Tweckling and other worries...

Tweckle.  What a great verb that I just learned about while watching the lecture, “The Networked Librarian” by Lee Rainie.  As I am learning more about what Twitter is, I am starting to see it as the clever wordsmith’s tool. Having to be so succinct with the post forces the writer to carefully craft the message he/she wants to get out there.  By tweckling a speaker, one has to be clever with the message for sure!  Anyway, I walk away from this talk thinking about a couple of things that Rainie said.  The first thing that really caught my attention was when he said that people who are researching will ping their network for input or advice instead of conducting a literature review in order to get relevant information on a specific subject or topic.  I was kind of surprised by this mainly because I would think this is a scary way to gather information.  What if the information the people in your network is giving you isn’t correct?  How do you know the range of information on a given topic if you don’t conduct a formal literature review?  It seems to me that conducting a more formal literature review is a whole lot safer even though it is much more time consuming than pinging a network.  The other thing that is on my mind as a result of this talk is how social media fits into a high school library.  The high school where I teach has all social media sites blocked.  The general opinion of social media’s role in our high school is that it is a distraction not a tool to be used in the school building.  I can see this being a long and hard battle to fight in order to get social media up and running in the school’s library.  However, social media certainly isn’t just beneficial to the library, it could be great in any classroom, so perhaps it isn’t a battle to be taken on just by the library…

Getting Started...

Welcome to my blog for LSC 597 Library 2.0 and Social Networking!  This is an exciting venture for me since the world of blogs, blogging and social media is new to me.  Many of the postings on this blog will focus on my journey through the world of social media.