My focus is going to be on face book, because it is basically the main social networking. I think face book is a good thing that can be abused- as with the young girls and boys who are being targeted by predators or the teacher fighting for her or his job because of comments they made on his or her own time. I also think it has hampered our abilities as a society to have meaningful face-to-face relationships.
The good thing to come out of a social network is re-established connections with friends from back in high school and college who have moved away and I'd lost contact with. It's good to reconnect with them; I deal with them through e-mail rather than in that public forum. We also exchange letters using the old fashioned method i.e. paper, envelope, and stamp. Whatever my feelings about face book, it's entirely up to the individual, but I do think we need to be careful how we use such a convenience.
Social networking as stated before can be good, but it’s a way that you do with a thing. I am sure before face book, started the visionary internet and design was to bring individuals together for one coming goal, and that’s bring individuals back together, or those that are far, you can’t see from day to day, you will be able to connect with. I think it would be very beneficial to the class room, however, but needs to be monitor heavily. Teachers should have access to any computer or account, which their students have, and should be able to log onto their computers, to see if there are any suspicious things going on.
Reference (s):
Spector, J. M., Merrill, M. D., Merrienboer, J. V., Driscoll, M. P. (2008). Handbook of research on educational communications and technology. (3rded.). New York, NY: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.Thorsen, C. (2009). Techtactics: Technology for teachers. (3rd ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education Inc.
Eric,
ReplyDeleteFacebook was established as means for college kids and only college kids with a registered college email and through a university or college that offered the access, to connect with each other. The creator actually wanted people to be able to see each other and rate each other in a visual sense. My sister in law was a student at Mount Union College (now the University of Mount Union) and she had a MySpace account already, as did I. She showed me what I thought was an updated version of MySpace but she explained that only college kids had access. Obviously Facebook was something very different than MySpace and has adapted to the mainstream fascination with social networking as it changed and morphed over the last 10 years. Though there is no manual on how to professionally utilize Facebook, we can offer training for our students and our colleagues for appropriate, professional ways to use social networking. That will be a viable way to prepare our soon to be working professionals to use social networking in a beneficial way rather than in a detrimental way.
Jacki