separate lives

The Guardian today has an article which summarises some of the findings of a recent report from JISC in the UK on student attitudes to Web 2.0 technologies. Entitled "Get out of My Space" the story explains that whilst universities and academics are desperately keen to have a presence in social networking sites (such as MySpace and Facebook), students themselves like to keep their space on such sites for personal activity and not study. Pretty obvious if you've ever surfed such sites. The notion that your tutor is eavesdropping on your chat, your hobbies and worst of all your personal photos and videos is a bit disconcerting for many no doubt. Still, the report does make the point that the provision of such tools can be very useful for distance learning (and presumably also, part-time) students in terms of creating a social space to replace the 'student bar'.