Jeff C. Weblog

Online social networking is an interesting topic. There is a lot of potential to meet new people, and there is great potential to share yourself with others. However, as a new faculty member, I am not sure how useful it would be for me to create and maintain my own facebook site. My time is probably better spent doing research and writing Extension publications. However, if there could be a smaller version of facebook, such as "CFANS facebook", then maybe this online networking thing would work out better on the college or university level.

I guess I am just a little concerned about time management. There are so many possibilities now with the internet, but when one gets involved with new things such as facebook, one needs to realize that it is another thing to eat up time. For people (especially new faculty) that are already pushing the amount of hours spend working in an attempt to make tenure some day (and subsequently having less time to spend with family and friends), I don't know if the whole "online social networking for work" thing is worth the time. For high school and college students who have more free time, I think online social networking has more potential. But, maybe it doesn't take much time and effort to develop and maintain an effective online networking site. I don't know because I don't have one.

One interesting observation is that many of the faculty web pages (at U. of MN and other universities) are out of date. Because of the lack of "upkeep" of many of these sites, I question the usefulness and participation of faculty in online social networking. However, as new faculty from the computer generation continue to take positions at the U of MN, maybe online social networking could really take off among faculty members.

I have been here since April and I have met some people. However, I wish there was a better way to meet more people, especially people that I could collaborate with. While I have already met a number of potential collaborators, I am sort of disappointed because I haven't been able to build many collaborative working relationships yet. Maybe this will happen over time, but I'm not sure. I wonder if online social networking could help this?

In terms of Extension, I suppose online social networking has potential to link different interest groups together. For extension educators, it would definitely be a great way to share new information and pictures with large groups of people, but blogs and regular websites might be better for this.

Also, I thought the assigned article was interesting, especially since it showed that so many kids are doing this kind of stuff. I knew the percentage was high, but not this high. That is definitely a great thing for them.