First of all, have a look at this film, made at Acklam Grange school. It shows pupils using Second Life in a lesson.

Social networking and virtual worlds are both consequences of a new technology. And there's an interesting thing about all new technologies.

Firstly, no-one knows what to do with them so they do the same old things but using the new technology.

And secondly, an army of people say that it's bad and will be the death of us all.

I'll take the second of these first:

Dangers
Baroness Greenfield warned about dangers to children's brains, but personally I don't believe the risk is that great.

Children will always play with "toys" which are relevant to the world they are growing up in and Social Networking sites are little more than toys to them. I first saw this idea at conference in the early 1990s where a speaker from BT reflected on people's concerns that children spent too much time playing those little handheld video games of the time with tiny screens and black-and-white cartoon "shapes" that represented characters.

He said that Victorian children had played with things like inanimate lead soldiers which were appropriate for the world they would grow up to live in. Then he showed a current TV advert - it had 53 video cuts and three interweaving story lines. This, he said, was the world our children were growing up in - a world where information comes at you thick and fast from all directions (just imagine crossing a road at a busy junction with pedestrian traffic lights) and the video games gave them practice at assessing and reacting to multiple information streams - ideal training for the world today.

There might be a physical or mental risk of course. Lead soldiers aren't exactly healthy and aren't permitted today but the Victorians survived and I expect our children will survive too. But it's a question worth asking none-the-less.

New Things
Social Networking and Second Life may be the first real breakthroughs since information technology took off in the 1980s. I've been watching for signs of real change for some time now and these *may* be it. One thing I am certain of however is that most use of ICT in schools is not innovative and is mainly used to automate the learning of traditional subjects.

First, have a look at this film made by some students in America. It sums up the problem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kra_z9vMnHo

I've been fascinated at how we don't know what to do with new technologies ever since I was a student teacher in Worcester and I saw the iron bridge at Ironbridge in Shropshire. The pioneers of the industrial revolution actually cast woodworking joints in order to connect iron girders together! Seems OK but it's quite profound actually and a couple of years ago I made a film for Logotron in which I explained the problem. Have a look and see what you think:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1-q9M2cYnU

The film was only made two or three years ago but social networking and virtual worlds barely existed then and look how they've come on. So I think they *may* be the first "rivets of information". It's early days yet so I don’t believe they even represent the progress that Trevithick's first locomotive was, far less a national rail network.

In it, I say "those early bridge builders could not have conceived of these things" and I think that's where we stand now. We cannot conceive what the future will look like but I do think that when people sneer at Twitter or regard Second Lifers as "sad" they are simply reacting in the time-honoured way. The early Victorian sceptics were convinced that if you travelled at more than 30 miles an hour your body would shake apart. They didn't regard the railway pioneers as sad so much as reckless but I think the principle is the same.