Social networking
November 21, 2007Having 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)
Learning Curve 
This is the conversation. These are the questions. The barrier, is that your children probably do not see their interactions with friends, colleagues, brass band mates (my son is a brass band fanatic) as learning experiences. There’s no common language for the learning that we do in our networks, and the learning that is done in the classroom.
I think that this is the challenge, to redefine learning in such a way, that the casual networked learning that happens in MySpace is as easily identifiable describable as what happens in our classrooms.
You’re right Dave. My kids looked at me as though I was mad when I suggested that they might actually be learning in their social networking! How do we derive a common language? And perhaps it’s about people taking responsibility for their own learning. Maybe learning is too loaded a term and associated with authority/hierarchy/classrooms/schools. Maybe growing is a better word?