NECCst Time, or Social Networking is Cool!

When I go to Washington, DC, for NECC 2009, I will be so much better prepared. Yesterday, 10 days after returning from San Antonio, I finally joined the NECC 2008 Ning. Wow! It would have been nice to have done that while at the conference. And it was on my list of things to do. In nearly every workshop, I wrote "Join ning" at the top of a page in my notebook.

I knew I wanted to join the ning, but I had no idea what it was. Now I am in it, and I am learning what it is. I've been thinking that I wanted to blog with my students, but the ning seems more organized than that. The ning is a social network, right? It is very colorful and easy to use.

(I acknowledge I am ignorant about this.) The ning seems like what we have been trying to do at my school with the school intranet using SharePoint 2003 (?). But the school intranet is hard to navigate, and there are no pictures on the pages. When I try to use it, it feels like having to write code, or it feels like the first networking class Haig and I took at Haywood Tech in 1997-- all trees and forests and a constant struggle just to figure out where you are and where to put your "object".

I don't do My Space or a Facebook. I recently read a post by another teacher who thought that teachers may not use those sites much because they don't feel "right." That's why I don't have a Facebook page. Despite the fact that I am trying to be a person of integrity, trying to make sure the teacher, the mother, the wife, the friends, and the neighbor are all the same person, I don't want to give any impression that I am open to being online in anything other than a very professional way

I like the idea of a "closed" social network. (I'm sure I'll soon learn the correct terminology.) I think the teachers at SILSA would use the intranet more if it felt more like the ning and less like the SharePoint site that's so difficult to use. I can see great benefit in having something like this for teachers only at school.

I can also see that it would be very nice to have such a place for classes. I know lots of teachers and other edtech folk blog, and this is how they engage in discourse online. But the problem with that is that the discussion is sometimes very disjointed. Conversely, easy-to-navigate forums would allow all the conversation about a single topic to happen in one place. Wouldn't that be easier? What if I could post a question in an online forum to all 70 of my English II/III students next year and then they could read all of the responses?

In what ways is this better than conversations and groupings in real life? I think it's an obvious question I need to be able to answer. There's much to think about.