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Kirkpatrick (2010) verifies this historical reflection by simply applying the title 2006 to achapter which starts to chronicle the development of knowledge-construction tools within the'Facebook'. This extract points to this event:'The new tool they arrived at would help users find the information that mostmattered to them at any given moment. That might include everything from whichparty a friend planned to go to on Friday to updates about the political situation inTajikistan someone might have posted as a Web link. The point was to make sureyou saw what you cared about, whatever it might be. The order in whichinformation would be presented would depend on what you had shown - by yourbehaviour - you like to look at. Zuckerberg explained it to colleagues "A squirreldying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now thanpeople dying in Africa''' (Kirkpatrick, 2010 p. 181)The point here is that the 'Facebook' affords its users a range of technologies to conduct theirsocial activities. Some early adopters have grabbed these affordances and used them in learningcontexts too, primarily because the client group (i.e. the learners) are already familiar with thetechnology, use it seamlessly with the rest of their lives and because the user-interface is moreattuned to Human-Computer Interface (HCI) values than many of the proprietary 'virtuallearning environments'. A brief meta-analysis of this in academic contexts suggests that it is theadditional affordance of a global platform such as Facebook or Google groups that enables usersto bypass the silos created by Computer Services departments in schools, universities and localauthorities who are tasked with locking systems down so that they are not subject to virus attack,the corruption of data, the compromise of information security or the potential risk to child orpersonal safety. The net effect of this is that the boundlessness of technology (Kearsley, 2000)and its ability to afford communication and collaboration (Somekh, 2007) is frustrated, causingearly adopters to step outside the firewalls of their institutions and use social networking utilitiesto construct knowledge and meaning."New communication tools shake things up because it’s hard for a threatened regime tocontrol them. With a variety of circumvention tools, the internet is even more difficult tocontrol. Why else did the Egyptian government shut down the internet as the revolutionunfolded?" (Nash, 2011 p.1)99Simon Hughes Ph.D. Thesis (October 2012)