Beyond Facebook

Facebook is synonymous is social networking, interactively communicating with others over the Internet using either computers or cell phones. It is not alone in the SNS world as we have discovered these first couple weeks. We're blogging which suggests more words, more thought, less spontaneity, and more effort to find and read. But we are communicating and we don't need to be friends.

Flickr.com and youtube.com are also a part of our lives, at least for the moment as a part of this class. We're displaying ourselves through images and videos, and commenting on each others' work. If it became a habit to use these websites for ourselves and our friends, we could communicate here also. Of course, Facebook does images and videos also.

Most recently there's GoogleEarth and although we didn't adventure into saving our information on GoogleEarth to retrieve from anywhere at any time, it can be done and we can "communicate" again with others this time focusing on maps and locations on the earth, push-pins and balloons with our personal notes.

Where will this end? Or will it?

Facebook

The line between using Facebook professionally as a teacher and personally seems rather clear in our class discussions. Issues included privacy and the proper relationship with a student, particularly a young student. Appropriate postings and pictures were also discussed and particularly when one doesn't have control over what others post about you, even if innocently. The idea of establishing a group with only individuals relevant to that discussion or coursework would be included in the group. Perhaps establishing two accounts, a personal one for socializing and a professional one for relating to students, was another solution, at least in part.

However, the use among young people was clearly recognized and its incorporation into learning seemed a natural next step despite the banning of Facebook from many, perhaps most, schools. The expanding functions of Facebook along with its popularity indicates that educators will be visiting this issue in the future. For now it's an experiment.

Why we should fail

I ran across these quotes a couple months ago. I like them.

"The two most important tools an architect has are the eraser in the drawing room and the sledgehammer on the construction site." ---Frank Lloyd Wright

"The physicist's greatest tool is his wastebasket." ---Albert Einstein

"There are days when I make five of them, but one has to reckon that of 20 drawings, only one will be successful." ---Vincent Van Gogh

"There is no such thing as failure. Only giving up too soon." ---Jonas Salk

"There's a way to do it better--find it." ---

"Fail. Fail again. Fail better." ---

"If you want to succeed, double your failure rate." ---Tom Watson, IBM

"I write 99 pages of shit for every one page of masterpiece." ---Ernest Hemingway