Social networking/education

I’m starting to write a bit about young people’s use of social networking sites, and working on the idea that there are three kinds of activity that are relevant to educators and educational settings. The first of these is to learn about them and their role in learners’ lives; doing this is an essential part of that crucial work of understanding the worlds that our students inhabit and recognising the knowledge, skills and dispositions that are involved as social and cultural capital. The second is to learn from them, in order to appreciate the kinds of social interaction and informal learning SNSs can support, and as a result to reflect upon and refresh our own pedagogies and designs for learning, whether or not these involve new technologies. The third and final area of activity is to learn with them, and by this I mean to focus in a critical way on the literacy practices that are developing in and around social networking, as well as the identities that are produced and performed through the various acts of multimodal and collaborative textual composition.