Having just read David Warlick’s blog posting I asked myself these questions.
- What does social networking mean for me as a teacher?
- What does it mean for me as a learner?
- What makes social networking happen online?
My children exemplify the social network phenomen among teenagers. Daughter(19) has been through MySpace and is now onto Facebook, which links her to her work colleagues and to her brass band friends as well as her some of her social contacts (ex school friends around the world who she had lost touch with and now has a finger on). For her (as a social butterfly) it is integral to the way she operates. Son (16) is more comfortable on Bebo but his band uses MySpace. Son (14) is less of a social being, but enjoys the widgets on Facebook, playing games and scoring hugely on some of their quizzes.
How do I harness this as a teacher? Are my immigrant/international students a party to social networks like this? Is my classroom a social network learning space? Can I shift this online? Using Blackboard or blogs? How can the focus of online social networks shift to learning? Which comes first: the network or the learning? Can they co-exist?
I enjoy the EVO sessions (where this blog derived from early this year), as a social networking opportunity, but there are always time limits on it. We see it as a finite commitment. I haven’t properly subscribed to the Webheads as a learning community for various reasons, not least of which is time. Maybe the commitment is the issue. What makes people buy into social networking?
A bunch of confused questions! Publish and be damned, or sit on the above and ponder it for a while? Interested in feedback from anyone who reads this. But maybe I will revisit at a later date and rewrite it (and check the facts on my kids’ social networking habits so that I am a bit more authoritative)
