Social Networking

I use Facebook to see what's happening in my friend’s lives, and I'll read their posts pretty much on a daily basis. Most of the time I'll use Twitter on my iPhone to post status updates and photos to Facebook because of ease of use, but for now I've decided to unlink the two services. I'm Facebook friends with my direct manager and I think there's some potential to share things with #maet that I rather not share with my employer. I'll probably establish another twitter profile to post to Facebook.
Twitter is more valuable for me for professional use as a source. I have several saved searches like #edapp, #sschat, and now #maet that I pay attention to and I find a lot of great resources that way. MaculSpace on Ning, although it hasn't been very active recently, is another great source for me. My computer lab position was posted on MaculSpace, and I started the Scratchrs group a couple of years ago.
Many students use facebook daily and some serious abuses occur, but ignoring it and banning it from the schools isn’t the answer in my opinion. Making mistakes is part of the process, and at the very least I think we should look at it as an opportunity to teach about privacy and model good digital citizenship. I've been paying attention to my daughter's Facebook posts as she maintains contact with a couple of friend who have recently moved. Inspired by this, I found a Facebook group for the elementary school I attended in Augsburg, Germany in the 1970s, and I've enjoyed reading and sharing memories with people who had the same experience as children in that era.
I'm poor at maintaining my networks in the digital realm. When it comes to social networks, professional and personal, I'll follow conversations or use them as PLNs, but I rarely share. They're more of a fun technical challenge to me. For example, A few years ago I spent the night sending out tweets to see how many services (Tumblr, Ning, Posterous, Facebook, etc) I could post a status update to with a single click. I plan to change this habit and utilize social networks to their fullest potential with the help of this class and my future CEP classes.