It struck me the other day when as I purchased a box of childish cereal that there are no longer any cereals boxes offering toys! What has happened to them all? I remember they were so diverse when we were children, reflectors for our bike wheels from Kellogs, or pencil toppers from Coco Pops! You even used to be able to get Pogs in crisps, I rememeber trying so hard with my dad to collect all of the Looney Tunes Pogs from (I think) skips.
Yet another thing dies from my childhood, bring them back I say, give us our toys!

The Guardian today leaked a story that children at primary school level are to be taught blogging, twittering and other such "social networking" skills. The report is rather ambiguous in which side it takes in the argument, but it is certainly an area worth considering.
The majority of the communication I indulge in with my clients during my working day is via an electronic media, generally email, but sometimes a Facebook style "wall" when discussing ongoing issues through a company intranet. Teaching children about these new forms of social interaction not only provides them with basic knowledge that they will use in almost any future career (the article implies teaching the use of a spell checker is a bad idea!), but hopefully it will also show them alternate ways to express themselves.
Obviously there are the usual opposers to anything to do with online social interaction, claiming it is the death of the spoken word, that we will all become introverts sitting alone in our darkened rooms, conducting our business through Second Life style platforms. A bleak view indeed, and one I wouldn’t want to promote or be a part of. But what they perhaps fail to realise is that online social networking is not new by any means, the popular alt.* usenet groups being the first to appear during the late 1980′s. I suppose this was primarily the reserve of the geeky and the nerdy though, and perhaps it is the push to a more mainstream audience that has scared people like Julie Burchill. But still, MySpace has been going since 2003, that’s 6 years, a massive timespan for an average internet "fad". I’m still talking to people face to face as much as a I was 6 years ago, aren’t you?No disaster yet the.
She brags that she has never owned a mobile phone, or indulged herself in any form on online networking (we will ignore the irony that she earns at least part of her living by writing an online blog, albeit in the form of a newspaper column), why doesn’t she go one further and refuse to use the wheel, or electricity? No doubt the invention of the auto mobile brought about concern that it would lead to the death of the horse as a transport medium, and it did in the west, but people aren’t still harking back for the days of the horse and carriage.
Progression and social evolution take lots of different forms, and the move towards online interaction is certainly not a bad one, and whether it is in the form of Facebook or Twitter, online social networks are here to stay. With this in mind I think it is imperative that students are taught the requried skills and ideas to fully indulge, though obviously not at the expense of other core subjects. I think social networking, along with subjects such as Drama and Music, teach more than just the subject itself, they tie in with English through spelling and expression, and IT in a more obvious way.
But that’s just my twopence worth, expressed through a blog, that will update my Twitter account automatically and set my Facebook status accordingly. What a world we live in!