I will be doing two sessions in the next two of days about social networking for educators. There are some basic questions about social networking that I plan to explore, hopefully modeling social networking in the process.
I’d like to produce a demonstration of social networking by capturing the update of a wiki page about social networking in education. To accomplish this, I have started a wiki page called Social Networking for Teachers [link]. This Wikispaces page is configured so that any of you can edit the page — and I want to invite you to do so, answering any of the following questions:
- What is Social Networking?
- What are some of the differences between how our students use social networking and how professional educators use it?
- What are your favorite social networking applications?
- What’s the latest thing you learned from a social network?
I will then capture the history of the page, and hopefully turn that into a short video by 3:00 this afternoon 😉
Thanks in advance!
David,
Is this for SCoPE?
http://scope.lidc.sfu.ca/mod/forum/view.php?f=261
You really, really, really should use danah boyd’s definition:
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2006/11/10/social_network_1.html
I really enjoyed hearing you speak today. I’ve been mulling over the concept of social networks for awhile and trying to decide where education fits in it. In your presentation you discussed how teachers (and others I’m sure) cobble together tools such as aggregators, twitter, del.icio.us, etc. to be our social network – while our students use MySpace and Facebook. So where do the two meet? Is asking our teachers to use facebook a way to reach the existing pool of students? Or do we try to create a separate (and relatively safer) social network? I’m investigating the use of ELGG, but wonder if our students would want to have 2 social networks or not?
Thanks again for presenting. We know you have a busy schedule (your tweets alone have frequent flier miles!), but appreciate you making time for MEGA.
Bethany asks some important questions here, about Social Networks. ELGG is certainly a valuable option. I know that the Science Leadership Academy is making extensive use of this tool.
In my opinion, Social Networking is a concept, not a Facebook or MySpace. I don’t think that kids call their Facebook a social network. I’ve never even heard my children use the term.
I’m not sure that the best use of social networking is a single networking tool, but a use of what ever tools or combination of tools are available to facilitate learning as a social and conversational endeavor, one that respects the perspective of the learner community to accomplish its own learning with guidance from participating teachers (master learners).