Social Network Possibilities

When I was working through the social networking lessons this week, I could actually see myself using Ning as a way to contact students. It seems like a good place to go for interaction. The chatting feature has two different tools, and while I didn't test it, I could see which other students from our class were in there at the time. The best part of Ning is the way students can see pictures of each other and have a greater sense of community. They actually gain the ability to communicate one with the other as well, just like in a face-to-face setting. This feature should actually create a richer learning environment than Blackboard, where students can talk to each other in the Discussions, but who don't have the same level of ability to approach each other directly. When creating a tool like this, it is important to remember to remind the students that nothing posted online is private. They need to take care to behave academically and to use common sense in their conversations and means of approaching one another.

For the time being, I will likely begin by adding the chat tool in Blackboard again. I had stopped using it because of the run-away nature of the conversations when I would create a live chat meeting with asynchronous students. In fact, the students ran away with the chat even when I was sitting in a room letting them play with this new technology. But this SNS week has reminded me that it's not all about my agenda. We need to allow the students to take the class where they need to go with it as long as we are meeting the learning outcomes for the course.

Facebook is another site I enjoy using for personal interaction with my family and friends. I don't add students as friends as a policy of mine. However, I wonder what value it would be to create an instructor Facebook account. I could add all of my students into this network, and we could post questions, queries, and comments about the lessons and assignments. We could upload pictures and videos to share with each other. Facebook also has a chat capability, and I have used it to visit for an extended conversation, which has the potential to be much more satisfying for a student than sending emails back and forth.

Twitter sounds like a nice idea for getting to know my son and daughter-in-law who live out of state, but I'm not sure I want to use it with students. It seems like it would generate way too much information and would take up too much of my time. Anyone having success with this medium?