Now that I look at Ning and other “social networking” sites, I realize that I’ve been doing this for several years, in slightly different platforms. I belong to about a thousand Yahoo!Groups and actually manage one, have used Apple forums to troubleshoot my Mac, follow a debate forum for the team, used to belong to a scuba network, and “network” online in a lot of ways. The main difference I see right off is that what I’ve done doesn’t have a personal campsite — Personal Page — as part of the information exchange. For my purposes that’s ok — I prefer not to have my personal stuff on the web so much anyway.
So yes, social networking is very useful. Classroom 2.0 was interesting in a 2.0 way — lots of good information — but I didn’t see much specific to librarians/media specialists. A couple of discussion groups with practically no members, no library or media tags. I am not inspired to jump in.
I can see that this could be useful for groups of educators and/or students to communicate & share information and get to know one another. With all other other tools we’ve learned about this spring, though, there are lots of ways to do all these things. Maybe a network pulls several (but not all) different tools together under one virtual roof? YahooGroups do a lot of those things too (documents, messages, photos, databases, etc)
Again, it’s good to know about Ning, so if I ever have occasion to use it (debate team, maybe??) it’s in the toolbox. Right now, I don’t think of anything I want to do that this would help me accomplish.
