How many of you have children (in class or at home) that have or want to have a social network identity? Some of you reading might be asking what a social network is, so here’s a basic explanation. By the way, I love that series! Why can’t students and teachers create content that effective?

Back to the topic at hand, social networking has power in numbers. It’s one thing to get to know your friends, but the idea of meeting friend’s friends opens up a door to an exponentially large number of people to include in your audience. MySpace and Facebook have been known to be home to countless internet predators, but not all social networks are created equal. For example, Ning – a build it yourself and control it yourself social network.  Check out the social network we created as a group of technology trainers. I admit, traffic has stalled, but we’ll be coming back to it down the road.

A second example of effectice social networking can be seen at LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a social network for the white collars of today’s workforce. Need a job or just want to find other people in similar fields of work, create an account and begin by posting a description of your job.

Now here’s the problem with social networking: TechDirt just posted an article about universities denying student applications simply based of Facebook profiles. Is this right? I don’t know. My first thought is that we need to educate students not only about the proper etiquette and behavior in a face to face social environment, but also etiquette in online networking as well.

Is this part of our curriculum?

Yes. Ethical responsibility and behavior is part of the North Carolina Computer Skills curriculum. It’s just not something that is emphasized. Maybe it’s because no one includes this on tests……..