I recently had an assignment where I was required view Ning.com from an educational perspective. I am familiar with social networking sites--I have a page on Ning, MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn--but I've never made a concerted attempt to use these sites with my students. My rationale for that was the fact that #1-most social networking sites are blocked in my school district, and #2-I was somewhat concerned about the potential repercussions that may arise from their usage in our school. Because of these two things, I was, and still am, wondering how these two sites would work well in the middle school setting. I can see how they would work at the high school and in post K-12 settings, but not necessarily at mine.
Apparently, the University of Brighton developed a social networking site for academic purposes. Elgg.org is an open source program that schools and district can use to create their own social networks. ReadWriteWeb posted a great article detailing exactly how Elgg can be used in an educational setting. Also of note, according to the ReadWriteWeb article, this site will NOT be impacted by the Deleting Online Predators Act, or Georgia's and North Carolina's state bills restricting access to social networking sites.
I wonder if will be a happy medium for some school districts. Will this site cause some district's chief technology officers to reconsider the usage of social networking sites within their district? Will this benefit middle school and older middle school learners?
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I think that social networks CAN be useful in the classroom, but it all depends on the maturity of the students and the dedication of the teacher to monitor how it is used. I think that a more personal, perhaps self made network would be better for a classroom, but social networks could definitely work depending on the audience.
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