Social Networking brings to mind the giants of MySpace and Facebook and the ability to see the friends of friends and branch out your circle of influence. Unfortunately while these sites do allow you to keep connected to a circle of friends even if they are not local and it allows these circles to intertwine it does not really have a good system set up for Communities of Practice. Sure the doctors of a particular small field of expertise might be able to find each other in these systems but does it allow them to share the information and resources that are unique to their practices?
So beyond just meeting other people and saying hello we would love to have community centers were the people inside are all interested in similar goals and have a shared language for those goals. After all does not a community over time build its own language to deal with the problems and solutions that community has? If I told you that cast B needed to meet at the MPR for a run-though would you know what I meant? My Drama students would. Therefore just posting that to my FaceBook would help those in that community but might confuse my mother who also reads it. Enter NING.
Ning is a social networking site that allows its members to create their own sub-networks. Each network has the features of the big players but can be specialized for the task that this sub-community will be facing. I have created one for my Drama students that we will use to keep all of the needed information and conversations as we work on this year’s musical and plays. Ning allows you to create your own unique social network for your specific Community of Practice without it being diluted by all the other communities.
http://www.stevehargadon.com/2008/11/thoughts-on-social-networking-in.html
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=social+networking+education&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
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