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Online social networking is now so deeply embedded in the lifestyles of tweens and teens that it rivals television for their attention...Nine- to 17-year-olds report spending almost as much time using social networking services and Web sites as they spend watching television. Among teens, that amounts to about 9 hours a week on social networking activities,compared to about 10 hours a week watching TV.

any students engage in highly creative activities on social networking sites...Overall, an astonishing 96 percent of students with online access report that they have ever used any social networking technologies, such as chatting, text messaging, blogging and visiting online communities

Eighty-one percent say they have visited a social networking Web site within the past three months and 71 percent say they use social networking tools at least weekly.

1. groups emphasize sameness, networks emphasize diversity 2. groups emphasize order and control, networks emphasize autonomy 3. groups emphasize borders and membership, networks emphasize openness 4. groups emphasize additive, cumulative knowledge, networks emphasize emergent knowledge

Had a core group of either paid or highly motivated contributors • Members workplaces shared much common structural characteristics – similar job requirements, organization etc. • Strong norms of collective behaviour: Members shared common social codes and ‘best practices’ • Trust, affiliation and other affective characteristics were nourished • The network had means to collectively censure inappropriate behaviour • The NOP used an appropriate set of distributed tools to effectively accomplish these goals.

ou just start to blog, read blogs and comment on blogs with content related to education and/or learning. But it can be a lonely world if nobody reads your posts. Thus, an aspiring edublogger needs to develop the set of network relationships such that their posts are read and responded to – in essence becoming a full member of the NoP. This is perhaps best accomplished by reading the blogs of others, commenting on them, noting the Blog role listings of other edubloggers that favorite authors are following, reading and responding to and gradually moving into the existing flow. Then, through immersion into the network (caused mostly by allocating  time to read, and  talent to originate and respond) the Edublogger  learns what content is appreciated, commented on and that leads to ongoing discourse

Figure 1 illustrates these three social aggregations with the individual learner in the centre.

I agree with Sarah that using social networking tools for a course increases the amount of interaction and probably encourages more assessment of how people interact together. I

I wonder for people who already use these tools if the community of a course would really feel any different than the community of their friends.

f we’re trying to create lifelong learners, then using social networking tools for learning might be more effective. It has a stronger intrinsic context for interacting with others than a more artificial classroom environment. Practice that is as close to real life as possible is more effective, so practicing using tools for learning in the real world should make it easier for students to transition out of the course and continue using the tools.

Yet students also recognized social networks’ potential to distract them and possibly even encourage cheating among classmates.

That’s not so much an oversight as a hesitation, with many institutions still debating whether to adopt social networking capabilities of their own or grit their teeth and take the plunge into Facebook, with all the messiness and potential privacy concerns that would imply.

privacy and authentication sought by institutions.

ult, Schools, upends the traditional application framework. Rather than make it available to anyone with a Facebook account

The background to the paper overviews the importance of the creation of an adaptable context that the learner creates to support and retain their own learning. They note ” It is not about learning design it is all about learning environment design”. By letting learning emerge from rich inquiry, collaboration and publication tools, learners are able to play active roles in the creation and sustenance of their own learning contexts. These skills, the contexts and the products of course do not end when the course LMS site is closed, but rather become life long learning attributes and capacity. Thus the creation of a rich learning environment that the student creates, owns and continuous to build with is the major learning outcome, the specific knowledge domain outcomes are useful but less important outcomes in a life long learning context.