Thursday, April 14, 2011

Social Networking Guide


Social Networking 
From Wikipedia: A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as message boards, e-mail, instant messaging, and live audio/video interaction.


One of the advantages of social networking for educators is that it allows us to connect with other educators and learners with common interests that we might never have the opportunity to meet in 'face to face' life.

Social Network Platforms are websites (usually commercial websites) that allow users to form their own groups on that platform.
Popular examples of these are Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, hi5.com, & Linked in. You can see a more extensive list of social network platforms here.
Often sub-groups for within these platforms based on mutual interest. They can exist on multiple platform and/or have their own independent site as well.
Examples:
Groups that host live events:

Combined Calendar(click agendafor easier viewing)
Here's a video that attempts to explain Social Networking
Common Craft: Social Networking in Plain English
Microblogging refers to using services like Twitter
Here are Barbara Sakamoto's thoughts on


The key to making twitter interesting is finding interesting people to follow.   You can find some people at:
To 'follow' someone, go to their twitter page anc click follow.  If you like, you can add them to an exisitng list or create a new one.

Other Guides
Examples of other social network platforms
  • WizIQ - a live, interactive classrom interface.  People come and teach a variety of lessons, many of which people can participate in for free.
    Upcoming Classes ,  Recorded Sessions Examples: Basic English Phonics Lesson 2 The short 'a' Sound , IELTS Preparation - Vocabulary for IELTS , Basic English Third Class
     (first few minutes or recordings are usually not interesting, you can scroll along the bottom to move to a more interesting parts of the lesson)
  • Shelfari - Shelfari is a popular social networking service for book lovers.
  • Linkedin - LinkedIn is a professional social networking website for business users, one of the most popular such sites out there. Some aspects of it are free, but many are paid.
  • Geni.com - An exciting social networking site enabling members to create their family tree. Although it’s a relatively new site, it has grown tremendously fast, and has hundreds of thousands of users.
  • 43 Things - A tagging based social networking site. Users create accounts and list a number of goals or hopes and these are parsed based on similarity to goals of other users.
  • Facebook.com - Facebook is a social networking phenomenon connection people with their friends, family and other users with similar interests.
  • Half.com - A leading student market place for buying and selling textbooks at discounted prices.
  • MySpace.com - MySpace is an interactive social networking website consisting of personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos. It’s currently the biggest social networking site out there.
  • RateMyProfessor.com - RateMyProfessor connects students aspiring to study similar courses by assisting each other.
  • WAYN - A social networking website uniting world wide travelers.
Other EFL related site based social networks
  • Live Mocha
  • ESLCafe.com Forums
  • SharedTalk: A language exchange covering 113 languages from the makers of the popular RosettaStone language learning software.
  • xLingo: A language exchange that lets users create and share flashcards with each other.
  • iTalki: A language exchange with a Yahoo! Answers-style QnA site, and a wiki-based public knowledge base for 10 different languages.
  • Huitalk: Forums, articles, vocabulary lists, and a language exchange using Skype.
  • Interpals: A large language exchange from a popular penpal social network.
  • Mixxer: A free language exchange using Skype built by Dickinson College.
  • TT4You: A free global language exchange site.
  • Conversation Exchange: Text and voice chat, email, or face-to-face meetings can bet set up via Language Buddy to improve your conversational skills.
  • Lingozone: Build vocab skills by playing game of Word Ladder and Hangman, while making friends with whom to practice speaking.
  • Language Exchange Network: Think Craigslist for language learning; this site has super-simple language exchange classified listings.
  • MyLanguageExchange: One of the oldest online language exchanges (this site was a Yahoo! Internet Life pick in 2001), it claims over 1 million members speaking 115 different languages. 

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