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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

In my own class, I am encouraging students to venture out beyond the protected walls of the institutional LMS and use blog posting and discussions to create “transactional presence” and sustain cooperative and collaborative learning. However, I note that most students confine reading permissions to others associated with the University or even exclusively to class mates, thereby eliminating exposure to search engines and external readers and communities. A safer, choice, but one that serves to minimize spontaneous and emergent connections and relationships with people outside of the institution

he first  use verbal and non verbal behaviours by which we invite others to enter or to leave our individual spaces. The second is built upon on environmental constraints and opportunities we build and inhabit such as doors, fences, passwords and speaking platforms. Finally, Altman notes cultural constraints such as  the type of questions that are appropriately asked, the loudness of voice and the amount of touching that we use to build and reinforce interpersonal boundaries that culturally define privacy spaces and practices.

hus, it  should come as no surprise that privacy issues are a major concern of all who use the net and perhaps especially so for those using social software tools for both formal and informal learning. No easy asnwers, but I don’t see any compelling reasons to attemopt to totally lockdown our or our students capacity to explore and gain control over their own emerging sense of privacy and security.

If nothing else, these reactions by users should end the notions, first, that there is no privacy on the Internet and, second, that youth have no interest in it. What remains fascinating is our ability to observe the re-creation of cultural norms whose existence in the physical world is largely assumed, repressed, or forgotten.

et’s “face” it: Facebook has built the site, and students use it; we in higher education should come to recognize that this universal commercial site is here to stay.

those of us in higher education should be thoughtful about the degree to which outsourcing restricts our control over our products and services in higher education. IT professionals—vice presidents and chief information officers especially—have a responsibility to raise critical questions and perhaps even to teach or coach their administrations about the long-term, and possibly unintended, deleterious consequences of decisions that seem so obvious from a business and financial perspective today. Surrounded by commercialism and its almost irresistible temptations, we must be careful not to sell our souls.