Thing 2: Online Communities & Personal Learning Networks

I confess: I prejudged Twitter. This activity forced me to explore Twitter beyond simply being annoyed by its prevalence well, everywhere, and by people peppering their conversations with "hashtag" before phrases.

I am not ready to jump into Twitter; I did not sign up for an account. However, I can see the advantages to following some of the professional channels or posters. It is a way to stay really up-to-date on news, particularly relating to school libraries and education. I like that one can virtually attend a meeting by following Tweets; it also seems useful for timely live updates (ie, when this year's book award winners were announced - Twitter had it first!). I did find some fun and interesting links to articles by searching #tlchat that I may not have stumbled onto otherwise.

That being said, I do find it overwhelming and a bit annoying to wade through the many posts that are silly or stupid or just not what I'm interested in. Perhaps with more practice using Twitter, this would get easier. I just don't know that I'm interested enough to find out. It seems it could maybe one day replace other news/community linking sources like listservs.

I have had a Facebook account for years and while the site can be problematic to use in schools due to filters, I do think the idea of having a discussion group via Facebook could be a really great way to foster critical thinking - it could help solve the age-old problem of group projects, too. You no longer necessarily need to meet in person if you can have a group chat going on Facebook. While Facebook surely has its issues, I think lots of them can be worked around by being selective about the audience with whom information is shared - and Facebook does allow users to "lock down" their information fairly tightly - and by thoughtfully choosing the content which is shared on Facebook.