An interesting set of slides on a European survey of social media use (via Pontydysgu) suggesting aa decline in the use of email. A key issue for me is to what extent is the use of MSN/ IM/ SMS etc. compartmentalised as being for social rather than for studying/ work? My own experience is that students are heavy users of particular social media tools for social use but they don’t think about them in terms of their learning. Their use of certain tools such as blogs or twitter or googledocs is very limited while awareness of, eg, social bookmarking, basecamp… is pretty much nonexistent. Use of these tools in a learning context is thus largely driven by course requirements – in other words, adoption is a product of power/ the desire to do well rather than anything intrinsic to that generation (of course, this may change as time goes on and our students become ‘more millennial’). This reflects comments from Andrew McAfee on enterprise 2.0 and email making the point that the adoption of collaborative tools in any given project is an outcome of the views of the most powerful person in the team.