Ning Social Networks – Unsuitable for Education?
Many educators may already know about Ning – the social networking site that has become more and more popular with teachers recently.
Ning - Social networking made easy.
Due to its flexibility and ease of setting up, Ning offers teachers a simple and easy way to set up a website that is fun to use for students and (if used well) can help students to develop and expand their Personal Learning Network (PLN). This could and should be a really valuable tool for teachers to use more and more, but as it stands at the moment, I’d urge real caution. Want to know why? Then read on:
I love the fact that the Ning development team are constantly doing so much to continually improve the Ning experience for its users. I especially like the fact that users will be able to discover new, relevant Ning networks that are similar to our own. This will be great for my students’ PLNs and a fantastic way of starting to expand school-based Ning networks and turn them into e-twinning networks.
The catch is that the free version of Ning is supported by Google advertising and this advertising can be quite inappropriate and offensive as I discovered earlier today. I am taking part in the amazing EVOnline 2009 sessions where brilliant educators from around the world are giving up their time to help each other learn how to use Web 2.0 technology in their classrooms. They have decided to use Ning to facilitate these sessions, great idea, however the ads that Google and Ning are serving up on their pages would most likely offend both the teachers and participants of these courses. Take a look at the ad I have seen 3 times now on one of our Ning pages:
Would you like you students to see this?
Thanks heavens I haven’t started using Ning with my students yet. I probably won’t until there is better filtering of ad supported sites – this could risk me losing my job. It’s really inappropriate, wouldn’t you agree? To be fair to Ning, they do offer an ad free service for 13 – 18 year olds, but I personally feel that these ads would be just as offensive and inappropriate for adults too.
If Ning wishes to expand into school PLNs and social networks via free ad-based sites, that later become converted to paying sites, they really should do something about this. I have already complained to Google about this ad, but I also feel that Ning should be pro actively pushing them to filter content more stringently. Does Ning really want to financially benefit from this type of Ad? I hope not!
I’d be really intrigued to know if anyone else has had experiences with “bad ads” in education? Have you ever wished you hadn’t used a certain tool with your students? I wonder what Ning themselves will say about this? I’d welcome any comments and your thoughts on this.
All the best,
Seth
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Could you not use the ad-free paid for service? It would still likely compare well with the host-it-yourself alternatives such as ELGG or Drupal (which at the very least costs your time) in development and maintenance.
Past this I would suppose that data protection (certainly for use in a European educational context) would be a bigger hinderance.
Hi there Al,
Thanks for your thoughts, you raise a good point.
I guess in many contexts it certainly would be simpler and easier to stump up the $20 per month that it costs to have an ad free Ning, it certainly would cut the hassle.
The trouble with this comes when you have to get the school’s approval for budget costs etc if you don’t want to have to pay for it yourself. This tends to hinder teachers (like me) who like to experiment with all sorts of new technologies to find those most relevant to teachers and students.
I also shy away from introducing teachers to web tools that they’ll have to pay for when I do training seminars. I kinda think it’s unfair to expect them to shell out if the school won’t pay.
All told though, Ning does seem to be a pretty much proven website / tool that’s probably worth the money once you’ve decided that Ning’s social networking is what you want and need.
Seth,
I have a ning for my students that is private with no ads at all. Any educator who has K-12 students can ask for the ads to be removed. Try it.
Warm wishes,
Nellie
Thanks for the hint Nellie,
I had seen that for 13-18 year-olds Ning will give you an ad-free site (fair play Ning, good on you!) but it doesn’t remove the ad problem for adult learners.
Saying this, I was pleased to see that a Ning representative (their blog editor) contacted me last night and said that they’d try to do something about the ads. Let’s hope they can come up with an ad-free policy for a wider range of educational Ning social networks. If not, maybe they’ll at least offer the teachers in the EVOnline sessions ad free Nings.
Watch this space!
Warm regards from a chilly Trento,
Seth.
Have you tried GROU.PS (http://grou.ps)? It’s ad-free
It looks really good Alex. Thanks for the heads up. I especially like the idea of a blog aggregating tool. Really handy for education!
Well Ning, the gauntlet has been laid down, let’s see what they say.
Best,
Seth.
Hey Seth,
I appreciate your blog post and wanted to respond personally.
Unfortunately, we have no control over the Google Ads that are served on the social networks on Ning. Given this, we offer to remove the ads on education social networks on Ning (Grades 8-12) for free. Just contact us in the Ning Help Center and we’ll remove the ads (http://help.ning.com).
If you don’t fall into this category, we also offer the ability to remove ads or run your own ads for $24.95/month, which – compared to other services – should be perceived as quite reasonable.
If there’s anything else with which we can be helpful, by all means let us know. We want you to LOVE your new social network on Ning.
Best,
Gina
Ning CEO
Hi there Gina,
Thanks for taking the time to personally reply. It’s nice to see that you guys care about what your users say.
I guess that you have a fair point that you can’t control the type of Google ads that appear on educational Nings. Some of my colleagues from the Webheads group also felt that “there is no such thing as a free lunch” and the ad-supported Ning sites were better than nothing. However, I do think that many adult education establishments (like the private language school where I also work) would be totally put off by the type of ads that were appearing on the Ning site we’re using for the “Images for Educators” series of training sessions.
At the end of the day, it’s Google’s fault, not yours. However as Google are providing a service for you that is seen by many thousands of users per day across your networks, I wonder if you are not in a better position than other educators to bring this up with Google and ask them if there isn’t something they could do to help you and us.
Surely “clean” ads will only lead to more Ning users and more ad revenue or possibly even more paying Ning sites?
Thanks again for your reply,
Seth.