Social media (SM) research presents new challenges for research ethics committees (RECs) who must balance familiar ethical principles with new notions of public availability. This article qualitatively examines how U.K. REC members view this balance in terms of risk and consent. While it found significant variance overall, there were discernible experience-based trends. REC members with less experience of reviewing SM held inflexible notions of consent and risk that could be categorized as either relying on traditional notions of requiring direct consent, or viewing publicly available data as “fair game.” More experienced REC members took a more nuanced approach to data use and consent. We conclude that the more nuanced approach should be best practice during ethical review of SM research.

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We are hard-wired for story: as the oldest form of education oral storytelling has been used from time immemorial and from culture to culture as "a way of passing down…beliefs, traditions, and history to future generations" (Hamilton & Weiss, 1990; p.1). To these ends oral storytelling is connected to modes of understanding that have been recognized by theorists to be intrinsic to the way we think -we are literally hard wired for story (Bruner, 1990; Egan, 1989).Despite this innate predisposition, in the contemporary classroom oral storytelling is not strongly utilised. The presence of complex and interdependent 'literacy events' (Street, 1988) that incorporate all forms of language are significantly less ubiquitous in the instructional environment of the classroom than they are in everyday life. Generally it is an autonomous model of literacy that underpins school curricula, pedagogy and assessment (Larson, 2006). Such narrowly defined conceptions of literacy in the classroom can be "closely aligned with a deficit model [that results] in curricular and academic disadvantage" (Larson, 2006; p.320) due to an emphasis upon decontextualized drill and practice in alphabetic decoding skills and standardized assessment procedures. This emphasis puts children from backgrounds that are less saturated in the cultural capital that literacy affords (Lambirth, 2006) at a disadvantage in the classroom.This autonomous model contrasts with conceptions of language and literacy as multidimensional artefacts incorporating social, cultural, and integrated aspects that cumulatively create an "expansion of the boundaries of what counts as literacy and literate competency" (Cervetti et al., 2006; p.379). Research has demonstrated that literacy acquisition is strongly dependent upon participation in authentic learning experiences within each child's

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