Social Networks

My social network experience started on myspace when I was in my early years of high school. I was late to joining in on it, but at that point, facebook was still exclusively for college students. I eventually started hearing about more and more people joining on facebook once it opened up to high school students too, but the first few times I looked at a profile page I was so overwhelmed with how it was set up. That's ironic, too, because once I swapped over to facebook for myself, and then went back to myspace here and there....I was so confused with what they had done with it! Regardless, I do my best to use facebook just for my own business rather than getting into other people's business. Naturally, however, the way facebook is set up makes it hard to not stalk people a little bit. :)

Mainly because I am not addicted to facebook, and have seen how easy it is for people to get addicted to facebook, it's hard for me to envision social networks in the educational setting. I feel like the distraction would be just too hard to overcome for the students. Our chapter talks about how using facebook or myspace as they already are would be almost impossible; so if you wanted to use networks, your school or class would have to set up an in-house network. But even in that case, what would you have your students do with it? One point the author started with was the lack of opportunity for students to have face-to-face social situations. So instead of using networked social situations, why don't you use the classroom to take advantage of the face-to-face collaboration. I understand that with each student pretty much already having a facebook page, that would already be an advantage for a classroom tool, but I feel like the hassle and the extra work wouldn't really be worth it; but, we'll see what happens at my school one day!