Curious about Twitter?

I meet more people in my line of work who have finally created Facebook or LinkedIn accounts, but consider Twitter the final frontier in their online/digital life. I hear: “Who’s got the time?” Or: “What do you use Twitter for?” Or: “I already suffer from Information Overload!” Nevertheless, Twitter has presented us with grounbreaking implications for our everyday lives and for the way we communicate. There’s probably no better way to explain this than to show you a video from a TED conference, in which Twitter co-founder Evan Williams explains its many uses. By the way, during 2008 alone, Twitter exploded in size by 10 times.

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Adults: All Aboard for the Web 2.0 Train

Some of Facebook's gifts, as displayed in the ...

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According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, social networking has become more mainstream among adults. That includes me, at least the last time I checked the crow’s feet in my 10x magnification mirror.

According to the folks at Pew, the number of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years — from 8% four years ago, to 35% now. That’s amazing, and encouraging. I have conducted a number of workshops on the subject of social media, and I still get attendees who look like deer in the headlights when I talk about Facebook, LinkedIn, and the whole sphere of social networking and social bookmarking.

On the other hand, I get plenty of people — of all ages — who are eager to dive right in.

Although those of us over the age of 18 stumbling through the social networks should be proud of ourselves for trying, don’t get cocky. We’re still light-years behind those lucky kids between the ages of 12 to 17. A whopping 65 percent of those crazy kids have an online profile on one of the big social networks — Facebook and MySpace, primarily.

It seems that the older we get, the less use we seem to have for social networks.

According to the Pew study, 75% of adults ages 18-24 use these networks, compared to just 7% of adults 65 and older. “At its core, use of online social networks is still a phenomenon of the young,” the study says.

Other age groups and their use of social networking sites:

– 57 percent of those aged 25 to 34

– 30 percent of those ages 35 to 44

– 19 percent of those aged 45 to 54

– 10 percent of those aged 55 to 64

Another interesting finding: We adults use social networks for professional and personal reasons, and we often maintain multiple profiles, generally on different sites.

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More on Social Media, Colleges and Universities

Many thanks to Heather Mansfield of Diosa Communications for promoting my post, “Why Schools Need to Get on the Social Media Bandwagon,” on her website. You can find my post here and at PROpenMic, one of my favorite Ning social networking sites. Speaking of Ms. Mansfield, she’s a web 2.0 consultant and expert with a great site that, among other things, lists good reads on the topic of using Web 2.0 tools in education. On her higher education page, she lists Web 2.0 Articles, Blogs, and Resources for Higher Education.
She also highly recommends the use of MySpace by colleges and universities, since they’re listed there on MySpaceSchools anyway. Here are two great links she sent along:
Her MySpace Portal
Her FaceBook page
Let’s see if her hard work pays off and if colleges and universities eventually get on the Web 2.0 bandwagon.

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Librarians are Cool

Libraries almost invariably contain long aisle...Image via Wikipedia

I know I’m dating myself here, but I don’t remember ever having a cool librarian as a kid. Instead, the librarians I knew had pursed lips, shushed people for a living, and slept with the Dewey Decimal System.

Not today. Librarians are Twittering, Facebooking, blogging, wiki-ing, and definitely not sleeping with the Dewey Decimal System.

If you want proof, take a look at the Library page of the Online Education Database, which currently contains reviews of 1,081 programs from 86 accredited online colleges. There, you’ll find tons of references written by and for librarians about using social media in libraries around the country.

Here’s what the Library page says about Twitter, for example:

Twitter is a free communication and social networking tool which allows you to convey short messages of up to 140 characters to your circle of friends via the Twitter website, SMS, email, IM, or other Twitter client. Messages appear not only within your profile on Twitter, but are sent to your community of followers who have signed up to receive your updates. Often referred to as microblogging, this new phenomenon has caught on with over 300,000 users on Twitter alone including Barack Obama and John Edwards. Twitter recently made the cut as one of Time’s Best 50 Websites of 2007. Librarians are using it to communicate at conferences and events and to keep up with developments in the field, and libraries have begun using it to promote their services.

Among their listings are librarian-only applications and networks like:

Shakespeare High Cafeteria: This online tribute to Shakespeare features active discussions about Shakespeare news, book clubs, a creative writing center, “staff lounge,” study help and teaching ideas.

Readers Read: Browse forum topics like publishing industry, general fiction, mystery/thriller, children’s books and nonfiction.

TeacherLibrarianNing: Educators and librarians get together on this network, where you can join groups, post photos, upload videos and more.

The Shifted Librarian: Librarians connect through this blog about library news, trends and of course, books.

Librarian Facebook Application: This Facebook app connects you to other librarians who can answer your search questions.

They also list a number of social media sites for librarians and book-lovers, including:

Shelfari: This blog about books and book collecting has a MySpace page and a Facebook application.

GoodReads: Keep track of what you and your friends are reading through this online networking site.

BookJetty: BookJetty lets users organize, rate and review books and even look up books in the site’s database of over 300 libraries around the world. Users also get a blog that lets them show off a “bookshelf” to friends.

MySpace Books: This ultimate social networking site has a page just for books, connecting readers, authors and those in the book industry.

Books iRead: Another Facebook app that lets you rate, review, and share books you’ve read.

You can also catch a number of 21st century posts on the site, including these:

50 Ways to Use the Wii In Your Library

100 Essential Firefox Add-Ons for Librarians

e-Learning Reloaded: Top 50 Web 2.0 Tools for Info Junkies, Researchers & Students

100 Ways to Use Your iPod to Learn and Study Better

Need any more proof that librarians are cool? I don’t think so.  Now shush!


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Ambient Intimacy? Guilty as Charged

SwurlImage by gniliep via Flickr

I was fascinated by Sunday’s New York Times article, “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy,” in which writer Clive Thompson examines the increasing use of social media like Facebook and Twitter. Guilty as charged — it seems the more I use them, the more I rely on them.

The piece looks back at Facebook’s decision to introduce the “News Feed” tool, which initially created a firestorm from users who felt that constant updates about their activities on Facebook was an intrusion. But then, just as suddenly, the tide turned.

In essence, Facebook users didn’t think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?

Thompson’s piece notes that scientists have a name for this kind of nonstop online contact: “ambient awareness.”

It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online. In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for “microblogging”: posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing.

Twitter, of course, is the premiere site for microblogging, where more than 2 million users provide brief updates about themselves, their work, their daily lives, sometimes on a minute-by-minute basis.

The Times article also notes that in 1998, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar argued that every human being has a limit on the number of people he or she can personally know at any one time.  Dunbar estimated that our maximum number of connections would average 150, which is now known as the “Dunbar number.”

So, Thompson asks, are people who use Facebook and Twitter increasing their Dunbar number, because they can keep track of more people? Try adding the number of contacts you have on Facebook and Twitter, as Thompson did for his article. He had 301 contacts on both sites, more than double the Dunbar number.

Check out the Times piece and think about your expanding world for a few minutes.


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Textbooks and iPods and Facebook — Oh My!

This Special Report in Businessweek this week takes a fascinating look at how technology — from iPods to professors’ Facebook pages — is changing the face of your average campus.

I especially like this quote from a researcher in the story:

Cara Lane, a researcher who studies learning and scholarly technologies at the University of Washington in Seattle, says all that time spent searching for Hannah Montana videos on YouTube can help make teens better at searching the databases, including Lexis-Nexis and J-Stor, they’ll need for academic research—those IMs, texts, and status updates are a primer for participation in online forums related to classwork. “Students usually arrive not knowing how to use education-oriented technology tools,” Lane says. “But they quickly surpass their instructors in their ability to use them effectively.”

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Swurl — Your Online Presence

For anyone who’s a Web 2.0 junkie like myself, Swurl is another tool that allows you (nay, encourages you) to follow yourself and your online presence — all on one page. But it’s not just about vanity, folks. It’s also a great tool that provides you with quick links to all your web places — Facebook, blogs, Twitters and more. Swurl gives you two ways to view all your web entries — in list form, which looks like a bookmarking site, or in a cool timeline view. You can see mine here:

Every item is in the small box next to the date, and direct links to those items are in blue. Check it out and see if it works for you.

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NSPRA Website

Facebook, Inc.

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Carol Mowen of NSPRA sent me a Facebook post to let us all know that the new NSPRA website will be available at its old URL in a couple of days, after some testing. So you can find it right now at the link I provided in my earlier post, then it will revert back to the old website address. I guess I should start packing…

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MySpace and the Principal

Mark Walsh over at EdWeek’s School Law Blog reported recently that an Indiana Supreme Court has thrown out a case involving a middle school student who posted a tirade against her principal on none other than the social networking site MySpace. The student was charged with harassment for messages she aimed at Greencastle Middle School Principal Shawn Gobert, after a dispute about body piercings. The student also allegedly set up a fake MySpace “group” that included vulgarities and Gobert’s name in the title.
Before getting to the state supreme court, the case was heard by an Indiana trial court, which found the student delinquent on the harassment charges. But then the state appeals court reversed that decision, ruling that the student was protected by the First Amendment.
In its decision on May 13, the state supreme court ruled in favor of the student, but on the basis that the fake MySpace page had never authorized the principal to be one of its viewers. The court also cited Indiana’s harassment statute, which states that a person breaks the law only when they communicate a message with “the intent to harass, annoy, or alarm another person but with no intent of legitimate communication.”
The student’s postings showed that she clearly wanted to communicate her anger and criticism about the principal’s disciplinary action, the court said, and “merely intended to amuse and gain approval or notoriety from her friends, and/or to generally vent anger for her personal grievances.”
An interesting case that raises all kinds of questions about the First Amendment, the Internet and social networking sites that are still primarily populated by teens.
If you want to read about a fascinating case with similar overtones, check out the New York Magazine’s controversial examination, “Testing Horace Mann,” from its March 30 issue. It’s a disturbing look at the way students used FaceBook, but an even more disturbing examination of the adults involved in the scandal.

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Teens Improve Their Writing When They Blog

This is fascinating to someone who is a writing “semi-purist,” like myself.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project recently explored the link between formal writing and the writing that teens do when they email one another, text each other and write for the Internet. What they found was that blogging is helping teens become more prolific writers. Hurray!
I know this is true of my own son, who maintains his own blog, maintains a Facebook account and yes – writes for the college newspaper. All of that spells one thing – plenty of practice.
The April 24 survey showed that 47 percent of teen bloggers write outside of school several times a week or more, compared to 33 percent of teens who don’t maintain blogs. More than half of both groups, although the number is higher for bloggers, believe that writing is important to their success in life.

Duke University writing professor Bradley Hammer told eSchool News that blog writing can be better than the writing style students learn in school, or SAT-style writing.

“In real ways, blogging and other forms of virtual debate actually foster the very types of intellectual exchange, analysis, and argumentative writing that universities value,” he wrote in an op-ed piece last August.

The full report is available on the Pew Internet site.

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