robert fitzgerald, phd

Jen Millea from education.au recently picked up Yoni Ryan's paper, Do you Youtube? Wanna come to MySpace? Yoni is on our Carrick Project team and presented this keynote at the FYHE Conference, QUT Brisbane, 4-6 July. In this paper Yoni says:

The explosion of subscriptions to social networking sites such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook leads us as educators to some fundamental questions abou the purpose and nature of university education, issues which have been ignored in the last decade as Western governments, along with vice-chancellors, have trumpeted the economic, utilitarian and vocational benefits of a university education. Such sites may be designated 'social' in nature, and in one sense they are. But they also direct attention to the individual, as the centre of a virtual 'exclusive' group. What does it mean to an education system notionally geared to the 'class' as a group, to inclusivity as a goal of education, and to the notion of tolerance of difference as a result of exposure to the class? Should we be encouraging the display of self that social networks allow as a healthy way of forging identity in a world characterised by increasingly undifferentiated and global 'selves'?