Ahhh, the dreaded social web!! By the time I just got the hang of using my phone to text, along came social networking sites! A friend of mine once told me that I needed to ”join the rest of the human race in the 21st century” and sign up for facebook. I responded with, well, I don’t think I can repeat what I said so as not to offend a few people, but I thought I was being very witty in my response.(If you want to know, ask me in confidence next time you see me) But now, every line of communication seems to be going the way of, what I find to still be somewhat impersonal, computer generated communication.
In the “Welcome to the Twitterverse” section of the chapter, I found some enlightenment about this “micro-blogging”. Just as I thought of facebook, I thought, Why the hell would I even care if so and so is pulling into the parking lot…going up the stairs…passing the water cooler…sitting at his desk…I never thought of the application in education. In the words of Bob Dylan, “The times, they are a’ changin’”. As teachers we have to adapt to these rapid social (using the word loosely) digital interactions, and what better way to involve students than with something like “Twitter Collaboration Stories”? What a cool idea!
The social bookmarking section also revealed another great tool for the classroom. I know we have gone over this in class and have even set up del.icio.us accounts, but explained in this chapter was a little more insight and depth on the advantages of social bookmarking. The keyword matching deal is pretty cool. Being able to subscribe to someones tag and see all of the information they have gathered about the topic, as well as info others who have subscribed to their tag, and to their tag and to th…talk about your six dgrees to Kevin Bacon! When I have more time, I plan to explore some more. Exciting stuff!
Delicious is especially good a search tool–rather than the entire web, you can target sites that have been tagged with your search keywords…organized by popularity.
I share your skepticism in general for the Twitter phenomenon…although Clay Shirky has noted its potential threat to autocratic regimes, who can’t control tweets and texting as easily as they can cell and online access: http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html