Abstract

Over the past few years, the rate of Web 2.0 diffusion has been dramatic. Social media and emerging technologies such as wikis, blogging, online gaming, tagging and social networking have spread widely and rapidly and are gaining increased attention for use in education. Finding coherence in the midst of rapid changes is very difficult. This study attempts to contribute to an on-going dialogue about the trends and implications of online social networking in education and especially in lifelong learning. The paper provides an overview of the current status of educational online social networking in Greece and presents a case study of the Greek Educational Online Social Network (EOSN) “Logo in Education: a learning community of practice” (http://logogreekworld.ning.com/). The specific EOSN has been created in late May 2009 by an independent initiative of an educator with the purpose to facilitate communications and interactions, exchange of information, ideas and educational material and to promote co-operation and collaboration between the members of the educational community mostly interested in Logo programming language and philosophy. In this paper we describe main features of the EOSN; discuss key aspects, general implementation details, changes and developments and conclude with considerations for future work.