UKOLN - Potential of Blogs and Social Networking

I've been attending the UKOLN workshop on Exploring the Potential of Blogging and Social Networking. Most of the PPTs from the talks, along with summaries of the discussion panels from the afternoon are available from the workshop wiki, so rather than try and summarise them all here, I'll just pick out some of the main concerns that emerged. These include:

• Various tensions between HE's attempts to impose control and standardisation on blogging software and the servers on which blogs are held (so as to provide security, archiving, standardisation) and the recognition that external blogging tools (and wikis for that matter) are often more flexible than those enabled within managed environments (like Moodle, WebCT for example)
• The need to educate users (be they staff or students) about how to maintain an online identity safely and appropriately.
• The large variation between what is referred to as 'digital literacy' pointing to 'blind spots' in students' skills (i.e. knowing how to use facebook, youtube, secondlife) doesn't mean that this can be transferred into teaching and learning uses of electronic forms of communication.
• Debates about privacy, and the implications of blurring the boundaries between professional and personal domains (whether this is unavoidable, preferable, dangerous).

I haven't come away feeling that my world view of technology has been changed, but it was great to meet some interesting people and look at web 2.0 from an alternative point of view.