Students and social software

If I put off writing a blog post long enough, someone else writes it for me. Meredith Farkas put together a great long piece on social software and libraries including a nice webliography at the end. She was responding in part to Paul Pival's Thoughts on privacy and libraries and social networks who is having a fascinating cross-blog conversation with Brian Matthews of Alt Ref (see his Perhaps my last comments ever on Facebook and In defense of social networks).

Even with all of that, I still have something to add.

I have ceased to worry about invading the spaces of students on social software sites. If students are laboring under the illusion that their creative efforts on the web are in some way private or anonymous, then I am happy to dispel that illusion. Better that a student is startled by the presence of a friendly librarian than by a knock on his or her dorm door by Campus Police who caught some infraction on a web site. Or, perhaps worse, for that student to remain blithely unaware and have no idea why job opportunities dry up almost as fast as they materialize, when future employers get a load of that student’s Facebook profile.

I also think I’m going to just get over my concern that I don’t know how Brian’s idea of monitoring blogs will scale. It will scale just like reading professional blogs in Bloglines. It will grow organically until I reach the point that it takes as much time as I’m willing to spend and then it will stop growing, or grow very slowly. And that’s good enough. No other outreach activity reaches all the students of a particular type—just because I can’t monitor all student blogs doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t try monitoring some of them. So I’m going to set that up over the summer, starting with the blogs that I’ve already discovered for members of the Class of 2010.     #

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