Social Networking Technology in the Classroom

Teachers whose students have a comfort level with social networking technologies can leverage those systems in classroom instruction. An article in the online education journal Innovate explains how wikis and systems such as MySpace and Facebook can serve as a "secondary orality," combining the immediacy and interactivity of oral communication with the permanence of print. Of course, this is not new in academia, but today's generation of tools, as well as students' preferences, make it more practical than ever before.