EDUC 628-Spring-08

While I am trying to think of an intelligent response to social networking technologies, I have printed off  Danah Boyd’s  lets define our terms : what is social networking technology as well as her and Nicole Edison’s Social Network Sites: Definition, History and Scholarship and finally the Economist Debate on Social “Networking.” 

As I acquire my feel for these types of assignments I will always click on every link to everything, and this is frustrating me because I waste (or seems like I am wasting my time) as I try to just answer a question.

In terms of social networking I will give you some insight on the conversation that went on as my family and I drove home last night. My husband asked me what I was thinking about, and I said, well, I am thinking about my blog.  His response:

·        You are just as bad as our daughter (she’s 14) and is on MySpace everyday.

·        My daughter said Mom, you need to be careful with Yahoo IM’s….it’s not like MSN IM.

And my thoughts drifted back to that mornings conversation that myself, and two other colleagues had about MySpace, cell phones, and social networking in general and teenage girls.  One of my colleagues said that they do not allow her kids to access the Internet because it seems like they never study.  They never bring home a book.  I agreed because my 14 year old had recently gotten in trouble for her grades because I never see her with a book (her consequence was that she had her cell phone and the computer taken away for a period of time).  I thought about my daughter and her friends and how they use social networking sites continuously everyday…how they take pictures on their phones and digital cameras and race home to put them on their sites/spaces.  These kids could be photographers I think sometimes. 

Now, there are times that I have to set limits for the amount of time I allow my daughter to spend on the computer if she never comes out of her room, as I should, and there are also times I need to set the some limits for myself.   I know she is socializing with her friends and I do know that she knows everyone she socializes with, and I don’t have a problem with this.  I think that she could be out and getting into some kind of trouble and she is not.  She is at home.

As far as education and culture and technology, I think that the culture of the teenagers who use SNS will not stop, and that is educators can set limits of how they want to use SNS incorporated into their instruction, then this could help tie education to social networks—networking sites.

I went out to google social network and social networking and Wikipedia returned the following:

 Social network   From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, search

Not to be confused with social network services such as MySpace, etc. or virtual communityA social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, idea, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, conflict, trade, web links, sexual relations, disease transmission (epidemiology), or airline routes. The resulting structures are often very complex.Social network analysis views social relationships in terms of nodes and ties. Nodes are the individual actors within the networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors. There can be many kinds of ties between the nodes. Research in a number of academic fields has shown that social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals.In its simplest form, a social network is a map of all of the relevant ties between the nodes being studied. The network can also be used to determine the social capital of individual actors. These concepts are often displayed in a social network diagram, where nodes are the points and ties are the lines. 

Social network service From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search 

A social network service focuses on the building and verifying of online social networks for communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others, and which necessitates the use of software.Most services are primarily web based and provide a collection of various ways for users to interact, such as chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging, discussion groups, and so on.The main types of social networking services are those which contain directories of some categories (such as former classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages), and recommender systems linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with MySpace,[1] Bebo[2] and Facebook[1] being the most widely used in the anglosphere, Hi5 in parts of Europe,[3]Google’s Orkut in Brazil,[4] and Friendster being the most widely used in Asia.[5][6][7]There have been some attempts to standardize them (see the FOAF standard) but this has led to some privacy concerns. 

And a list of social networking sites from Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites