direct correlation between teaching and learning in RL as well. That bias has been brought in world.

Conclusion: Teachers want to use the space. Most of them want to use it for the wrong reasons. Many don’t have a clue what it means to be “in the world” in any real sense, instead focusing on imposing RL constraints on SL constructs — even when those constraints are irrelevant.

Part of that success for mobile ads could relate to the novelty of the format, Strother suggested. As people grow more accustomed to seeing ads on mobile Web pages, clickthroughs will decline, the argument goes.

Nevertheless, Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone has shown that with a decent screen size and intuitive navigation, U.S. consumers will use their phones for activities other than talk and text messaging. Google is hoping that efforts such as its own Android initiative will lead to a new generation of handheld devices that help the mobile Web live up to its promise.

While "some of the bigger brands have made some serious commitments to mobile," Strather said that the tendency among advertisers is to make mobile a microcosm of an aggregate digital budget, or to treat mobile advertising as an experimental expense. "Very few companies on the advertising side have made mobile a standalone item on a line-item budget," Strother told InternetNews.com.

The company is trying to keep file sizes small, so that the ads do not unduly slow the load times of mobile Web pages, Agarwal said. Slow speeds have been a common complaint about the experience of browsing the Web on a mobile device.

Google also said it will only show one display ad per page.

genuine conversation with their audience,

Marhshall McLuhan argued that in each socio-cultural era the medium in which information is created and transmitted determines the essential characteristics of that culture. He also predicted the evolution of an interconnected "global village".  The shift from a centralized media industry modeled on industrial revolution structures to a decentralized chaotic information-age soup is having a profound effect on the messages we exchange and shaping the characteristics of our culture. The global village comes to a crescendo with podcasting, and you can participate in the revolution with tools that are easily within reach: your imagination, the computer you're using to read this web page, and a video camera. We're not going to predicting what's next, as that's going to depend on what you, yes you, plan to do with new media. If the flutter of one butterfly wing, can trigger a chain reaction of events resulting in a storm half-way across the planet, imagine the effect millions, or billions, of individually produced videos will have on the characteristic of the global village and the media landscape.

You don't even need a video camera to start videoblogging, the mashup culture is in full force

most new computers come with free video editing software

A large group of vloggers, over 2,000 at last count, actively participate in the Yahoo! Videoblogging Group from all over the world.

So much of what we take for granted as part of daily life online, from the BIND software that makes domain names work, to the Apache webserver that powers a sizable chunk of the world's websites, to the cheap Linux servers that Google stacks into its global datacloud, was created by volunteers who gave their creations away to make possible something larger−the Web as we know it.

Is it possible to understand exactly what it is about the web that makes Wikipedia, Linux, FightAIDS@Home, the Gutenberg Project and Creative Commons possible? And if so, can this theoretical knowledge be put to practical use?

"We must now turn our attention to building systems that support human sociality."

We must develop a participative pedagogy, assisted by digital media and networked publics, that focuses on catalyzing, inspiring, nourishing, facilitating, and guiding literacies essential to individual and collective life.

to humanize the use of instruments that might otherwise enable commodification, mechanization and dehumanization

By literacy, I mean, following on Neil Postman and others, the set of skills that enable individuals to encode and decode knowledge and power via speech, writing, printing and collective action, and which, when learned, introduce the individual to a community.

Printing did not cause democracy or science, but literate populations, enabled by the printing press, devised systems for citizen governance and collective knowledge creation. The Internet did not cause open source production, Wikipedia or emergent collective responses to natural disasters, but it made it possible for people to act together in new ways, with people they weren't able to organize action with before, in places and at paces for which collective action had never been possible.

If print culture shaped the environment in which the Enlightenment blossomed and set the scene for the Industrial Revolution, participatory media might similarly shape the cognitive and social environments in which twenty first century life will take place (a shift in the way our culture operates). For this reason, participatory media literacy is not another subject to be shoehorned into the curriculum as job training for knowledge workers.

Like the early days of print, radio, and television, the present structure of the participatory media regime−the political, economic, social and cultural institutions that constrain and empower the way the new medium can be used, and which impose structures on flows of information and capital−is still unsettled. As legislative and regulatory battles, business competition, and social institutions vie to control the new regime, a potentially decisive and presently unknown variable is the degree and kind of public participation. Because the unique power of the new media regime is precisely its participatory potential, the number of people who participate in using it during its formative years, and the skill with which they attempt to take advantage of this potential, is particularly salient.

Woolcock (1998) argues that social capital `encompasses the norms and networks facilitating collective action for mutual benefit.'

Fountain (1998) defines social capital as the institutional effectiveness of inter-organizational relationships and cooperation—horizontally among similar firms in associations, vertically in supply chains, and multidirectional links to sources of technical knowledge, human resources, and public agencies.

Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998) defined social capital as the sum of actual and potential resources embedded within, available through and derived from the network of relationships possessed by an individual or social unit.

And Fukuyama (1999) included informal norms that promote cooperation between two or more individuals. The norms that constitute social capital can range from a norm of reciprocity between two friends, all the way up to complex and elaborately articulated doctrines like Christianity, Islamism or Confucianism. And so by definition, trust, networks, civil society, and the like which have been associated with social capital are all epiphenomenal, arising as a result of social capital but not constituting social capital itself.

A meta-societal definition of social capital was offered by the World Bank (1999), which referred to the institutions, relationships, and norms that shape the quality and quantity of a society's social interactions. In this view, social capital is seen not merely as the sum of the institutions that underpin a society _ it is the glue that holds them together.

Cohen and Prusak (2001) extend Putnam's definition to define social capital as a stock of active connections among people, which covers the trust, mutual understanding, and shared values and behaviours that bind people as members of human networks and communities.

As a working definition, we define social capital in virtual learning communities as . common social resource that facilitates information exchange, knowledge sharing, and knowledge construction through continuous interaction, built on trust and maintained through shared understanding.

Although most of you call these sites "social networking sites," there's almost no networking going on. People use these sites to connect to the people they know.

1) Social stratification is pervasive in American society (and around the globe). Social media does not magically eradicate inequality. Rather, it mirrors what is happening in everyday life and makes social divisions visible. What we see online is not the property of these specific sites, but the pattern of adoption and development that emerged as people embraced them. People brought their biases with them to these sites and they got baked in. 2) There is no universal public online. What we see as user "choice" in social media often has to do with structural forces like homophily in people's social networks. Social stratification in this country is not cleanly linked to race or education or socio-economic factors, although all are certainly present. More than anything, social stratification is a social networks issue. People connect to people who think like them and they think like the people with whom they are connected. The digital publics that unfold highlight and reinforce structural divisions.

3) If you are trying to connect with the public, where you go online matters. If you choose to make Facebook your platform for civic activity, you are implicitly suggesting that a specific class of people is more worth your time and attention than others. Of course, splitting your attention can also be costly and doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be reaching everyone anyhow. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. The key to developing a social media strategy is to understand who you're reaching and who you're not and make certain that your perspective is accounting for said choices. Understand your biases and work to counter them. 4) The Internet has enabled many new voices to enter the political fray, but not everyone is sitting at the table. There's a terrible tendency in this country, and especially among politically minded folks, to interpret an advancement as a solution. We have not eradicated racism. We have not eradicated sexism. We have not eradicated inequality. While we've made tremendous strides in certain battles, the war is not over. The worst thing we can do is to walk away and congratulate ourselves for all of the good things that have happened. Such attitudes create new breeding grounds for increased stratification.

A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement.

I have been seeking to better understand the mechanisms by which consumers curate and circulate media content, rejecting current discussions of "viral media" (which hold onto a top-down model of cultural infection) in favor of an alternative model of "spreadability" (based on the active and self conscious agency of consumers who decide what content they want to "spread" through their social networks.

This new emphasis on "participatory culture" represents a serious rethinking of the model of cultural resistance which dominated cultural studies in the 1980s and 1990s.

In this new context, participation is not the same thing as resistance nor is it simply an alternative form of co-optation; rather, struggles occur in, around, and through participation which have no predetermined outcomes.