Thing #12 Exploring social networking

Well, as of this "Thing", I am over half way thru the 23 "Things". Yea!!!

I set up MySpace and Facebook accounts. It was actually pretty easy. I didn't add any friends because I don't know anyone who has an account with either one, except my niece and my "going on 21" year old daughter, whose accounts are private and probably doesn't want her "meddling mother" seeing her pages! (Imagine that!)

I did do a search for library and librarians on both social networks. However, I chose not to join any of the groups. Facebook showed over 500 people to search and MySpace had a dozen or so people that fell under my search terms. The two groups that I found on MySpace were "Librarians are Cool" and "Ladies & Lads of Library Land". However, after looking at their MySpace pages, they weren't your typical Mesquite, Texas librarian types, so I didn't choose to join their groups! Ha!

I did join 4 different Ning networks. I joined Texas School Librarians, Teacher Librarian, Teachers 2.0 and of course Mesquite Librarians and Friends. Three of them let me create a network badge, so check out my side bar to link to those networks. I didn't find a badge available for Teachers 2.0. Also, I clicked on the RSS feed buttons on all 4 networks in order to add them to my Bloglines feeds, but I only had success with the best of the 4 - Mesquite Librarians and Friends.I plan on going back to the other three later to see if I can get the RSS feeds for those as well. I did customize the background, wallpaper on a couple of the Ning networks, as I feel like those will be the ones of most use to me as a librarian.

I didn't add any bells or whistles to my Facebook or MySpace sites, but later when I have finished all 23 "Things", I may go back customize those sites as well, just for fun. One thing I did include in my personal info was the name of my high school and year of graduation as well as the same for my college. It might be a way of old school friends reaching me if they don't know how to locate me. In fact, this past year, I had a high school reunion and some friends shared pictures from the reunion on Classmates.com. I created an account so I could view the pictures. To open a basic account, it's free as most others. However, I keep getting e-mails to get a different version (which there is a charge for), because various classmates are interested in contacting me. I'm not interested in paying a fee just to find out who these people are. (It's probably people that I wouldn't want any contact with anyway! Ha!)

I feel that the Ning networks are the most useful for librarians professionaly, as they keep us up-to-date on new trends and provide information relevant to our jobs.

Even though I don't see any practical uses for Facebook and MySpace in a school setting, especially for elementary children, I feel like as librarians we need to be familiar with social networking in order to know about what tools our students are using on their computers. I feel like liability could be a problem if we promote the use of these social networking sites because of privacy issues and problems with predators.