Internet Working

As I pondered social networking technologies today, specifically in the context of their value in relation to higher education, it wasn't hard to see advantages. Immediate updates, questions cleared up almost as soon as they arise, potential for class community-building-- it isn't hard to see why people flood to join these sites and integrate them into their lives, business, associations. I myself have created profiles at many of these sites upon prodding from site-promoter friends. They've always started out well. I enthusiastically constructed profiles, wrote up dubiously witty information about myself and waited for comments to flood in.

What I discovered from my experience is this: as with most things, success or failure is determined not by the tools you use, but by your determination and dedication in their use. I believe that initial enthusiasm with these tools is grounded in a realization of their usefulness-- usefulness that could be exploited to the benefit of social groups or classes at university. Personally I think that tools like Delicious and Twitter lend themselves more to the classroom setting than a social setting, but the site cannot (and shouldn't) make the student. Technology doesn't change outcomes as much it affects their speed. Good students will get the answers to their questions with or without Twitter, whatever it takes, and will spend 30 minutes of their day first walking to a class that was canceled and then sitting through the requisite 15 minutes until they figure it out.

The thinking I did today actually focused most on the problem of overlap between professional/educational content and personal/social content and whether people would be willing to take the step to allow professional contacts to access their day-to-day information. One of the impacts of sites like Facebook and Twitter is it reveals how many of us see information we put on the internet about ourselves as viewable only by ourselves and people we'd like to talk to. When we become more aware that anyone can see us, we may encounter a disconnect like the one in the following graph. What is, or should be, the solution for that?