The Internet at large is a very very dangerous place, and while learners will willfully expose themselves to such threats, there is real risk in an institution promoting the use of such tools without due regard as it gives tacit approval for them as ‘safe havens’ which they are far from being.

I believe schools etc have a vital role in helping to educate students to the very real threats on the Internet, but they also need to provide a learning environment which is relatively safe while students gain those skills at least. I would go further and suggest all official systems promoted by an institution need to be ‘safe’ even if students have been educated to the risks as being wary of the tools is a sure way to distract concentration from learning. There are also significant costs to an institution to validate 3rd party tools and their providers and forming suitable legal agreements with those providers and failing to do so is abdicating responsibility for the well being of our learners.

It will be interesting to explore this and other issues again in Dec for #vleundead

This post was mentioned on Twitter by GrahamAttwell: New blog post – educational discourse and the discourses of the social network developers providers – http://is.gd/4Q1yk...