Response Blog #1 Creating a Social Network

I am still in the very beginning stages of creating my social network. I have had to change my thinking over the last couple of days. When I think of my social network, I think of my group of friends, friends-of-friends, colleagues and family members. In other words, I think of the people that I see or talk to on a pretty regular basis. However, after looking at various blogs and networking tools, I now see that a social network can be very large and include people you have never actually met.

At this point my social network is definitely more of a personal social network. I use email and Facebook almost daily to connect with friends and stay in touch with family members that have moved. Considering how much time I have spent in the personal sector of my social network, I am now wondering why I never crossed into the professional side. While searching the web for projects and lessons to use in my classroom I have stumbled upon a few professional blogs, but like many of my classmates expressed, I was a silent participant. Many times I would want to ask the blogger a question or ask if he or she could elaborate on a topic, but I never felt like I could since I wasn’t a “blogger.” Hopefully, now that I more fully understand social networking I can really work to develop my professional social network and perhaps even mesh the two sides in an appropriate manner using one of the tools we have been sampling.

Speaking of Web 2.0 tools….I definitely see the value of bringing these into the classroom. I have both participated in classes that used forums and I have also asked my students to use them. I can understand the experience Mike had when he asked his students to use a blog. I think, generally, students feel that a blog or any time of online communication is simply a different new form of IM or text messaging. I, too, had to have a long conversation with my students about appropriateness. Many of them were surprised to hear me use the word “publish” when I described their posts. We talked a lot about proper online etiquette and I explained that I would be grading their posts and their responses as if I was grading one of their papers. With that being said, I also explained that a blog or a discussion forum is a bit more of an informal space and therefore a different tone and style can be used in a blog or a forum than in a research paper. Again, as Mike mentioned, the kids seemed to really enjoy this. I think it is an example of an idea I heard from Sara Kajder in "Promise into Practice: What It Now Means to Teach Adolescent Readers and the Impact of the Results" during the K12 Online Conference. Asking students to go online and share their ideas with their peers works to bridge the gap between the literacies they use outside of school and the academic setting.