Blog Juice for Educational Technology

Our demonstration of social networking yesterday was nothing less than amazing.  Even Brenda was impressed when I showed her what happened to that wiki page in just the first 10 minutes.  The presentation on social networking in the afternoon, at the MEGA meeting, was over in 45 minutes (something of a real effort for me).  Then I headed out for Winston Salem for the NC School Library Media Association conference.

This morning, I noticed a comment on yesterday’s blog from my friend Bethany Smith, who was in the audience.  She said:

..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?..

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 could be entirely wrong here.  If so, I’m sure someone will tell me.  Tom Hoffman strongly encouraged the use of Danah Boyd’s definition, which seemed to refer to Social Networking as a single site.

That said, 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 and its ability to accomplish its own learning with guidance from participating teachers (master learners).

2¢ Worth!