Eeeeeeeeeek, Sorry for dropping in all of the above post. My fumble fingers hit the wrong button and I wasnt able to edit the extract.

I have an education background but worked in an ICT capacity in a secondary school last year. My boss spoke a lot about promoting Web 2.0 across school programs as a means of making ICT more relevant to students and allowing them to communicate in ways that were more familiar.

The issue of concern to me was always that of reducing real communication to short spasmodic bursts between computing sessions. Susan Greenfields article just highlighted some of these concerns for me.

So coming back to the point of this thread, playing music together whether at the folk club or within a social circle has more value in meeting real human needs for connection and communication than any amount of second hand vicarious experience/s via the myriad digital media. Folk clubs and the like meet our very real needs for intimacy and connectedness. Those needs will never be fulfilled by any amount of digital alternatives.

If we continue to support and promote a culture where the prime means of communication is via text, email or Facebook/Myspace we are risking much in terms of students losing or never gaining the skills to communicate by "analogue" means and losing the capacity to share in the full gamut of what it means to be human.

I agree with Will Fly abut not ditching the baby with the bathwater but this technology is all soooooooo new that once again we have little or no understanding of what it means for our culture over the longer term (generations that is) and like the introduction of other technologies in the past, i.e. TV, the Bomb, our social institutions are seriously lagging behind in terms of managing the social, legal, economic impact of those technologies on the rest of us poor buggers!

In practice that means not leaping into promoting the glories of Web 2.0 in schools without some very deep reflection on the implications of doing so and then careful consideration as to how to manage the process of introducing it all.

"Nuff said fer now,

Cheers,

Andrez