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This site contains presentations, publications, lessons and training materials developed over many years. The site is continually updated so I hope you'll come back often. All content is freely shareable and linkable, but I'd love to hear your comments about any of it. You can always find me at sine@udel.edu.

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August 29, 2006

Saving Social Networking

Tomorrow I am giving my first of several talks to groups of parents at local schools. Last year I spoke about this for the first time focusing on MySpace. At that point, the news media was covering MySpace and the dangers of predators every day. In my own review of MySpace, I saw a lot of the dangers, especially for younger kids.

As I redo the presentation now, the fad of MySpace has proceeded like all fads. The older kids are moving off of MySpace and on to FaceBook. The younger kids are taking over MySpace.

It looks like this fad will eventually fade but what will be left behind is social networking online. My dilemma is how to give a balanced view of all of the benefits of social networking while everyone is focused on the dangers of MySpace. The US Congress xx is considering the passage of DOPA (Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006). This is scary legislation inspired by fear. It’s aim is to stop all social networking sites in any school or library receiving e-Rate funding. But the definition of social networking sites is any site where a user can add content. And the final determination of what those sites will be is the FCC. This could mean all blogs or collaborative projects online or Wikipedia.

This would certainly be a loss for education and puts educational decisions out of the reach of educators.

Posted by Pat on August 29, 2006 8:07 AM