Thread started: Jan 15 2008, 5:08 AM EST
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Critical thoughts on Social Networking and Education:
Posting sent to the wiki and relayed by Frank Rennie.
I'm increasingly critical about the educational value of SN. Especally sites like Xing, Orkut, Bebo, etc. but also Flickr, MySpace, YouTube. They provide social value, yes. Learning is a social activity, yes. But somehow that does not necessarily bring the two together. The former type of sites are more like online address books, the latter allow sharing of micro content. Both aims are fine, but not educational per se.
Additionally there are rising fears in social networking: impostors, identity theft, privacy issues, unsave content. All this makes learning in such an environment an "unsave" experience. Compare this to a VLE which provides a save environment for learners in "protected" groups. Still, informal self-directed networked learning can take place in open communities, and perhaps a positive example is groups of interest forming within the social networking sites.
Questions to ask are: how can you be sure you learn the "right things" in these networks (i.e. quality of learning)? It is too easy to mislead learning to become indoctrination or propaganda in such sites as there are no quality controls. And of course we do not want censorship to govern the Web. So, there may be some dangerous implications, just think about the coverage of WWII and the holocaust out on the Web...
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