The web is full of  social and collaborative tools.  I was familiar with a lot of the tools I looked at.  Some I used more frequently than others and yet a little time allowed me to become better acquainted with others.  As such, each of the articles I looked at mentioned something that I had already come to know and believe.  I am a big believer in engaging the learner and with the tools available today, it is easier than ever to do so.

 Bill Mitchell wrote an article on Poynter Online entitled:  “News & Record Editor: Social Web is a ‘Cocktail Party’ That’s Improved the Paper.”  In this article, Mr. Mitchell wrote about his journey in social networking.  The paper was given the directive of becoming part of the social web.  Mitchell decided to join the world of Twitter.  Mr. Mitchell spoke to John Robinson, a wired top editor he encountered on Twitter, to get his take on the benefits from being part of a social web.  Mr. Robinson equated the web to a cocktail party.  Just like a cocktail party, the web is full of interesting people.  You go from group to group until you find those that interest you.  Then you join in the discussion.  Robinson was then asked how he thought Twitter had improved his paper.  He mentioned as a way he received feedback.  Ask his readers about the job the paper was doing and the readers let him know what they thought. Secondly, Robinson noted a time when a political story broke first on Twitter.  Because he was able to find out about it through Twitter, he was able to move on the story.  Finally, he was exposed to more opinions that helped him flesh out his own.  Not everyone who uses Twitter is going to find all these advantages, but this certainly gets a person thinking about the many practical applications of Twitter; well beyond who is doing what now.

 Digizen offers ideas and examples of educators using social networking services.  “Digizen” is this websites way of talking about being a digital citizen.  Ideas and examples are broken down into five different categories:

1. Profile-based social networking services: sites such as Bebo, Facebook and MySpace

2. Content-based social networking service such as Flickr and YouTube

3. White-label social networking services such as Ning and Elgg

4. Multi-User Virtual Worlds such as Second Life

5. Mobile social networks and micro-blogging, i.e. Twitter.

Each of these is then broken down and a handful of examples are given for educational usages.   I was surprised to see that one university posted course profiles on Facebook.  These sites were all interesting and offered new (to me) ways to integrate social networks into the educational setting.

 10 Principles for the Future of Learning is a very interesting article.  It is brief and basically offers ten points.  The third point discusses moving from presumed authority to collective credibility.  I thought this was a very good point.  It talked about learning to distinguish good knowledge sources from those that are questionable. In a world of Wikipedia that skill is a very important one to develop.  Jason Flom also spoke about de-centering pedagogy.  He called for leaders at learning institutions to adopt a pedagogy that takes advantage of our era.  In other words, don’t fight what is new; learn how to incorporate it into learning. He also spoke about how learning for years has come from copyright-protected publications but now it is more networked since it is peer-to-peer based.  Flom talks about learning being connected and interactive as core ideas are taken and expanded upon by the larger group.  Also mentioned was the importance of making learning a lifelong endeavor.

Joyce Valenza’s article 14 Ways K-12 Librarians Can Teach Social Media happens to be one of my favorite articles.   Dr. Valenza discusses the difficulty of teaching students about copyrighted images from the web.  She offers valid choices so librarians aren’t telling students “no, you can’t use that.”  Instead, she gives ideas for alternate sites for this use.  She also realizes how hard it is to teach the preferred bibliographic form to students.  Instead, she again gives alternatives; sites which will to the citation for you once you feed it a few facts.  Each one of Dr. Valenza’s fourteen points was something I was familiar with.  The main theme in her article was not to keep doing things as we always had, but to embrace technology and use it to our advantage.  The important part is not so much in the how, but in the doing.  As social media becomes an accepted part of our lives, we need to make certain that users are being responsible and using the right product for the right job and therefore to its fullest potential.

 I am including the website Mashable because I am fascinated by it.  According to the website they are the world’s largest blog focusing exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Media news.  There is everything a person would need for any sort of Web 2.0 application, including getting started guides for Twitter and Facebook.  So imagine my surprise when I found a link to something we had discussed at the dinner table.  My oldest was saying that PSN (Playstation Network) was down and his friend was upset by this.  There on Mashable was the story of what problems users were experiencing.  What I really found amazing was the fact that the article was posted after we had dinner. 

 Sarah Robbins-Bell speech Social Media and Education:  The Conflict between Technology and Institutional Education, and the Future spoke to the importance of educators realizing the need to change the way they do things.  She points out the role of educators is changing and that if we don’t get on the bandwagon, social media will replace us.  The millennial generation does things differently that we do, and we need to not only understand this but to use it to our advantage.  This generation grew up talking back and engaging in the situation.  They are used to having a voice and we need to make changes accordingly.  We need to remember that we are the last wave of educators who remember what things were like before the internet and it is our responsibility to convey the before when necessary.  Ms. Robbins-Bell believes that all communication is education and our main responsibility is to teach today’s students how to learn.