My Tweetwheel (or “why social networking matters”)

This week at Learning with Computers, Ana Ma. Menezes is helping us all learn about “Microblogging with Twitter“. She’s a great facilitator, and despite my limited availabilities I’ve felt eager to give this issue some minutes… Somebody either in this community or at Webheads in Action had mentioned Tweetwheel, and I gave it a try. You can see the result above (click on the image to see the original page, and hover on any “friend” to see how many friends we have in common). I’m currently following 81 people, mostly EFL teachers, all of them usually twittering about EFL teaching and sharing useful resources. I guess I needn’t explain how this does away with the isolation of traditional f2f teaching in the classroom, and how it maximizes opportunities for professional development with like-minded colleagues!

A case for social networks (Facebook)

I was surprised to read today in “Next” – Clarín’s issue on new technologies- Tom Hodgkinson’s strong rejection of social networking (actually, I read the Spanish translation by Cristina Sardoy of his article in The Guardian last Jan 14 ; see the original version in English here).
Though I quickly scanned the article online, and am not quite sure the translation (clearly much shorter than the original) totally respects his ideas, but there are some points I’d definitely like to disagree with:

Hodkinson writes:

And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn’t it rather disconnect us…?

I think this argument is as old as the question of computers dehumanizing social relationships… to me, just fear of the unknown. What happens is that the Internet has allowed us to choose who we want to have “around”, making geographical location quite irrelevant.

Hodkington goes on:

since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image.

Now, there’s no reason why your writing on the Web has to be ungrammatical when your usual writing isn’t, is there? Like all the communication we have, you can choose what to show others… Now, if his friend chooses to stay at home “plugged to the computer” when he does have something to share f2f with friends who are nearby… I’d say he either needs therapy, or is time both of them looked for new friends!

He adds quite a lot about the philosophy and policies advocated by Facebook’s founders and sponsors, an arena where I’m really ignorant and so I’d better not discuss… In favour of objectivity, I must say it is there that Hodkington gave me some food for thought, and started me wondering w”ho is favoured by my practices” (paraphrasing Paolo Freire).

However, it is his conclusion that makes me dismiss it all:

For my own part, I am going to retreat from the whole thing, remain as unplugged as possible, and spend the time I save by not going on Facebook doing something useful, such as reading books. Why would I want to waste my time on Facebook when I still haven’t read Keats’ Endymion? And when there are seeds to be sown in my own back yard? I don’t want to retreat from nature, I want to reconnect with it. … And if I want to connect with the people around me, I will revert to an old piece of technology. It’s free, it’s easy and it delivers a uniquely individual experience in sharing information: it’s called talking.

Now sir, maybe the things I am interested to read are suggested to me by my friends at Facebook? After all, by linking to the “right” people, and then to the friends of those friends (carefully selecting who to add as “my friend” according to my criteria). And in my case, my interest in educating with new technologies is much better fed by browsing websites (like The Guardian’s, which made your opinion available to me!), as the only books in the field are not easy to get and more often than not beyond my budget.

As for nature, maybe it’s the other way about. Maybe the time I spend at Facebook saves me hours of browsing for the links I want to find, and the time and money it’d cost me to travel all around the world to meet the teachers at Webheads in Action and Learning with Computers, among so many who help me keep developing professionally every day!

That’s all for now… It’s not I’m mad about Facebook (as I’ve said somewhere else, I only joined it after Mary Hillis’s kind insistence), but I do believe it’s not more than other tool… It’s the way we use that will make the difference!

BTW, if you want to find me on Facebook, I’m “gladysbaya”… And if you’ve never watched this excellent video yet, do not put it off any longer! (watching it takes just under 5 minutes, I won’t take any responsibility for how long it keeps you thinking about it!):

And now you all know why I’m not a regular poster… I can’t keep my opinions short!

Thanks for your attention,
Gladys