Social Networking Sites

Oooh I like these! Facebook - a totally fun but completely inane form of communicating with old mates. Second Life (also referred to interchangeably as Single Life or Social Life) - what a fantastically creative place. The world is your oyster (or maybe your avatar is?) Facebook Statistics (courtesy of Wikipedia, July 2007) (Approximate numbers as of June 2007). * Users: Over 28 million * Monthly new user average: 4 million * Daily new user average: 150,000 * Page views: Over 40 billion per month * Searches: Over 600 million per month * Largest network: London, UK 673,900+ On March 2, 2007, a poll conducted by eMarketer.com of American youths in the United States discovered Facebook was the most viewed site among all respondents with more females aged 17-25 (69%) visiting the site than males (56%). Source: Abram, Carolyn (2007-02-23). "Have a taste" - Facebook blog entry (blog). Personal Reflections 1. couldn't see the point of it - this is something students use to publish photos of drunken gatherings 2. assumed it related to the Millennial Generation's desire for celebrity 3. didn't want to publish details of my life - couldn't see that anyone would be interested 4. concerned as to misuse of the site - see newspaper reports of school students insulting their teachers Eventually joined due to ex-student pressure and, ultimately I am glad I did. Great platform for rekindling relationships with past friends. BCUC's alumni is in there - now all we have to do is to use the technology to benefit from it. Possibly a bit of data mining required. Possible Uses in HE Well as the students are clearly in there and love the technology this is a good place to meet up and to connect. Make up networks of class groups and use it for announcements. Make specific facebook pages to act as course pages. Use the networks to carry out market research for assignments. This is their favoured communication tool - for now at least!

Blogs

Don't like them! Although - to be fair - the technology is serving me very well for this on-line journal. Don't really get it! Why do people want to write a public diary? Is it the need to be published? To have 5 minutes of fame? Anne Bartlett-Bragg, from the University of Technology, Sydney, 2003 believes there are 500,000 plus blogs on the internet. There are some claims that there may be more than 2 million. Ever read any? Ever been sent a link to any? Who is publishing and what for? To be fair British newspapers use them extensively to encourage readers to comment on newsworthy stories. Presumably this gives them a channel to spawn more stories and to edit according to the views of their readers. Guardian Unlimited blogs are evidence that some people like them and have time in their busy schedules to respond with comments. Personal experience is less positive. Two attempts at blogging proved how difficult it is to use this as a two-way form of communication. Nobody writes back. How do you get momentum going so that people constantly log on and respond? Both blogs 1) for contacting old students and 2) for gathering feedback on the student newspaper both died a death within the space of a week. Couple of learning points from this exercise though: 1. If you are the author of multiple blogs your details have to be the same on each blog. Any additions/amendments to your profile copy through to all blogs. Hence my details have now overwritten the details of the PR students on the Fonts blog 2. More interestingly, the comment from an ex-student that said "we're all in Facebook" Not giving up on them though. As stated above the technology is great for an on-line journal and this may be something to trial with the students next academic year. A blog seems the perfect medium for students completing their Personal Development Skills Portfolio the core of which is a reflective narrative on their skills development. From reading Bartlett-Bragg it may be possible to encourage Level 1 Personal Development students to engage with blogs to produce an online journal. It should be possible to encourage them to get as far as Stage 3 in the process- "Reflective Monologues"

Web 2.0 experienced

Wikis, blogs, social spaces uncovered ....... Wikis The origins of wikis and some limited discussion can be found in the previous posting. The benefits are obvious, most particularly in terms of students involved in group publishing activities. The complexity of setting up a wiki and managing groups is, as yet, unknown but the benefits make it worth pursuing. Lyndsay Grant's Case Study "Using Wikis in Schools" (May 2006) provides us with an excellent example of independent learning via a school-based collaborative activity. The 11 year-old students were asked to collaborate on a history project looking at "Technological developments since 1950" using a wiki (from wikispaces) to publish their findings. Despite this being a group project the students tended to get very protective over "their" web pages and seemed to work in isolation, "very few edited material on others' pages" (Grant, 2006) On one occasion however, a child moderated the work of others as they had misread the brief. Whilst the original authors took this very badly and subsequently ignored the advice, the child-moderator would have learned a great deal. The ability to look at each others' work and to evaluate it is very beneficial to learning and the wiki technology enables this to happen very simply, in an interactive, fun way. Unfortunately the learners perceive risk in 1) posting their ideas publicly and 2) becoming a class swot "acting like teacher". The problem, then is not the technology but the group dynamic, the peer pressure that prevails. View of Self - does the learner feel confident enough in their own abilities to comment on other people's work? Relationships - will commenting (usually negatively) spoil relationships with classmates? Reputation - will the learner's reputation in the group be damaged as a result? Personal experience with group work at Level 5 (HE) would suggest that these concerns diminish the longer the group has worked together. Eight PR students (in their second year) collaborated very successfully on a student newspaper assignment using Blackboard's discussion board as the main communication tool. A wiki would have offered a much better interface for a collaborative activity of this kind. BCUC's Public Relations students excel themselves again with this excellent publication for those student living at Chalfont Campus.