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Which social media? and why?

I just came across an interesting link about using Twitter for teaching:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jessica-gross/embracing-the-twitter-cla_b_204463.html

Somehow I wanted to keep a record and also share this link with others. What social media do I choose and why?
  • Delicious is an obvious one for bookmarking, but this isn't a site that I particularly wish to share with others. Nothing really personal there, but still I like the idea of keeping one of my sites free of interactions.
Which leads me to another point: I already feel I have too many communication tools, with messages ariving to me via email (3 v. busy accounts), LinkedIn, and Facebook (which I don't use much). At the moment there's my Ning site too, for an online focus group.
  • I tweetted the link, because I am interested in finding what happens with Twitter. I just started yesterday, and it's really through using it that I'll get a sense of using it for teaching and for professional reasons. It's nice that David Travis from UserFocus is following me, right from the start!
  • But now, I am here in my blog, and I am getting a sense of why this link should also be there (so I have moved on from 'which media?' to 'several media simultaneously' with different purposes in mind. Here is my 'review' space where I can develop ideas a little.
My problem is a sense of a lack of audience. Fellow students on the Oxford Brookes course on social media in teaching may look at this, so the text above was written with them in mind. Mostly though, I feel self-conscious, as I don't have a drive to display my thoughts to the world. All my social media tools are with restricted access, which suggests I might be missing an important point - or perhaps more simply that I am just starting ;-)

All of this goes beyond identity. I know who I am in the relatively static pages of LinkedIn (a professional person), and in the discussion exchanges on Blackboard, Moodle and Ning (an e-tutor). What a blog does is make you think of your persona in relation to an audience that may one day be there - but possibly not.

It's a journey and I am just starting...
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