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shift to another platform as it emerges. They might not maintain wikis, but Wikipedia is both useful to them and perhaps slightly exciting as its notoriety grows. To post to a forum, add to a frie

Social Networking in Higher Education Social Networking in Higher EducationBryan AlexanderThe many projects and services under the Web 2.0 umbrella are now a fact of the global information world. Technorati last tracked 70 million updated blogs, a number that continues to gr

networking services routinely enroll millions. Social music-sharing services continue to grow, as Last.fm continues to build a user base and Apple’s iTunes now maintains a social function, My iTunes (http://www.apple.com/itunes/myitunes). It is no longer shocking to realize that photos are largely digital, rather than analog; it is also not surprising that they are published in active social networks, such as Flickr and Picasa. RSS feeds appear not only on most blogs and news sites, but on campus home pages and corporate intranets. Folksonomic tagging, briefly controversial, now appears in the most widely used platforms, like Amazon.com and YouTube.Such a list can go on, but students are sometimes better posit

participating in online social networks, consuming digital media there, and starting to create digital content. Web 2.0 is not remarkable; it describes simply the background structure of media and socialization.How can colleges and universities respond to this world, which has erected itself around us in a very few years? As we nurture campus networks, support users in their engagement with the entire digital cosmos, how do we respond to this subtle transformation in the environment? And as we continue our investment in licensed content, licensed applications, locally accessible databases, and password-protected courseware, how do we experience this parallel universe of sometimes breathtaking openness and sociability? Several avenues are open to us and have already been trodden by some institutions: learning from successful architecture, following new and emerging technologies that are changing learning (what some call Learning 2.0), and rethinking literacy.