I remembered how shocked I was to learn about MySpace and how much information students were willing to share on it--personal information that I would never want shared in such an open forum. My students were talking abut Facebook recently and were telling me how much better this was for social networking. This is just beyond my grasp right now; I don't think I will be creating an account with either social networks any time soon.
On the other hand, I know a lot of people in library school with me have accounts on facebook. I know some teachers have profiles on MySpace. I am not sure why I have such a hang up about it, but maybe it is because I haven't tried it out yet; maybe it is just my techniphobia coming out.
Anyway, I learned about linkedin: relationships matter in class one day. This is social networking on a professional level, which I thought was really interesting. After you have set up a profile, you can network with other people that are either in your business or that you went to school with (you need a preexisting relationship with them). You can ask them to be linked to you and then you can share questions with each other through the first three rungs of connections. The answers can be rated then so you can see how other people view the advice that is given. You can also recommend people like an online reference which is good for job searching or if you are hiring, good for networking, and good for quick leads to find more information. It seems businesses are using social networking and the technology out there to their benefit while my first instinct is to bury my head in the sand...I see how the inner circle could be shifted based on how much technology one knows about. It is like a secret handshake or password. I imagine that libraries could also use a system like this to ask each other reference questions and the like. I can imagine teachers connecting to other teachers to ask questions about curriculum, etc. This could be really cool!
The website can be found at:
http://www.linkedin.com/
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4 comments:
What I wonder about is how people find the time for such involved online interactions- for me it means giving up something, which is difficult!
Leslie
I tried to edit my first post but ended up deleting it instead. Anyway, I know what you mean about Facebook. I've been thinking about creating a bogus account with fake data just to poke around. I'm glad to know about the professional network you found. Linda
Hi Lindsey,
I'm glad that I'm not the last person on earth that feel uncomfortable posting on myspace and facebook-I'm interested in this different way of networking-perhaps you can talk more about it next time.
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