AlphaPlus

This  great post on Mashable/Social Media – 5 Trends Affecting How We Connect Through Social Media – got me thinking about just how many possibilities we now have to use social media to connect with others who share our interests  -  we  can have as many networks and belong to as many online communities as we have interests… the explosion in connectedness is just amazing…   what does it all mean for  us a in our personal and professional lives? -  how can  (or should?) we keep our personal and professional  lives and communities separate? .  The Wild Apricot Blog has just run a very thought provoking piece from a Paul Adams a  Google User Experience Researcher exploring the complexities of understanding and managing multiple  online and “real-life” networks- 

“This presentation shares what Google’s User Experience team has learned about how the web is changing our real life networks; how people are connected to each other, and what that means for their behavior online; how people influence each other, and how “influence” is affected by the structure of our social networks; why “identity is a cornerstone of the social web”; and, finally, the touchy issue of online privacy and giving control of their own data to the users of social networking sites. 

In our field – adult literacy – we are (based on  recent conversations I’ve had with friends and colleagues)   beginning  to use  Social Media to get our message about literacy out and to connect with others – and to think about how we could use social media in literacy practice and in our own professional development – building networks, reaching out to each other and finding ways to use social media to share and learn from each other. 

For example in July & August of this year   NIFL   hosted a very lively discussion about Using Social Media in Professional Development and Teaching – you can see the full archive of the discussion on the ALE Wiki – another great example of the power of social media to support us to learn together. 

Of course  as we  embrace social media and use it to connect with each other and to support our literacy work – we need to pay close attention to  privacy and security for ourselves and for  students – a good place to start  and to spark our thinking about privacy and security is this list of  tips – Protecting Online Privacy  from the Media Awareness Network       and   click  HERE for an enlightening presenentatio on privacy and social networking from the Privacy Commissioner of Canada

Finally – after all that reading!!! check out this very informative and entertaining video- Canadian Social Media Statistics – prepare to  be amazed by some astonishing numbers !!

Tags: social media

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 26th, 2010 at 8:51 am by maria and is filed under Literacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.