Social Networking in Education: Helping or Hurting?

What are the pros and cons of new technology and social networking in the educational sphere?

Pros:
Online Universities are now offering classes and all materials through facebook, which makes them available to students in all countries, even those without the funding to otherwise receive an education.

Teachers are offering extra help and are more available to their students via Facebook and MySpace.

Student-teacher relationships can grow even after students have left the classroom.  For many students, this means the ability to keep in touch with an important mentor.

For at-risk students, online communication can keep them connected via classroom pages and groups led by a teacher during vacations when they would otherwise risk being completely disconnected from the positive influences of school, camp, or other community programs.

Cons:
Cyberbullying.

Teachers using social networks for their own personal unrelated-to-education uses, and being discovered by their students, inadvertently setting bad examples.

The (unfortunately more than) one-in-a-million person giving teachers and social networks a bad name by misusing social networks to connect with their students in inappropriate ways.

My conclusion?
We need to be very careful not to block out the pros alongside the cons. I believe there are ways to allow the benefits of social networking while still protecting students from the possible negative outcomes, and I worry that the walls are going up too quickly, and schools will be banning programs that could potentially help their curriculum. I'm not denying the risks, nor am I accepting them as necessary evils. I think we need to refine our use of social networks as educators, and determine the safest and best ways to use them. And we need to think quickly, as technology is changing very quickly all around us!