Reading through some of the Sites of Current Interest to Me from John Connell:the Blog led me to Rough Type and a comment about a paper published about My Space. The paper stands in contrast to the lack of dialogue about MySpace in educational circles. (Partly this is because some schools block access, so by blocking they think that usage goes away; partly it is because they have never heard of MySpace; partly this is because they see MySpace as being irrelevant)

Whether its plagiarism, or creativity, or school intranets, or learning spaces – looking at student behaviours in MySpace is essential if we are to work with the potential of technology and the potential of our kids to create a ‘new future’. Ogh…I know ‘new future’ sounds cliched…but whatever your term for future planning, MySpace and it’s ilk are here and ready to be our advisors and help shape our understandings.

The paper is an indepth analysis of elements of MySpace with important ideas for our understanding of literacy in this Web 2.0 space.

Is illiteracy the new literacy? Berkeley’s Dan Perkel writes, in a paper, Cut and Paste Literacy, on MySpace profiles: “A social perspective of literacy helps show that a part of [the] problem in this framing of copying and pasting as a literacy practice is that it does not neatly fit within common educational practices. From the perspective of the social niche of traditional schooling, to copy and paste is to plagiarize, unless there is careful attribution of sources …