Will Richardson and Stephen Downes have noted Danah Boyd’s interesting post about social networks and social tools in educational settings. The distinction is an important, but not a new one, stemming from the traditional nomenclature of YASNS (yet another social network) and socially enabled applications. The two come somewhat closer together with applications like Facebook (particularly given FB’s extensibility), but I the gap is fairly wide.

A couple of notes, though:

Higher education is different. College students are more likely to benefit from the traditionally social applications, not just because of their relative maturity (save the smart remarks), but because the classroom communities in higher ed are generally weaker, if they exist at all. Sometimes this is a matter of logistics– class size and frequency of meeting– but it’s also simply a function of a different kind of population.

Student services are different… for higher education at least. While we all want to avoid creating a creepy treehouse, I think the real future for social networks in education lies in the realm of student services (and extended activities, obviously, such as clubs, sports, alumni groups, etc). I’m not convinced, even in higher ed, of efforts to mold a social network application like Facebook or MySpace into an instructional space, but using those networks to provide information that students need about services and activities– in a way that isn’t intrusive or creepy– is a logical and growing service.

Familiarity doesn’t have to breed contempt. While I believe educators can build a stronger network more quickly with social applications like Twitter, blogging and social bookmarking, social network applications provide an easy point from which to begin exploring what is, for many, a completely new world of communication and participation. Many groups (in my case publishers, presses, poetry and writing groups) find applications like Facebook an easy and amenable place to quickly create a communication presence, again providing an easy entrance for educators and a quick means to establish some basic, useful connections.

Social network <> Social networking. Keep the distinctions clear, if only for clarity in operation. In this context, social networks or social network applications refer to a relatively specific kind of application: those which facilitate social interactions and in which those social interactions are the primary coin of the realm. Facebook and MySpace are the most prominent, to which you can add Orkut, Friendster, etc. This is different from social applications or social tools, in which the social interactions facilitated are directed toward a social object– a bookmark, a blog post, a wiki page, a document, a photo, etc. Social tools are tools like flickr, del.icio.us, blogs, wikis, and a kajillion-trillion others. Social networking occurs with both kinds of application and all can comprise part of a personal learning network, but social tools are not the same as social network applications in this discussion.