Social networks for Lifelong Learners

Social netwokring is more than Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

There are a number of excellent networking sites designed specifically for those interested in and developing communities with an educational feel. They come in all shapes and sizes.

Education writer Karen Schweitzer has written a guest post on Mission to Learn which includes reviews of over twenty different sites.

Sharing emails: Moomeo

Well I am not entirely sure this is a good thing...

If you have an email or a series of emails and you want to share it/them then you can email it to post@moomeo.com. You then get a link which you then share (not by email - could have done that in the first place..). What this link enables you to do is to put the email onto social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

I can think of a number of ways this might be useful, especially if you don't have a blog or website you can easily update and then link back to. On the other hand, it could be a nightmare for corporate media and IT managers as emails find their way into a more viral social media system.

How to spy on social media conversations

Sometimes you just need to find out who is saying what about a topic and you prefer not to have to log on and become part of the social media systems. www.spy.appspot.com lets you type in a topic (I tested it with "NHS") and then it will search Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, Blog Comments, Yahoo news, Blogs and Google Reader to find out what is in the social media conversations on your topic.

I found it quite riveting to find out who is saying what. I expect many organisations could use this to assess their online profile.

Revolutionising the dictionary: Wordia.com

The Open University is sponsoring a new form of online dictionary based on user-generated definitions. Gone are the antique and dusty versions of what a word means. Instead, anyone can pick a word and then upload a short video explaining your version of its meaning.

www.wordia.com is where you can participate in a dynamic form of language. Just going through the word of the day is quite riveting.

What word do you dare define?

Social networking site takes on knowledge management

There are hundreds of social networking sites around but this new one looks interesting and if it works it could reshape how we share knowledge and learn from, with and among our online friends.

www.ileonardo.com is where social networking meets a social form of knowledge management. You can upload content and create notebooks where you can collaborate with other users. You can see the information that your friends are working on. In this new era of open source knowledge and rapid dissemination, this feature has some significant advantages. It could rewrite the concept and dynamics of what is traditionally known as the opinion leader.

What I like about this site is how it moves on the concept of spreading good practice. It forces us all to think about how much we want to to share and with whom.