Almost always, I pick up my e-mail first thing. Today there were several Facebook messages there, so I logged on there first. One response to an update was from a long-lost school friend who found me through Facebook. We hadn’t seen each other for nearly 40 years. Our exchange was brief, about the fact that we were both on Facebook and not cooking dinner. Another was from an interesting ‘random’ – a person I have never met, who sent me a friend request some time ago. I hesitated initially, but over a few days found enough evidence that he is who he says he is – an academic in Iran – so I accepted. We have communicated by message and chat several times. I have not been logged on to Facebook much recently, and he was checking to see if I am OK. I remember reading somewhere that if people ask after you when you are not there, that is a sign of genuine community.
Anther message related to the new group which is documenting problems with Brisbane public transport, with the aim of improving it. I intend to write on the wall there later today or over the weekend.
Today I have spent almost no time social networking, and today will be one of those days where I miss a lot. I was out in the real world, or doing chores. I am the only person I know who uses Twitter but hasn’t set it up so it works from a mobile phone. Must do it – but a mobile phone would have made no difference today.
The main thing that caught my eye during a quick skim of Twitter this afternoon was new media lecturer Jason Wilson’s experiment using Twitter in combination with the extension Twitwall as a teaching and learning resource (I asked him about this last night on Twitter, and he blogged it today). His reasoning is simple: “it allows us to talk to each other during and between classes”. Talking in class is seen as a good thing now! (Makes me think of Steven Johnson’s book “Everything Bad is Good For You” – must get that.) There is more to it than that, though – Twitter facilitates sharing of information while retaining intellectual property rights, and Twitwall supports posting longer pieces, which makes it suitable for class discussion. In the student guide Jason says “as you become more integrated into the world of Twitter, you’ll be able to directly access information from debates between significant thinkers in our field of study as they happen. They offer a great way of bringing all of us into contact with a networked information environment.”
That reminds me to search the profile of someone I know in real life, to locate what he said recently about searching conversation threads. Apparently a conversation between two people can be displayed in a search, except for the first tweet that prompted it. That one needs to improve.
Other than that, all I did was comment on someone’s design on their profile page, and re-tweet a joke.
Tags: conversation, discourse, random
