Things 12 & 13

The role of social media, well what can I say, it seems to be a double edged sword, it can be a brillant tool for communication and awareness and then on the opposite side it can misused and abused.
I do think social media has become a major part of our society especially in the last 5 years and it is replacing the physical community as more and more people facebook, flickr and twitter.  There was a news item on the BBC recently about how large numbers of people are addicted to their smartphones and cannot leave them alone even when they are on the loo, like that is severe and seriously unhealthy addiction.
There are many plus sides to the new social media in that you can keep in contact with friends and relatives even if they are on the other side of the world, you can make new friends although I do not know why people need to have 10,000+ friends on facebook, its not like you are going to remember all their names, although it does help people network and make contact with people they may never even have thought about contacting before.
It also provides instanteous access to information and can help foster community in making people aware of what is going on, but on the other hand it can be abused as seen recently in the riots, it also seems to distract people from what they should be doing and it can can be abused so easily.  One harmless comment can so easily be misconstrued and used against someone.

Thing 13 - GoogleDocs etc.
I quite liked this Thing, I am already using Google Docs and quite like its form feature which I have used in my teaching.  I could not download Drop Box, but I had a look at the site and it looks quite a useful site to store documents.  The last part of this thing I have become very interested in especially when I started to look at examples of wikis on the net and I have been inspired to set up a wiki using wetpaint to use with my law group in September.  I have created a basic wiki site and I am hoping to use it to get information out to the students as well as to get them to work collaboratively online.  I am also hoping that once each small group uploads their work it will be beneficial to the whole class as they will all be able to access it.  I see it as a useful resource for them and hope they will use it and add to it, but only time will tell, so will add more on that later.