__I have used social networking (SN) tools like Twitter, Facebook, Plurk, Ning, etc. for many years. My involvement with these tools has been predominantly social. Today, I place more emphasis on personal learning, but find that I still like to maintain a social presence on these tools. I use SN tools for personal and professional relationships, and conduct myself in a way that is still social with professionals, to some degree. I think it’s important to maintain that human touch, as we each have our own personalities and interests to bring to the network. Plus, I believe that online connections can easily develop into personal relationships.

Over the years, I have gone through Utecht’s Personal Learning Network (PLN) stages and back again. When I first discovered SN, I would have likely gone from level 1 (Immersion) to 5 (Balance). However, since I’ve had children (with a major reduction in free time), I moved to stage 4 (Perspective). In fact, I stepped away from SN (for professional purposes) simply because with a full-time job and a child at home, there was no time for anything else. As a result, I felt disconnected, and professionally isolated. There was professional development through work, but being so busy without sufficient time to think and reflect, it was difficult to apply what I was taught.

When I had my second child, I left work to pursue my Master’s. I also reconnected and rebuilt my PLN. In the time that I had been away from SN, the technologies have grown and improved to more effectively support the development of PLNs. As a result, I have revisited stage 1 (Immersion), lost a lot of sleep during stage 3 (Know it all), and am now feeling comfortable at stage 5 (Balance). While I feel I have balance in the use of my PLN, I continue to explore new tools that could impact my PLN, and therefore, continuously revisit stage 1 (Immersion).

I'd like to become more of a contributor to my PLN. I am continuously learning from others, and while I do share, I still haven’t developed a much of a following. I am quite satisfied with my level of involvement with SN tools. However, returning to work will present new challenges, as I will again need to retreat to stage 4 (Perspective) in order fit SN time for personal learning into my life.

Reference:
Utecht, J. (2008, 3 April). Stages of PLN Adoption. http://www.thethinkingstick.com/stages-of-pln-adoption.

What advice from this article will help a PK-grade 12 international school library in China embrace a Library 2.0 ethos? All of the A to Z tips are relevant, but these five (and more) play a very important role in this transition.

D-Direction: When addressing virtual access and social networking for libraries, there are many areas to cover (e.g. improved website, new ILS, social media policy). Formal plans need to be established in order to determine a vision and direction for how this library will change. Which changes to the library will be tackled first?

A-active: It is necessary to remain active and perseverant when incorporating social networking into this library’s practice. In this particular case, remaining active means actively persuing how to use social media in the library when many of the main sites are blocked in China. The library will need to get creative and carefully examine the current users and their social networking habits in order to utilize social networks effectively with these students. Just jumping into Facebook or Twitter usage might not work in this case.

C-Content: However this library decides to move forward with its online presence, the content within the website must be valuable. This also incorporates tips such as B-Blogging, or R-Reference, as all should become a part of the library’s website content.

G-Good Reads or L-Library Thing: Treating these two websites equally, either would be very useful in terms of getting the users involved in the reading community. The problem is that both of these sites have had access issues in China.

K-Koha: The library has been looking into changing the catalog for a long time, but budget has been an issue. Large commercial systems take a huge part of the budget. Maybe the solution is something open source such as Koha? Some investigation needs to be put into this, which also emphasizes the significance of the H-help element. A great amount of support would be needed from the IT department as well as school administration.

Based on:
Brown, A., (2010, Jan. 22) A to Z of Social Networking for Libraries [blog entry]. Retrieved from http://socialnetworkinglibrarian.com/2010/01/22/a-to-z-of-social-networking-for-libraries/

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_I have been a Delicious user since about 2007, and I used to use it extensively. Initially, I didn't tag my sites at all. Later I began to appreciate the value of tagging, and began by usually using the words that were suggested to me. However, I didn't have a plan in mind with my tags. In some cases I tagged something "education" and the next time I tagged something as "teaching". I began to use so many different tags for the same category that I constantly found myself cleaning up my tags. Without regular maintenance and standardization, it became next to impossible to find my links. My use of Delicious then died, until I recently received an email saying that Delicious was sold, and I had to opt in to save my links.

Since its redesign, I have struggled to make Delicious useful. I used to share bookmarks with other users. Those links are no longer to be found, and I have to reestablish those social connections. I used to bundle my tags, but those were erased. I found the bundling feature (a hidden link, though available), and will recreate those when possible. In the rebuild of this website, while my links were transferred, my organizational system and social network were not. These are the features that Delicious was so valuable for. Now, in order to make it useful, it seems we have to start from scratch.

All that being said, I think the idea of sharing bookmarks socially, can be a powerful way to support users who need information. Curating information can happen in so many ways using today’s social media. Delicious is one option for doing this. Students would need to be users, follow my account, and know which tags to pay attention to. However, this appears to be a bit tedious. I believe there are better, more visually appealing and simpler ways to organize and share information, although the new feature of stacks provides some potential. Personally, for the moment I believe Delicous is a great tool for being able to store your favorite links on the cloud, and possibly share them with other people. As a social/sharing site, there are better web 2.0 resources to use at the moment. This one is too unfriendly and needs to work the bugs out before gaining social momentum again