As our Work Literacy Ning site (2008) is in danger of getting bumped off the Net due to Ning’s new pricing policy, I will post some of the key articles here so we don’t lose them. Thanks again to Michele Martin for writing a significant portion of this.
Introduction to Social Networking
Online social networks facilitate connections between people based on shared interests, values, membership in particular groups (i.e., friends, professional colleagues), etc. They make it easier for people to find and communicate with individuals who are in their networks using the Web as the interface.
By some definitions, just about all Web 2.0 tools are a form of social networking, but for this module we’re going to focus on “ego-centric” social networks, those that are focused on individuals, as opposed to networks that build up around objects, such as Delicious, Flickr, Slideshare, etc. (Note you can learn more about the concept of ego-centric vs object-centric networks here ).
There are several different online social networks, but for our purposes, we’ll focus on the three that tend to be used the most by learning professionals–Facebook, LinkedIn and Ning. Each of these ...