Facebook as a Learning Tool?

Facebook.com and it's in some ways more capable companion, Ning.com, are definitely changing learning as they support people connecting in groups and sharing what interests them. Whether these tools will be useful as supports for communities of practice is yet to be seen, and in some ways, they are low-end collaboration systems as their primary functionality is to connect to others socially, share media, and more recently, to play games. From the CoP viewpoint, maybe they function best as discovery tools for those forming ad hoc communities of practice who then move to other platforms for true collaboration.

One potential should not be dismissed, which is the use of facebook to support learning across boundaries through games. An interview with Curtis Bonk by Robin Good suggests the potential of games like farmville and asks how we create educational games with that platform? I ask, who and what would we want to teach? And why? In this case, the boundary spanning potential for learning is like marketing -- it's to push awareness either for the direct purpose of learning/teaching a particular idea or the indirect purpose of capturing an audience.

Any suggestions?

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