I am not heavily involved in many online communities. I am a member of a few, and active in probably one, but I am more on the receptive end of things than anything. I Tried My Space back when, but it was little too much for the kids in my opinion. From there I got connected in Facebook, which really serves as my primary online community.
I keep a minimal amount of friends and it is typically restricted to people I know in real life. I do also maintain a Facebook page for professional purposes, and I have made that page much easier to find. One serves for my personal connections with friends and family and allows me to post pictures privately with them. The other is where I friend my coworkers, Bosses, and professional associates. I don't really post much there, but it satisfies the need. I am on Twitter, but my use of that is in its infancy, and I am mostly a consumer at this point. As I have said many times, I am also on edmodo.com, which is a FB like site designed for educational use. So far I am only really connected to four people, they were all on my ISD team in EDUC 633, but who knows where that will go as I research it further.
I am also a member of some professional groups online, but much like Twitter these memberships are mostly new and mostly as a consumer of information. I would like for my role in these to change at some point, but I honestly find it difficult to devote the time to be overly active in these communities with all the things I have going on in my analog life.
My family is a mixed bag when it comes to communities. My wife has no interest. I made her a FB page and it sat dormant for a year before I finally took it down. My youngest is, well, too young to really be communicating with others on the Internet, but we have allowed some monitored usage of restrictive social games where characters can interact, but only in the context of a game. Such sites do not have chat or ways for others to identify her or communicate with her, and I emphasize that she is always monitored if she is using such things. My oldest uses message boards to talk with others kids about games she is playing, but doesn't have a web presence so to speak.
Overall I am really the online person in the house, but I assume this will change once my daughters get a little older.
Very interesting. I certainly remember how slowly I waded into the online community sites. I wasn't even thinking of the various professional groups, but LinkedIn certainly functions like a community.
ReplyDeleteIt will be interesting to see what your oldest child gets into as far as online communities. A youth pastor friend of my has noted that his youth are moving away from Facebook and towards a combination of Twitter/Skype/Tumblr/Youtube and using a platform like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite to keep it organized themselves. It makes me wonder just what will pop up next.