Abstracts
Sustaining Social Networks in Education
Tuesday 5 May 2009, 1530 - 1600
Presenter: Pru Mitchell
Education.Au, SA
Presenter Biography
Pru is an education specialist librarian with diverse experience across Australian school, TAFE and university libraries. Her current work with education.au, Australia’s ICT in education agency has enabled her to bring her expertise in information management and education to innovation projects looking at social networking, online collections and information retrieval.
Abstract
“If web 1.0 was organized around pages, and web 2.0 is organized around people” (Johnson, 2006), then how do we as information professionals reflect this change in our practice?
This presentation draws on the author’s experience of innovation projects at Education.au in the past two years looking at how social networking might enhance professional learning. The resulting service aims to put the individual rather than the institution at the centre of learning, and to provide individuals with support as they step into Web 2.0. While professional learning and collaborative knowledge construction are the desired goals of professional social networking, this paper outlines challenges faced through the Innovate – Collaborate – Sustain phases of such projects. It provides an evaluation of the project using the 5 stage process of computer mediated communication as a model (Salmon, 2000).
