Thing 4: Twitter, Facebook and Personal Learning Networks

Thing 4: Twitter, Facebook and Personal Learning Networks 

I try not to spend a ton of time on Facebook so it’s not the best way for me to build a personal learning network. I do pop into some Library & Reading related Facebook groups that I’ve joined but I find the content to be mostly reminders or summaries of conference & events. I rarely see a ton of interaction or thoughtful discourse….it’s mostly perfunctory. Believe it or not, one of the best ways that I’ve seen public schools use Facebook is through their PTA chapter. Almost every parent has a personal Facebook account and it’s incredibly easy to have them like the PTA’s page and announcements & fundraising messages reach their audience. I saw a fairly big increase in parent engagement when my old elementary school decided to use Facebook as a means to reach a wider audience. 

I’m a huge Twitter as a personal learning network fan. I’ve had an account for awhile now and have spend oodles of time building and culling from my network. Right now, I’d say that I have ⅓ of the people that I am following are friends for fun, ⅓ of those that I am following are for my hobbies, and ⅓ of those that I am following are educators & school librarians.

I’ve spent a great deal of time managing my network, it’s an active process to figure out who is tweeting out stimulating & engaging content rather than just crap! I’ve found a lot of value in following live tweeting events. I’ve been involved in #tlchat & multiple educational conferences that provided hashtags as a way to aggregate content and acquire knowledge from sessions that I was not able to attend. Following hashtags is kind of a way to hitchhike your way through a conference. 

I was really intriguing with the website paper.li . This service lets you build a newspaper-esque layout of twitter content based on your interests. I found it cool that I didn't have to scroll through a ton of junk in my feed in order to get to the articles about particular topics. I was kind of annoyed that I had to make seperate papers for each topic. As a personal preference, I wouldn't mind mashing up a couple of topics and having them appear in ONE feed - sort of like the app Flipboard. Nevertheless, I liked paper.li’s usability and will use it moving forward with a couple of school library & education based topics that interest me. 

One thing that’s slowed my roll on twitter when using my Macbook Pro, is that the app store recently took away the native Twitter client. It’s still available for mobile - I use it daily and love it. However, I’ve had to resort to using either Tweetdeck or just logging into Twitter with a web browser. I don’t dislike either choice - they are both a serviceable plan B, but for speed and efficiency, I liked it when Twitter looked the same on my phone as it did on my laptop. Perhaps this complaint is just me getting old :)