Ning!!

Ning! MySpace is dead. Long live social networking.

Posted by Christopher Dawson @ 3:13 am

I stumbled across Ning a few weeks ago as I was looking for some end-of-year activities for restless students. Ning is a free service that actually lets you create your own social network. While this turned out to be an interesting exercise for my students, particularly once they understood that they weren’t creating mere web pages but actually building social networks, Ning (and other services like it) could prove to be an invaluable tool for schools and educators.

Here’s how it works:

1. Create a Ning account.
2. Create a social network
3. Create your own set of pages that will be your home in your social network
4. Invite people to join your social network
5. Manage users, friends, etc., on your social network

Students were a bit confused by the process at first until they realized that they weren’t just creating a MySpace. They were creating MySpace! Once you create a social network, others can join your network, just as they would join MySpace or Facebook, and create their own set of pages, have their own friends, etc. Every student in a class, for example, could be a member of a teacher’s network. The teacher would be like Tom of MySpace fame. All of the students could create their own pages and the teacher would be a friend to all of the students, enabling easy communication. Similarly, a school-wide Ning could have both teachers and students join the network, but with different user privileges, again enabling simple communication between staff and students in a way that kids understand all too well.