During dinner last night with some of my Twitter colleagues who were in town for the COSN conference, I was pondering a question I really am curious about.
A teacher and I were talking yesterday about Facebook and work he is doing with a science organization for college students and professors. The organization had a blog which was completely unutilized. So he decided to set up a Facebook page instead. After one day, the page already had 40 followers.
It led me to really do some “wondering” about how to better meet both our students and our teachers where they live. Blogs are not where either of them “live” online per se.
I love blogs, love reading them for the inspiration they provide, and love writing on my own. And I’m not suggesting that blogs don’t have tremendous value, because I believe they do.
But after quite a bit of time struggling with encouraging teachers to engage with blogging at my own campus, I’m just wondering what means of communication might work at a more innate level for our staff. Because I really think there would be value for them in connecting with the ideas that I find so inspiring in the blogosphere.
So I was wondering aloud at dinner last night–would video(videoblogging) be another avenue to connect with classroom teachers? Or would something like Facebook be a way to connect with them better than Ning, since a lot of them are already on Facebook? (After all, I can create a Facebook page for our library, which I did today, and share blog links and links for tools there.)
I guess my point is, instead of trying to encourage teachers to come where “I am” or where the blogosphere is, how can I bring it to them where they “live”?
That’s interesting, Carolyn. I’m realizing that my own _not_ living in Facebook means I’m oblivious to its potential. I guess it’s time to put that “life-long learner” cliche into practice….
It must be cool to meet people f2f from Twitter. Korea makes that so difficult!
Doesn’t it really depend on “where they are at”? I’m sure some of my teachers are on FaceBook, but more on MySpace, and a lot just do email. Ning is nice for the email only crowd because they have a fear of the other social networking sites. You can point to Classroom 2.0, and they feel safe. If most of your folks are on FaceBook, I would definitely go there, but I have a feeling most staffs are in a whole bunch of different places.
Carolyn,
Your post here is very similar to an observation I made last November after a conference I attend each year. I noticed that people seemed happy if I created a web page and then if I created a wiki, but they forgot about it and never went there. Only on Facebook was there more participation. I wrote about it in my blog http://malahinitx.blogspot.com/2008/11/organic-changes.html