My Ning Social Networks

I belong to the following Ning social networks that are related to my work (in addition to the one I use for my ENG 131 class at Red Rocks):

• NCTE Ning (National Council of Teachers of English)
• Sloan-C SL-NET (Second Life – Networking Education and Technology)
• Ning in Education
• College 2.0
• eTools and Tips for Educators
• RezEd
• Renaissance Island of Second Life
• RREADS (Red Rocks English ADjunctS)

I hadn’t realized there were so many.  I haven’t been active in any of them lately, but I hope to remedy that this summer.

Resources for Using Ning

Websites:

• About Ning
• Ning Help
• Ning Blog
• Ning on Twitter
• Crunchbase Ning Company Profile
• Everything Ning on Mashable

Books:

• Hernandez, Manny.  Ning for Dummies.   Hoboken, NJ:  For Dummies, 2009.

Articles:

• “7 Things You Should Know about Ning“
• “Is Ning The Next Facebook or MySpace?“

Videos:

• “What is Ning?“
• “Ning Social Networking Site“
• “Ning Create an Account“
• “ning tutorial1 getting started“
• “How to NING“
• “Do Your Own Ning Thing: Create Your Own Branded Social Network with Ning“
• “How to create a Free Social Network using Ning“
• “Changing themes & colors on your Ning profile“
• “Create Profile Picture on Ning“
• “Organizing page elements on Ning profile pages“
• “Add RSS Feed to Profile Page on Ning“
• “How to edit your Ning profile – V.001“
• “How to put your twitter on your ning profile page“

Social Network for English Adjuncts

I’ve been working on a Ning social network for adjuncts in the English Department at Red Rocks Community College.  I tried to find a video on YouTube that would show people how to join and set up their profiles, but all of the videos focused on actually creating the site.

A-Twitter at Last

I’ve been hearing about Twitter for quite some time, but I didn’t understand the attraction.  I finally joined earlier this week, as eclark131, and I’m afraid I still don’t understand the attraction.  We’ll see how long it takes me to get tired of it.

Video:  “Twitter in Plain English“

I’m using twitterfeed.com to automatically post tweets about my blog posts.

Video:  “Twitter Feed [11/28/08]“

I also ran across Twitter Grader, which allows you to score your profile.  I know my score is very low, so I’m not too interested in that. 

However, TwitSnip seems useful.  With a bookmarklet in your browser’s Favorites menu, you can post quotes from websites and the URLs to your Twitter account.  I’ve tried it a couple of times.  It seems to work fairly well, though I had to keep the tweets shorter than the 140 characters it showed.

The other day one of my students mentioned haiku, and it occurred to me that it would be possible to write a haiku in 140 characters or fewer.  I even came up with a clever name for the poems:  twaiku.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t the first.

I also wasn’t the first one to think of calling poetry of any kind that fits in a Twitter tweet poetweet.  I found several sites with the word poetwy, but I don’t know if they were using it in relation to poetry in Twitter.

Video: “What is LinkedIn?”

more about “Video: “What is LinkedIn?”“, posted with vodpod

 

New Addition to Recommended Reading List

I’ve added Ellyssa Kroski’s Web 2.0 for Librarians and Information Professionals to my Recommended Reading list.  Even though it’s written for librarians, it’s a good introduction to web 2.0.  She has chapters on the following:

• web 2.0
• blogs
• RSS and newsreaders
• wikis
• social bookmarking
• photo sharing
• social cataloging
• video sharing
• personalized start pages
• social networking software
• vertical search engines
• social news
• answers technology
• virtual worlds
• productivity tools
• podcasting
• mashups

I do have a couple of objections to her classifications:  (1) She included Second Life in a book on “web 2.0.”  To access Second Life, you have to download their software; it cannot be accessed on the web (i.e., by using a browser).  Therefore, in my mind, it doesn’t belong in this book.  (2) She included Ning in a chapter on “Mashups” when it clearly fits under social networks.

Video: “BAAGZ: Introduction”

more about “VIdeo: “BAAGZ : Introduction”“, posted with vodpod

 

 

Ning in Education

I’ve been really impressed with Ning social networks since I started using one for Sloan-C SL-NET. The primary advantages over Blackboard or Moodle are its public visibility, the ability of members to start forums and form groups, and the accessibility of RSS feeds. I’m using a Ning site for a hybrid technical writing class I’m teaching this fall. (It’s private for the obvious reasons.) I’ve also joined a social network for educators who are using Ning in education.