Online Learning Journal INF206 OLJ 1

Social networking is about creating communities not defined by geography.  It has endless potential in the teaching and learning environment, harnessing collective knowledge to create online communities of practice as well as using this intellectual output to create best practice for knowledge and information organisations.  The cultural and social elements of the contemporary network facilitates people power in the most amazing way, although we have witnessed it can be used for good and for bad.

I already use Facebook, albeit, rather reluctantly. It has become a communication tool to share photos and keep up to date with many of our friends and all of our family who live interstate.  My 16 yr old son is about to go to Brazil to play soccer and that is how we will communicate with him over there, it’s cheaper than a phone call and he can send us photos and news…That is only if he decides to accept our friend request.  Instagram is a recent exploration; I love the ability to photo shop pictures and then share them, as they say a picture tells a thousand words.

 It turns out I had a flickr account, I had opened one 4 years ago and completely forgot about it.  I loaded photo’s on of our family trip to NZ to share with family and friends.

I only joined twitter last week, I haven't been really interested in that. I find amusing that even the ABC news is reporting on people's tweet's. I read the other day if people wanted to know what was being said on twitter they would be on twitter, well now I am, at least  I can choose who I follow!

I am very interested in LinkedIn, I went to a staff development session about that and so I am pleased we will be covering that professional development aspect.

I love Blogs, I currently subscribe to Hey Jude, and Michael Stephens-Tame the Web.  I also follow a few food blogs I love cooking and love new ideas.

What I hope to learn predominately in this subject is how organisations can co-exist with social medias. I have heard many stories of pilot blogs being set up for say connecting with teens and then nothing further, it is like no interest is generated so they just forget about it, or that staff person moves on so its not followed through.  I would like to fundamentally learn about best practice in Library 2.0, and connecting with students, I am currently working in an academic library and the social medias used are Facebook and instagram with the former mostly being a broadcast mechanism, and the latter just nice pictures of the Uni that catch the Librarians eye(we have a pretty nice campus).  I am open and keen to learn and probably would like to lose a bit of cynicism about social media and in the words of Kevin Kelly I probably define myself by "what I don’t use”.