Larry Cuban is a tremendous scholar and thinker. As an educational technology researcher, his books on technology use in K-12 schools (i.e. Teachers and Machines, Oversold and Underused) formed the core of much my thinking. Naturally, his recent blog post of course stirred some great thought for me. In it, Cuban points out that the progressives vs. reformers battle (i.e. Ravitch, unions, and colleagues vs. anyone who sympathizes with Obama and RTTT) is a false dichotomy. The big bad “reformers” are actually one strain of progressives, what Cuban calls the efficiency-wing while the self-proclaimed progressives are the pedagogical-wing.

Just read a great post by Henry Jenkins where he reminds us that Web 2.0, Learning 2.0, and Education 2.0 are not the same as participatory/social learning. The post got me to thinking about an often unspoken topic when it comes to the current zeal for social media and participatory learning models. The type of social, exploratory, discovery-based learning that many scholars today are trumpeting only explains very particular literacy and learning contexts while neglecting other important types of learning. What do I mean?

What happens when you introduce social network sites in schools?

I’m in the thick of data analysis for my dissertation right now. I’m doing something unique, and completing three separate studies that each explore a different question concerning the effect of Social Networking Sites (i.e. Facebook, MySpace, and just about everything on the web these days) on high school youth. The over-riding question is, how do activities in these online communities affect their social and academic outcomes??