I recently read one of the articles listed in the recommended readings that I found very interesting. The article, Teaching the Facebook generation, talks about how so many encourage the use of social networking in schools, yet many schools ban such websites.

I already talked a little bit about using social networking in the classroom in my last blog post, but I didn't talk much about the consequences or what is preventing teachers from diving head first into this approach.

In my high school, like most schools, Facebook and Myspace were banned on the schools internet. This was to stop us getting distracted from doing our proper work. Of course, we students were more tech-savvy than some teachers thought us to be, and we quickly found ways around it. We would find 'Proxy Websites' that would allow us to access those sites and chat with our friends in the next room again. The IT department would then catch on, and block that particular proxy website. Our solution? Go find another proxy website. Easy.

I guess my point is this: You can't take the Facebook away from the Facebook generation. They will pretty much always find a way around it. It's like banning anything really, you are always going to have those few people that find a loophole. Plus, almost all teenagers these days are going to have a phone with Facebook. 

I think that teachers should encourage social networking more, but create guidelines. Let students collaborate online for academic tasks, let them share information online. Like every task in school, it has to be monitored. 

I personally feel much more comfortable in an open, collaborative classroom. My experience in high school was anything but that. Now that I am in university, I found the approach used in my classes to work so much better with me and other students I have spoken to. I only wish that my high school was more encouraging of such working environments, and I think that allowing social-networking online is a great way of doing that.