How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live

One of the teachers in my building brought an article from TIME Magazine to my attention recently: How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live. We plan to use the article as part of our Fahrenheit 451 unit, which is focused on technology and society. I am curious to hear how my students feel about this topic, both before and after reading this and other related materials. One of the things that I want to draw their attention to is the fact that our district is now on Twitter. While I am a bit of a technology nut, I have chosen not to join this 140-characters-or-less publication site. I wonder how many of my students "tweet," and if it is meaningful for them, or for their parents, to follow their school on Twitter. I know that this short post is a bit disjointed, but my ideas are still forming. School starts in a week, and my brain is still spinning. We'll see how this unit goes! :-)

Facebook...

As mentioned earlier, social networking and I aren't buddies. However, a friend shared this article with me recently. While I'm not sure that I like the idea personally, I am pleased to see that people are exploring positive ways to use Facebook (and similar sites) in the professional sphere. As a public site, it provides employers and potential employers with a lot of seemingly private information. Here is an opportunity to shift the "My boss fired me because of the pictures on my profile!" problems to "I got my dream job because of my ad!"

What next? :-)

23 Things: #6

I've heard a lot of buzz about del.icio.us, an emerging Web 2.0 tool/site. As a conscientious objector to social networking, I find social bookmarking to also seem... uninteresting. On the one hand, knowledge is power (Thank you, Francis Bacon for a fantastic phrase!). The more sites that del.icio.us sends me to, the more knowledgeable I am. On the other hand, I am not keen on the larger, less-known world knowing which sites are "regulars" for me. One of my students raised this issue in his first class blog: the danger of expanding technology is the loss of true human contact. The generic, all-encompassing "we" would rather send a text than make a phone call. I can bookmark a page socially, rather than make direct contact with particular people.

On the other side, email could have the same fault found within it. Why call when I can email? Why write a letter when I can call? Why visit when I can write a letter? As we shrink the time it takes us to communicate across distances, are we expanding the gap between each other?

In other words, I'm not quite ready to step outside of my comfort zone and use del.icio.us. Perhaps I will try "digging" things (23 #7)... After all, my husband reads Digg.com every day and often tells me fascinating things....