Here is my reply to a discussion about education and facebook on the CEO Ning...

I think that schools share a responsibility with parents and the broader community in supporting children make good choices on the net.
We need to be there modeling good behaviour, scaffolding appropriate responses and dealing with the consquences of doing something that harms others or causes distress.

I think there is something to be gained from considering the role school have always played in supporting social development. Think of the first school dance. Schools have often run these and in doing so provided young people with the opportunity to 'know' what are our communities expectations. My students recently attended a dance at a boy's school and we went to great efforts to explain the expectations of behaviour and consquences. We asked senior students to be present to model best behaviour. The girls commented all evening about how polite the boys were, asking them to dance and generally being good hosts. Obviously someone at the boy's school had done the same. What a great learning experience.

My project in Second Life hopes to achieve this same outcome. We have a very strict protocol in terms of behaviour and consquences. Students are expected to be 'on their best' behaviour and image themselves in full school uniform attending a sophisticated event where they need to observe all the most important social conventions of meeting new people such as minding your tone, thinking through what you might say and how you can be proactive in building a community. Poor behaviour is not tolerated and students will be excluded. It is made explicit in the beginning what is considered appropriate. Learning in virtual worlds, although not on facebook, gives me an opportunity to talk about the virtual versus the 'real' and challenge students ideas of what being social online means.

We dont belong on their facebook pages, just as we cant be at every social occasion, We can, however, use similar environments to scaffold and develop the idea that virtual is real.

This post was prompted by comments made by Steve Collis in our meeting at NBCS. He is an inspiration and just a really nice guy.