20 tips to arrange and manage your social networks

"The more I started using social networking sites, the more I began feeling disoriented. After a while, I lost count of how many ‘Web 2.0’ services I had signed up with." This rang a bell with me so take a look at this post by Mahendra Palsule 20 tips to arrange and manage your social networks.
He recommends mind-mapping what you do , define your audience, use a password manager and lots of other possible time-savers.

Facebook concerns

It is interesting that concerns over data privacy etc. aspects of Facebook and other social networking sites seem to be global. Lyn Parker and I have given a couple of sessions on "What does your Facebook say about you?" at Sheffield University (see http://cilass.group.shef.ac.uk/?p=267) and there was quite a lot of interest around this topic from all parties. I'm in Australia at the moment and in yesterday's newspaper there was an article reprinted from the Washington Post:
Hart, K. (2008) "Face like an open book." Sydney Morning Herald. The guide section. 23 June, 10.
It mentions studies by people in the US, including a study by Adrienne Felt at the University of Virginia who looked at 150 popular Facebook "applications" and found that the majority "have uneccessary access to private data". More info on her study is at http://www.cs.virginia.edu/felt/privacy/

User created content

Gerry McKiernan just alerted us to a book that has a free pdf version:
Vickery, G. and Wunsch-Vincent, S. (2007) Participative Web and User-Created Content: Web 2.0, Wikis and Social Networking. Paris: OECD. ISBN: 978926403746. The free version is at http://213.253.134.43/oecd/pdfs/browseit/9307031E.PDF
This was originally prepared for the OECD in December 2006.

Facebook

Our BSc Information Management first year students presented their project posters yesterday, the results of small-scale studies. A couple of the groups were looking at Facebook. One group asked other information management students about their use of Facebook. Interestingly, 40% were not concerned about who could access their profile, and a similar number were not concerned about employers accessing their profiles (looking at comments from respondents it seems like a few people were thinking about the issues more after doing the questionnaire!). However it seemed some were restricting access to profiles or putting in minimal information.

Another group was investigating whether sports groups at Sheffield University used Facebook. Basically the small one (tennis) didn't, and of the larger groups (rugby and football) one didn't think Facebook was useful and had created its own website and the other did use a Facebook group: it would be interesting to investigate "why" a bit more closely. I have put up the posters on the sky platform on our Second Life island (Infolit iSchool) so you can look at them inworld if you have an avatar - that's what's in the picture. There are also posters about e.g. students' use of library resources.

Google generation, Web 2.0, social networking and University students

There is a good current article by Philip Kent "Enticing the Google generation : Web 2.0, social networking and University students"based on a presentation at the recent IATUL (International Association of Technological University Libraries) Conference in Auckland, NZ. He draws on recent Pew surveys and the CIBER report to attempt a balanced view on how University libraries might respond. In his own library (Victoria University, Australia) this includes the Encore interface for the Innovative LMS. He is strong on the problems of privacy control and the role of universities. More worrying for IL, he repeats the CIBER concern (and repeated elsewhere) that it may be too late to affect student behaviour in HE and that it is a job for the school sector. In the UK this is surely
impactical and it would be better to emphasise that the need for HE librarians to find fresh active ways to reach their students, through active learning and use of Web 2.0 tools where helpful.

Networked Learning Conference

I would like to draw your attention to this recent Conference, held in Greece this year, at which a number of interesting papers were given relating to Web 2.0 and student learning.
Jane Secker (who wrote one of our chapters) blogs enthusiastically about it here. Issues include Web 2.0 and copyright, Facebook and privacy, and ICT skills needed for Second Life. Jane and Gwynneth have put their presentation "Vitual Libraries as virtual learning spaces" on Slideshare here.