Most of my students are already using at least one social network (MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, Friendster). But when you join an existing social network you are locked into their way of doing things. You can't really design your own experience for a particular community. Or can you... ?
Send your students over to Ning which is a site where they can create their very own personal social network... for free!
A five minute sign up process is all it takes to be off and running with your own network. You can invite members, post content, and control the look and feel of your social network's home page. You can choose to have the network viewable by anyone or keep it restricted to members only. You choose the URL for your network, which will end in ning.com, and therefore would look something like this: mycoolnetwork.ning.com. You can host blogs, threaded message forums, and several other features. The learning curve is very low as it has a similar look and feel to established social networks.
So how does Ning make money? The network you set up has rather unobtrusive Google AdSense ads on the side of the page which generate revenue for Ning. If you want to control the ad content on your site and keep the revenue for yourself, all you need to do is pay Ning $10 per month and you can remove all of their ads and put up your own.
I think that setting up a social network makes a great group project for a computer literacy class. Groups of students can compete to sign up the most members, have the largest number of relevant blog postings, generate the most useful message threads, etc. So send your students out there to play around and see what happens.
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