Facebook and Teaching - is Facebook evil?

Last night I was watching Newsnight (a late night news programme on the BBC in the UK) and they were talking about the recent valuation of Facebook. The TV news story was followed up today with a blog post on the BBC - Behind Facebook's megavaluation: the generational divide lurks by Paul Mason (Newsnight's economics editor). (The post also has some great comments that are worth a read.)

Interestingly is the post, which I thought would be mainly about the 'megavaluation' of Facebook, also contained material on the 'generational divide' (as the title suggested) on Facebook, that is, who is and who is not on Facebook, and who can be-friend who.

The article makes the claim that on Facebook teenagers (read students) only have teenager (read student) friends, and that they don't expect 'post-teenagers' to be-friend them on the site. In addition, the article makes the point that teenagers are not really in to email, Twitter, or online chat. I must admit that these claims are confirmed by my own observations in my teaching, and that I can fully understand why students want a place online that is private and their area away from the prying eyes of 'post-teenagers'.

From a teaching perspective this raises some interesting problems. If students are only in to Facebook and are not into email, Twitter, or online chat, then how are the educators supposed to reach them? Will Facebook launch a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) section? And what does all this mean for the openness of the web?*

Hopefully, this lack of online interaction between students and educators will fade..... But in the meantime we need to find a solution! Any ideas?