I find it a lot to hold in tension as I teach – skills that students need for success today (like handwriting for their standardized tests); skills that they need for lifelong living in community (like how to handle criticism and conflict); and skills that they need for navigating a technologically dominated future (like how to search for information online). Some of these areas overlap, of course, and yet others are almost in real conflict with each other – like learning to write in the strict form of a news article vs. learning how to communicate in a way that suits a medium.

It stands, though, on the precursor that educators actually do something about helping young people understand what real communities are about, including those of the type your friend had been part of all his life.

Above all, I’ve never been too sure about actually using Facebook as an educator to connect with one’s students – it’s their playground, and as an educator I think it would be a huge turnoff to have the ‘teach’ join them in the mall. However, we can learn a lot from social networks and the way young people use them (successfully or not) to work out what citizenship understandings are currently lacking in our society.