CONCLUSION

Social networking offers an unparalleled opportunity to education, although this is not without concomitant risk and concerns. To ignore social networking and what it has to offer to education would not only be short-sighted but would also indicate a basic failure to understand the impossibility of returned to a pre-Internet world. Social networking, like its precursors email, instant messaging and mobile phones, has changed communicative practices permanently. It is now essential that the educational establishment grapples with the implications of that change: the genie is well and truly out of the bottle and no wistful longing will put it back again.