Social Networking Sites 501 Blog Post

Social Networking

Social Networking in Plain English…amazing! Makes it all seems so easy to get connected and stay connected with friends, family and peers. In fact, it almost made me want to see how far I could push the envelope for finding: a new job; a new partner; and, a great place to live!!

One of my favorite pastimes is Ham Radio. In respect of my own anonymity in the webosphere, I will refrain from posting my callsign. But, I will share a little bit of history with you about my journey into amateur radio.

My Elmer, mentor, leader, role model, and guide through the journey was an awesome man who inspired me to pursue not only my basic qualifications to operate a ‘radio station’, but also to get my morse code certification while Canada still required it to own radios of certain power, and specific capabilities. As with every area of specialization, there are phrases, terms, idiomatic expressions, and terminology that users in that arena are required to assimilate into their bank of personal/professional knowledge in order to be successful in said arena. It is regrettable that mandatory morse testing was dropped from amateur radio in Canada, because it really required a radio operator to use a language that was specific to radio operations.

My Elmer was a retired firefighter, who spent 40 years helping others, saving lives, dealing with others’ mistakes, and trying to educate people about how to be responsible in the face of the considerable power of combustibles. I stumbled upon this individual not by chance, but by circumstance. I was back in Canada after a long absence in Asian Russia, and I had no way to communicate in realtime with friends I made, and family I reconnected with while traveling. Ham radio seemed like the most natural method of ‘keeping in touch’ with that area of the world. I found that, if I sent a package to them, or when my mother sent packages to me while there, the packages would get to me already opened, with the best contents removed (read: stolen) by locals, mail authorities, buerocrats who justified the theft as payment for allowing foreigners in their regions, or by mail transporters who got hungry while delivering the post. If I sent a letter to friends and family around the world, the mail was inevitably opened, sometimes lost, and ALWAYS read by others, so nothing was really secret. I approached my Elmer in Canada indicating my desire to use ham radio to send open, short messages by morse code to local postal outlets in various towns, villages, hamlets, and scattered settlements across Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, through Siberia, and up into Arkangel where postal workers would receive the morse transmissions, decode them into Russian, and deliver the messages to my family and friends’ mail boxes at their houses. I’m not even sure where a telegraph station is located in Alberta, but I can assure you that every city block east of the Carpathians has a telegraph station, where average people send telegrams for low-cost, at high-speed to others. I remember sending a telegram ahead of me as I left Piter to visit Sochi. The telegram was sent immediately, and my aunt got the paper transcription of my message an hour later delivered to her door.

Not only was ham radio effective for helping me to get morse code messages to friends and family, but it introduced me to an entirely different world of people who were connecting with one another literally at the speed of light around the world. Many a night my Elmer would call me on my handheld radio during the wee hours of the morning, demanding me to bring him two blueberry fritters and two extra large Tim Horton’s Double-Double coffees because “the bands are wide open, and I’m making contact in deep valleys in Italy, Chile, China (or wherever).” And, off I’d speed from my small house, cruise over to the local Timmy’s, get the booty for my Elmer, and jet to his place where we’d make contacts around the world while the atmosphere was quiet with solar activity. It was amazing to talk, in realtime, with no delay, to persons in extremely remote locations, and develop a network of ‘colleagues’ around the globe who would try to meet one another at specified times on certain days of the year to swap stories about long distance (called DX) contacts we’d made. I remember speaking to the space station on one occasion, but it wasn’t as thrilling as I thought, because there were no obstructions between earth and space to overcome! So, for me, social networking has always been an important aspect of my personal development, and finding new methods of contact was only a game to play, to figure out how to get messages around to many people at one time, so we could all share ideas with one another in an open venue.

Today, social networking has a new visage, and utility-specific language that accompanies the use of each tool for getting one’s messages out to their audiences. Another

Sunday

Today I spent touring around Ning, getting caught up in the many digressions available to a wayward mind on a Sunday afternoon that is looking for distraction. I created/joined a few Ning networks. Ning instructions are not as clear as I would have hoped them to be. Although today’s post is rather short, I learned a whole lot abut how to use Ning, and how other Ning users are integrating technology into their classrooms by reading countless posts about success and failure stories dealing with Web2 and technology in schools.

Monday

Today was Facebook day, when I updated my account that, well, hasn’t been exactly dormant during recent weeks, but didn’t receive full attention because of the various other Web2 tools and utilities I have been exploring. I am very pleased with how many new friends I have on FBook, and with how well received many of my postings on friends’ boards have been commented on. I was astounded to read Iyengar, Han and Gupta’s 2009 statistics about Facebook, “Social networks have become a cultural phenomenon. Facebook, one of the largest social networking sites in the U.S. was founded in 2004. By February 2009, it boasts more than 175 million active users and continues to grow rapidly. Worldwide these users spend 3.0 billion minutes each day on Facebook. More than 850 million photos and 5 million videos are uploaded on the site each month.” And, that, according to Leitner and Grechenig (2008), users are connecting with one another on the bases of “common language or shared racial, sexual, religious, or nationality based identities. Sites also vary in the extent to which they incorporate new information and communication tools, such as mobile connectivity, blogging and photovideo- sharing.” With users connecting to other users through literally hundreds of millions of Social Networking Sites (SNS’s), from which is drawn this sample of “100 different social networks as the following, listed in alphabetical order: Amiglia, Amitize, Anobii, aSmallWorld, Asoboo, B4class, Badoo, Bebo, BeRecruited, Blogtronix, BooksConnect, BottleTalk, Boxedup, BuzzNet, Campusbug, Capazoo, CarDomain, CarGurus, Change, Cingo, CircleUp, CitizenBay, Classmates, Coastr, College, College Tonight, ColShare, CompanyLoop, DeviantArt, Dogster, Doostang, Eons, Etsy, Facebook, FaceParty, Famster, FanNation, FastPitch, Flickr, Flingr, Flip, Flixster, Friendster, Gather, Geni, Graduates, Groovr, GuildCafe, Habbo, Hi5, iHipo, ImageKind, iYomu, Kaboodle, KinCafe, Kinzin, Konnects, LastFM, Lawyrs, LibraryThing, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Lovento, Mahalo, Meetup, Multiply, Mycool, MySpace, Netlog, Ning, Orkut, Pairup, Pandora, Passado, Piczo, Plazes, RateItAll, Reunion, Revish, Ryze, Shelfari, Shoppero, Spoke, StudiVZ, StyleFeeder, Stylehive, Tagged, Takkle, ThisNext, TravBuddy, Tribe, Twango, Twitter, Vox, Wishpot, Xanga, Xing, Xuqa, Yelp and Zooomr.” (Leitner & Grechenig, 2008)

My own Facebook account is riddled with ‘friends’ who are friends of friends, but are business opportunities looking to advertise their pay-for-use services to continue to remain friends. This week, I found an excellent video about how to use Facebook:



While I realize that Facebook is not the only SNS, it is, by far one of the most common sites for users. Tonight I tried customizing my Fbook account, again, but had difficulties figuring out how to import the customizable wallpaper background for my account. I’m confident with my use of Web2 tools these days, so I cannot imagine how intimidating it must be for newbies with no background in technology at all….

Tuesday

Tonight I logged in to MySpace, also for the first time in a very long time. I like MySpace, and the functionality it offers users. While there are extensions and apps that a users can add, there is so much more functionality to MySpace. And, when I log in to my account, I like that I can have my playlist already dropping tunes for me to hear. I was able to add a new app to MySpace, but when I logged in I spent too long trying to update my profile. I’m thinking there must have been some sort of internal server error that kept me from editing my profile beyond the addition of a single app. In fact, at the end of a long night of trying to get MySpace to react, it ended up crashing FireFox on me several times, so I left the editing process there for the night. I decided to turn my efforts to reading more about social networking, and how online identities are created, monitored and measured by users in SNS’s. First off, though, I really like Park’s (2003, p.50) definition of found an excellent definition of social networking, and social networking analysis, “A social network is a set of nodes (people, organizations or other social entities) connected by a set of relationships, such as friendship, affiliation or information exchange (Wasserman & Faust, 1994). SNA is a set of research procedures for identifying structures in social systems based on the relations among the system components (also referred to as nodes) rather than the attributes of individual cases.”

Harrison and Thomas (2009) relate a qualitative research approach to online identity creation, “(f)irstly, they outline the core concept of identity, which refers to the way in which users develop their online profiles and list of friends to carry out four important community processes:
1. Impression management is concerned with personal identity formation, in which users define their own identities through the information they provide in their profile, and the extent to which they make it public or private in the community and thereby send out identity signals to others.
2. Friendship management is linked to impression management in that users use publicly displayed profiles of others to choose who they would like to include as friends on their list, that is, they look at the identity markers of other users as a benchmark for establishing levels of social interaction.
3. Network structure relates to the roles that users play in the social community in which they participate. Some users will be fairly passive and have a restricted personal network. Others will be active posters of information, and build up intricate networks of friends. Others will play an even greater role in actively promoting and developing the SNS as a whole, by setting up groups and communities and posting publicly available information to encourage interaction.
4. Bridging of online and offline social networks, which is concerned with the degree to which the SNS becomes an integral part of the users’ actual life while offline (Turkle 1995).

From my own experience, I have tried my best to limit the use of my name, location, and relations to family in my SNSs, and it is difficult when making friends, not to share personal information, and bonds of trust should first be developed between myself and other users before I provide contact email addresses, or personal information.
Despite the length of the following quote, I think it only appropriate that my own personal interests in the works of Milton Erickson and Lev Vygotsky should be recognized as contributing to a dialog surrounding SNSs. Harrison and Thomas (2009, p. 115):
“Social Interactionism:
The role played by what Erikson (1968) terms ‘other significant people’ has been recognised as a fundamental concept in social interactionism. Vygotsky’s (1978) notion of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and Feuerstein et al.’s (2003) idea of Instrumental Enrichment, stressed that mediation is fundamental to all human development including learning. Successful learning is seen as being dependent on how learners interact with the people around them in order to overcome problems they cannot solve by themselves, so that they can move to the next stage of development that lies in the ZPD. The role of the significant other or mediator (also referred to as the ‘more knowledgeable other’ or MKO) is to attempt to find ways of helping the other person to learn. While Vygotsky noted the centrality of language as an essential tool used by humans to carry out mediation, Feuerstein et al. (2003) emphasized the fundamental role of mediators in the transmission of culture. In this way we can see that the concept of mediation provides us with a means to examine the roles of both language and culture in human development.”

I am a convinced that Social Networking Sites provide a shared social construction that mimics face-to-face human relationships, but provide greater safety in the interactions by allowing, as Harrison and Thomas note, respect for each individual’s Zone of Proximal Development, as well as each users Social Territorial Imperative.

This has been quite a plate of food for thought this evening. I will keep my readings up, and hope to share them with you later this week.

~rob

Wednesday and Thursday




















































Two days were spent creating new accounts for, and navigating through LastFm.com; LinkedIn.com; Zoomr.com; thinkfree.com; Ask.com; MetaCafe.com; LiveStreamTV; Pandora.com; ODEO.com; hi5.com; and bebo.com. There is so much available to newcomers into the webosphere, but unfortunately there isn’t enough time in the day to join a community, get engaged in learning what each community has to offer, and still get enough sleep to make the work day easier!

~rob


Friday

Today I returned to Facebook and MySpace, with greater success this time around. I was able to make changes to my profile, and update not only friends lists, but to change settings which I had been unable to do prior to today. I reread Michael Blanding's (2009) article, Thanks for the add. Now help me with my homework. I am very impressed with how 'on the mark' I believe Blanding is. Learning styles have changed considerably in the past five years as our society shifts to a more visual/kinesthetic demographic. I think that teaching needs to reflect a more visual/kinesthetic nature if we are to 'hook' kids into becoming excited about learning. I was pleased to have Joanne link a Trailfire to Stephen's Lighthouse, as that is a  website I have visited numerous times (like weekly) over the past three or four years. I always appreciate Mr. Abrams sense of humor, and the technology reviews he does. Another blog I am totally in love with is ZDNet.com, for news as well as the other treats they offer.

Reflections on the process of learning about the tool

This week the greater majority of my learning was from the journal readings I collected about the history, development, use, and explosion of SNSs during the past ten years, but more specifically since Facebook went public. I am really astounded that so many people are accessing SNSs each day, and so much information is passing through such a simple user interface. This week Stephen Harper used Twitter and YouTube to get his message out to youth, but according to the news his experiment was a bit of a bust because he failed to connect with his audience in ways that the public wanted to him to appear. While I understand that the last US election employed considerable efforts to use social media marketing to reach a demographic of voters that doesn’t typically present as a high voter turnout at the polls, I think there is a disparate sense of comparison between a US leader’s “Change” campaign, and a CDN Prime Minister using social media to ‘get to know’ we, the plebes, in Canadian society. The most recent articles I located in the ERIC, CBCA, and ProQuest databases through the university databases using the search terms +social +networking +facebook +myspace +twitter netted results that deal with analyses of social networking utilities. It is alarming to see the amount of research committed to employing social networking tools to gain greater shares of social capital in online communities. I wonder if the youth of today really have even a fighting chance to limit their exposure to the great machine that has billions of dollars invested in using social networking and social media marketing to increase the purchasing habits of today’s youth. My personal interest in appreciating the diversity of humankind leaves me wondering if the push to modernize southeast Asia and Africa by the year 2030 isn’t just a push by NGO producers to find greater markets in which they can sell their goods and harness the purchasing desires of developing nations by having them mass produce disposable items for distribution in developed nations….

Discussion of the tool in terms of my own personal learning

My own personal learning this week, as with most weeks these days, benefited from the numerous errors I made, and shortcomings of knowledge I expressed with editing my existing accounts, and in creating membership in the new communities I joined. There is a great feeling of satisfaction I feel when I have mastered a technology…HA! Mastered! Well, when I have figured out how to create and post using a technology. This week I didn’t get that feeling of satisfaction, like with Animoto last week, or with Voicethread, or even with my PBWorks account.

My school division still blocks access to FBook, MySpace, YouTube, and the majority of other SNSs I highlighted in this week’s post. Students still use the verboten social networking sites, but they are not to talk about them, or try to login to them during school hours. The ban on social networking in schools makes me think my folks growing up in the  60’s, when rock music was still considered to be evil, and it was banned in many areas. How archaic can we really be and still make progress as a society? Are those same people who lived through the evils of rock era the employees running school divisions who are now determining the SNSs are out-of-bounds? What in the world will people say in 30 years from now when they look back on their education and realize how dissimilar schools are to society and the workplace?

Again, my learning this week was really gleaned from the readings I did, and from the difficulties I had with using the simplest tools that even elementary children have mastered!

Discussion of the tool in terms of teaching and learning

I have to be honest that there isn’t much more I can add to what I believe are the benefits and advantages of using social networking sites that Michael Blanding didn’t already mention in his article Thanks for the Add. Now Help Me with My Homework.

When I took over teaching high school classes in my school, the principal told me that class sizes ranged between 6 and 10 students for the options courses, and that it should be easy for my first experience teaching high school (remember, I’m a kindergarten teacher). Well, although I don’t know a whole lot about technology or Web2 tools, I was able to integrate PowerPoint presentations, YoutTube videos, mp3s, videochatting, virtual tours, online games, and various other technologies into out daily lessons, and class enrollment was 46 students, with some sitting on the windowsills, some standing, others sitting on the floor…you get the picture. Students want a school experience that reflects their everyday lives; they want an education they can use. In the 21^st century it is difficult to imagine enabling students with skills they might never use, when there are skill sets readily available to them they are off limits.

Again, there is no way I can add to Blanding’s (2009) article, but I will applaud the subscribers to the blog who left comments sharing stories about the need to reach students by providing them with an education that is emotionally and mentally stimulating so they WANT to learn.

I hope that after I retire from teaching in 32 and ½ years from now, that I will be able to look back and recognize that students enjoyed my classes and went on to use the tools I shared with them. It is amazing, because during our last Elluminate session I asked Joanne how she developed an interest in Web2 tools, and the persons who were influential in aiding Joanne’s development have inspired her to pass on a knowledge of technology to me, and I will likewise pass on the same inspiration to my students, and the spiral seems to continue growing…. It really IS quite amazing!

~rob

References

Blanding, M. (2009). Thanks for the add. Now help me with my homework. Retrieved from http://trailfire.com/joannedegroot/marks/295594

Iyengar, R., Han, S., & Gupta, S. (2009). Do friends influence purchases in a social network? Retrieved from www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/09-123.pdf

LeFever, L. (Producer). (2007, August 6). Social Networking in Plain English. Common Craft. Podcast retrieved from http://trailfire.com/joannedegroot/trailview/61581

Leitner, P., & Grechenig, T. (2008) Social networking sphere: A snapshot of trends, functionalities and revenue models. Retrieved from www.iadis.net/dl/final_uploads/200810C024.pdf

Park, H. (2003). Hyperlink Network Analysis: A New Method for the Study of Social Structure on the Web. Connections 25(1), 49-61.