So I’m becoming infected. Infected with the MacBook transportability, reading/writing more online. Infected with the Web 2.0 tools. Infected with understanding the personal perks for people like me. Infected with making my social world more enjoyable because I have the power to select a social realm of my own design.
The portability of a laptop lets me multitask. Do my homework and watch David Letterman, see/hear musical groups good enough to get invited to New York city. All college students have an opinion about popular musical groups and if I become familiar with these groups, it provides me with conversation starters. I work with 7 college students and I like to have a personal relationship with them besides the business relationship I have being their boss.
My student workers starting posting to my cleaned-up work blog this week at the end of their shifts. Yeah! Celebrate! My work blog was born in October, last year, but I found it cumbersome and less intuitive than wordpress to setup and manage. Receiving some guidance in this class about setting up a wordpress account was a big bonus. I could transfer setup and management skills to the “other” publishing system. Students come to work for an hour or two a day. I might see 5 workers throughout any workday. Trying to delegate work, remember a work assignment’s stopping point, or transfer lines of communication when we do not all work together all the time was a big time eater. The blog lets us tell one another where the workflow is, what bumps have been encountered, and a hint, some shop talk, of what it is that ‘another person’ does. It is working. Celebrate!
I am paying attention to the social networks I have dived into. I’m really paying attention and not just paying “continuous partial attention” (Roush 2005). I noticed on a wordpress’s page the “Write your tag” feature with a list of tags in alphabetical order until: travel, video, health. Who can tell me why this is so? These tags are sometimes like those in subject catagories at the Library of Congress and sometimes in a category us ’social creatures’ use all the time, like “random”. Gotta love it! Yup, I’m catching the fever, becoming infected with Web 2.0. I thought I should know about these tools for professional sake but wouldn’t find them of much value at my personal level. I was wrong.
This was probably one of of the best times to be wrong. Aren’t you glad you took this class?
PS I think it is so great that you have integrated blogging into your day job with the students. I tried suggesting this where I work and it was shot down faster than a one winged pheasant in Northern Wisconsin.