Richardson Ch. 6

Everywhere I am hearing praises for Twitter; it expands social networking and makes people feel part of a more global community. However, I disagree with the use of twitter as an educational to. It makes sense as a personal networking tool, or as a “social notepad” as Richardson calls it, but it skirts boundaries of private and professional life, much like the social networking on Facebook or Myspace. Since education is becoming more and more a group effort, these social networks are crucial for teachers to communicate and expand their resources and references.

Social bookmarking services seems especially useful for professional networking; I am always finding good teaching sites and then either forgetting what thy are or losing the URL. Being able to form a social network based on sharing resources will be very helpful as a teacher. For example, a website I found named Delicious is a social bookmarking website. One just enters keywords that are relevant to their topic and numerous links pop up with similar key words. I entered the word ‘education’ and about 12 different articles popped up  with the number of people who had also bookmarked these pages. These social bookmarking websties allow us a way to organize the otherwise overwhelming web  into a way that one can make useful for themselves.