Social Media and Social Networking - is it appropriate in Education?

I feel like Social Media and Social Networking is something that needs to be introduced to students much like Television.  Students need to be taught about Social Media and Social Networking.  Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet was written about the dawning of the telegraph and can be compared to the dawning of the internet.  It can actually be compared to any new technology and/or system being implemented.

One of the things covered in Standage's book was that everyone blindly sees the good things about a new technology and fails to notice it's pitfalls.  No one seems to want to acknowledge the things that can be exploited about the new technology until someone actually tries to do it.  Nor do they necessarily see the impact this technology will have on other systems in society.

When Television first came out, it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.  As TV became more widespread, we saw more and more exploitation.  We had to teach our kids how to view television and recognize the exploitations.  The same goes for social media and social networking.  We need to teach our students how to use, view, and otherwise conduct themselves on social media and social networking sites.  They will inevitably use social networking at some point, so why not teach them how to do it right?

We can set up environments that simulate a real-world social networking site - for example a closed Google+ environment, Edmodo, or something similar - so that students can experiment in a safe, controlled/monitored environment.  Students can use these to learn not only from the teacher, but also from each other.  As I talked about in my blog entry on podcasts, these social networking sites can give students a way to publish what they've learned in a creative way that can serve as an alternative assessment.

Since students can publish "publicly" within this controlled environment, they're adding to the collective knowledge of their peers.  By having access to this collective of knowledge, no one student has to know everything.  It creates a collaborative learning environment that Vygotsky calls "Social Constructivism".  In other words, as students interact with one another and under guidance from a teacher, they are in the process of reaching (or possibly already in) the "Zone of Proximal Development" where real learning takes place.

I think that given the social nature of learning, the need for authentic assessments, and the need to teach our students how to be good citizens in online environments, it is important to incorporate Social Media and Social Networking into our curriculum.