My Students and Facebook

I teach a wonderful group of grade 8 students. We are located on the central mountain in Hamilton. About a quarter of my students do not have access to a computer at home. So I posed the following question earlier this week: What's the big fascination with Facebook/MySpace? Most of the students responded with common reasons such as, "It's easier to communicate with my friends and relatives in other countries", "It's easier to send a message than to talk to them on the phone". I was floored at that last response. No wonder my so many of my students do not understand cursive writing, nor can they do it themselves. The ability to communicate with the technology that we have today has rid our students of the basic ability to write. I wonder how they will learn to sign their names in the future? Perhaps, by that time, we will have resorted to some sort of fingerprint scanning system for authentic identification!