Assignment 3: Evaluative Report

One of the most interesting aspects of the course was examining social media under an “academic” lens and thinking about matters such as identity or participation in online groups from a sociological or psychological viewpoint, or personal learning networks from a knowledge management perspective always reflecting back what it means for the library and information sciences (Burkhardt, 2009; Casey and Stephens, 2009) and the individual librarian (Utecht, 2008).

https://flipboard.com/profile/nadinebailey754

Looking back in my module notes, on numerous occasions I’ve scribbled “out of date” or “links no longer working” even though the resources were no more than three years old.  The core learning in such a rapidly evolving field is the ability to differentiate between concepts and ideas, and the materials or tools that they are embodied in at a moment in time <!–[if supportFields]> ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {“citationID”:”rXUfU1rg”,”properties”:{“formattedCitation”:”(Shariatmadari, 2013)”,”plainCitation”:”(Shariatmadari, 2013)”},”citationItems”:[{“id”:852,”uris”:[“http://zotero.org/users/1210720/items/GTCPV9DD”%5D,”uri&#8221;:[“http://zotero.org/users/1210720/items/GTCPV9DD”%5D,”itemData&#8221;:{“id”:852,”type”:”webpage”,”title”:”Writing on the Wall: Social Media – The First 2000 Years by Tom Standage – book review”,”container-title”:”The Guardian”,”URL”:”http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/11/writing-wall-social-media-standage-review&#8221;,”author”:[{“family”:”Shariatmadari”,”given”:”David”}],”issued”:{“date-parts”:[[“2013″,10,11]]},”accessed”:{“date-parts”:[[“2014″,1,30]],”season”:”13:22:11″}}}],”schema”:”https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json&#8221;} <![endif]–>(Standage, 2013 reviewed by Shariatmadari, 2013)<!–[if supportFields]><![endif]–>.

http://paper.li/deschatjes/1387886085

        My research project “Comparative analysis of social networking tools and technologies for International School Librarians in Asia” prompted me to evolve further as a social networker in my professional sphere.  Many librarians had responded on the benefits of Twitter and Google+, necessitating professional exploration into the ways in which these tools could be incorporated in my learning network through aggregators such as Paper.li and Flipboard.  Becoming active in both these tools and curating material for librarians and students has been very satisfying as more people access and use these resources.  

However, despite these useful tools, there is still a frustration shared by the librarians canvassed in my research.  On the one hand there are graphically interesting, dynamic, current but ephemeral resources  (Twitter, Google+, Facebook, Paperli) which are constantly refreshed without reference to what is useful in an ongoing manner. On the other hand there are the static collaborative wikis (Wikispaces) which had their hey-day in professional networks around 2006,  but are suffering from neglect and time shortage on the part of their initiators.  There are attempts at social bookmaking using folksonomies (Vander Wal, 2007) with less graphically enticing but practical tools (Delicious, Diigo).  Forums and listservs as social media didn’t receive a lot of attention in the course although these appear to be the dominant mode of interaction for many of the professionals surveyed. As a professional and as a researcher I have become more and more interested in knowledge management and how the world of the online social network can be carved out by organisations and individuals to meet their information and learning needs and this is something I would like to explore further.

The concepts of online identity are fascinating and manifold.  Reading around issues relating to identity, trust, privacy and security in social media made me re-examine both my use of social media and that of my family using various tools suggested in the modules.  Professionally the most important take-away for me has been the value of building up your online professional identity as a librarian using your own name as a “brand”.

Practically I’ve learnt much which can be directly beneficial to my work, whether in terms of Website design (Lazaris, 2009; Mathews, 2009) or marketing (Brown, 2009) or how to approach teaching students about the use (and abuse) of Social Media (Valenza, 2009; Stephens, 2011; Lorenzo, 2007) and the creation of a social media policy (Dearnley and Feather, 2001; Lauby, 2009) and strategy (Kagan, 2010).

Finally, the best part of the course was to be afforded the time to systematically explore the world of online social media in all its aspects, to play around with the tools, using and keeping or discarding them according to their relevance or usefulness while still earning academic credit!

I’ll end this reflection with the latest Facebook meme – the wonderful “Map of the Internet 1.0” created by Jay Jason Simons – a graphic glimpse of the state of the Internet world in 2014.