How many social networks are you involved with? School, church, parent organizations, student organizations, neighborhood communities and work are just a few to mention. What about online social networks? MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Ning and Netvibes are just a few (very few) to mention.
What do these social networks offer you? People often use their networks to gather the latest news within their circle, ask for help for various things or reach out when looking for work or gathering information for projects. This is not only through the real world networks, but also through the various online networks. Reaching out into your network is a great way to solve problems collectively, get various ideas in how to accomplish goals or share events with others in your network. Showing students how to use these networks to reach out beyond their immediate community can also be of value. We now have the capability of networking with people all over the world instead of just around the block.
When do these networks become too much? How do these become streamlined? This is also an aspect we must all ask ourselves and possibly teach our students how to decided what is best for them. as adults, when our schedule becomes overwhelmed with commitments, we usally look at what organizations we belong to and start diminishing our involvement. We keep in contact with people we made connections with we just may decide to leave a certain group for various reasons. Chris Pirillo discusses this in his video blog as his idea of what these social networks are. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp4UfBK5Zw8&NR=1 These networks tend to bring various meaning to the term friends and networks.
As stated in my previous blog post, these are great tools to use, we just need to control how we use them. We need to teach our students how to best utilize the tools to gain something for what we put into them. Another fun video to watch sums up how I think we all sometimes feel as these social networks compete for our time and attention. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkSaNToDbW8
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