I found I went through several stages.
1)Adding exisitng contacts onto facebook
2)making new contacts via friends profiles etc
3)responding to event inivtations via facebook not for all but for some communities it works.
4)Adding apps like dopplr the scheduling facebook application.

Only yesterday the organsers of Mlearn2008 set up a facebook fan group to keep those interested in the run up the event in October.

mLearn was the first conference on Mobile Learning and is widely recognised as one of the most prestigious international conferences in the field. mLearn 2008 http://mlearn2008.org/ , hosted by the University of Wolverhampton, School of Computing and IT, will take place on the edge of historic and rural Ironbridge Gorge, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Important dates for your Diary:

Conference Dates
Tues 7th (pre-conf. Workshops)
Wed 8th to Fri 10th October (mid-afternoon finish)

Now facebook is just a tool but one that people are using for good or ill as society does with any tool. So for now I put myself down as fan of facebook.
I find it amusing its another stealth technology like SMS thats rise was not predicted by most commentators.

As for whether social networking sites can support education more generally. Sure. As long as they are being used to challenge and stretch users’ understandings of particular knowledge, not simply to keep throwing their own half-formed opinions about. On which note…

First, “neoconservative libertarianism” is not only weirdly oxymoronic, but “being whoever you want to be,” or creating virtual identities is a phenomenon of online interaction broadly speaking, not just Facebook, and it isn’t obvious that there is anything particularly pernicious about it, other than that it occasionally leads to people being ruder than they would in real life.

Second, while Facebook has certainly becoming another experimentation ground in the modern push towards personalized marketing, this has been going on for the last forty to fifty years. While Facebook is another avenue of opportunity for it, to claim that Facebook is promoting the “commodification of human relationships” is rather far-fetched, and no one who’d actually read volume one of Marx’s Capital would make such a claim so flippantly.

The Guardian wrote:

“Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?

And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn’t it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk?”

PLEASE – you must see this is utter nonsence. I’ve met people from all around the world and from all levels of society on facebook – I’m hardly likely to meet them `down the pub’ am i? `ungrammatical notes’ – it’s just communication!! why not rail against text messaging!

You’re right to wonder about the role of facebook in education, but it is not facebook per se that educators are interested in, rather it is the tools / environment and the way they combine and are used that is of interest.

Henry Ford was a very upleasant character with very racist views, yet nobody thinks today that you support racism if you buy a Ford motorcar. Similarly, the guy who discovered the structure of DNA openly supports the idea of inferior races, yet that does not take away his momentous discovery.

It might be helpful to concentrate on the benefits of social networks, given that they are a fact on the ground. Yes, I knew most of my Facebook friends already as well, but now I am able to communicate with them better, what is wrong with that?

“Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.”

Absolutely true. My Facebook friends list is predominantly made up of people I knew anyway.

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