Take a breath

Time to take a breath and reflect on the experience of Social Media thus far.  I am now totally "immersed" as the subject requires me to be, but have not plumbed the true depths of how far the various tools can take me professionally.


Module 3 took us on a magical mystery tour of tools, and adding to Facebook, Twitter and Flickr accounts, I now have Delicious, Diigo, Linkedin and Second Life accounts.


I personally found the first six applications relatively easy to negotiate and will enjoy exploring their capabilities more as I study this subject.  I can imagine that adding these tools to library services in some way would not pose too many problems with either staff or clients.  It was a simple exercise setting up the account, and the interfaces are generally uncluttered:  help tools are actually helpful.                                                                                                                                  As mentioned in some of the readings, privacy and control are the most worrying of issues but many organisations are (or have) developed policy to deal with this.  I found the Victorian Department of Justice's YouTube clip on Social Media Policy 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iQLkt5CG8I  to be very simply articulated and presented in an appropriate medium (a social media tool such as YouTube.)




One issue that I am dealing with is the time that can unfortunately be wasted messing around with some of these applications.  While it has been a great exercise to dabble, it is clear that users need to have a sense of what they would like to achieve using the application before devoting massive amounts of time in such an exercise, especially in a professional setting where time literally is money.  Social Media can be extremely distracting!

With great trepidation, I finally entered Second Life, where I am known as GeminiJem - a lovelier, slimmer version of me, who notoriously lost her hair on her first outing.  


I have yet to be convinced of the educational applications of Second Life.  It has been a monumental effort to simply get as far as having an avatar which can walk reasonably.  I am very much looking forward to my first SL SIS meet-up with my INF206 classmates and Judy.  There seem to be many roadblocks to actually accessing SL - computer capacity, the technical knowledge of the user.  Furthermore, I find SL lacks the user-friendly component which is characteristic of other social media tools.    It is clear from the SL troubleshooting page on Facebook that my INF206 classmates would tend to agree with me on this point.


I am keeping an open mind on Second Life depsite not being able to find anyone in my circle of friends, relatives or work colleagues who either use it or have a high opinion of it.  All are keen to hear of my experience - good or bad.