This weekend, a very popular student at my school and her mother were tragically killed in a car accident. It’s been a difficult few days for many in our community. The reason I mention it is that the student and many of her friends had sites at MySpace, and while hers has since been closed to public view, many of the other kids have been posting pictures and thoughts on their own sites in her memory. What’s been striking to me is the scope of the outpouring online among these kids who are obviously making use of these sites to support each other and to grieve her passing. No doubt, as you scroll through many of these pages, you’ll see troubling pictures and comments and links. But you’ll also see a deeply connected community of kids, kids who are turning to these spaces to help each other cope and express their genuine feelings of sadness and confusion to one another. And it’s a community that I think most adults simply don’t “get” yet, myself included to a some extent. It’s more than MySpace that we need to understand, however. It’s the power of the connections that kids are making online, connections that we never had the opportunity to explore in those murky, gangly, confused years of our own adolescence. We’re totally missing the point if we think we can wave the spectre of danger in front of them (danger of pedophiles, danger of future embarrassment, danger of _________) and expect them just to stop. Whether we like it or not, these are important and meaningful places to a large number of our kids. It’s not our role to control them because the reality is we can’t do that. It’s our role to educate them. And to do that, we have to be willing to learn from them first.