At what grade level are SNSs appropriate?

Commentary

Good teaching is good teaching, some if not many aspects of SNSs (or as NECC folks prefer to call them “Social Learning sites” or “Educational Networking sites”) are appropriate for all levels of education K-12 and beyond, but there was a lot of talk today at EduBloggerCon about the child safety issues involved.

It seems, to me, that there should be a gradual release of responsibility that comes with scaffolding employed here. For example, K-2 might use a tool/platform that only allows only classmates (and trusted adults) to join. This would allow those teachers to ensure that children learned the, potentially, hard lessons that always accompany putting ones thoughts out there for a community in a fairly small and very safe environment.

From there, students in grades 3-6 (upper elementary) would be ready to expand their community (i.e., learning network) out to their entire grade level. This will not only increase its utility, but inevitably present more “teachable moments” as student learn about the unique aspects of interacting with larger crowds. However, the crowd, in this case, is comprised of their peers and, as such, is not likely to present overly complicating communication challenges that come along with working with a varying age of members.

Consequently, in middle school, the community could be expanded to the entire school population. This will allow for an even more heterogeneous community and a yet greater number of teachable moments. As the size of the community grows, the amount of risk increases, but so too does the potential value/reward. (Clearly, by middle school, almost all students outside of school, will have jumped straight to the full-feature, international community of a general-use SNS like Facebook. But the model I’m presenting is only intended to describe how educators should deal with and prepare students for the Web2.0 phenomenon. We can only hope to influence, we cannot control, what students do outside of our care.)

Finally, by H.S. and after such careful scaffolding and tutelage, students will be ready to bring their full-value PLNs into the school environment. By this time, one would hope that they fully understand both the educational rewards and the inherent risks (and risk mitigations techniques) of social learning.