“Many of the students we spoke to are making some use of their own tools to socialise and network in personal and public spaces, and in doing so are actually supporting their learning in that they use these tools to communicate and share information and resources between themselves and their peers, even though they did not necessarily view this themselves as ‘learning’ per se. However there was little evidence that institutions were providing this functionality formally. On an informal basis students are generally being encouraged to share their contact details, but from the staff viewpoint this was seen more as a way of the students passing organisational information rather than for learning purposes.”

From Learning from digital natives: bridging formal and
informal learning via the twofourlearning blog. Students will always self organise, my mature Maths students were helping each other stay focussed on revision just before the GCSE exams using MSN and mobile phone text messages. How do we make the best use of this self-organisation?