Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Thing #22: Nings

Oh could I ever get into "Ninging"! I had such fun looking at possibilities for it. I saw several school nings--most notable for me were some of the following. One of these offered students, staff and parents a place to practice English! Another gave teachers and librarians a place to learn and use Spanish! I discovered tons of librarian nings and pages of them centered on my passion of scrapbooking, including this one that uses scrapbooking in education! I've no doubt one could find a ning on any subject possible.
What I like about it is the chance for the members to "design" and "run" the site themselves. This is the one major aspect of this Library 2.0 journey that really appeals to me. I can see our school establishing a ning for our community. I can see us using Nings for students to communicate, create and collaborate on units of study.
This may also be the best way for my far-flung family to keep up with each other.
The problem I see not only with nings, but also with all the feeds and subscriptions, etc... is management. My friend remarked to me yesterday, "Do you realize how many user names and passwords I now have?" After I laughingly agreed, I expressed my concern at keeping up with all of this. One post I saw today spoke of "weed whacking" RSS feeds and subscriptions. And so many of the nings, blogs and wikis I have previewed during this experience had had no posts in months (in some cases, years!) And there were so many that were little more than personal pages ala MySpace--only one to three members since inception. But perhaps I am getting into Thing #23!

1 comment:

Grendel said...

A place to practice English? Excellent! A place to practice Spanish? Wow--something I really need! Thanks for sharing this information!