The extent of Facebook's reach in Australia – it accounts for 29 per cent of all time spent online by Australians – has led to research group Nielsen defining the trend as "Facebook Time" and "Non Facebook Time".

"It's just phenomenal," said Nielsen Online's director of analytics, Mark Higginson. "Every time I run those numbers I have to double check. Australians are spending nearly a third of all their time browsing the internet on Facebook alone."

Source: here

What’s most compelling to me here is not necessarily the tool set, however, as much as the vision that brought this to fruition. While most all of this work is done locally on an internal network, the concepts are preparing kids at Concord for the very global network they’ll inhabit once they leave the system. And here is the best part: Concord is a special needs school, a place where kids with all sorts of disabilities attend. The work that these kids do in these contexts is very rewarding on a number of levels.

The larger point here is that this isn’t too far out of the reach of most schools provided they have the courage and the leadership to make it happen. Aside from the photo-sharing tool, the rest is freely available. There’s nothing really too difficult about it aside, perhaps, from creating good teaching around the tools. Makes you wonder what so many other schools are waiting for.

Concord School Web-Based Social and Collaborative Learning

Anyway, makes me think that there must be some non-cloud options for similar things. Flickr etc. are great, but for school’s where privacy is a massive concern to parents, it would be nice to have some internally hostable options.