Learner Bytes

My blogging experience is limited and, having only recently started to interact with the blogosphere and become involved in the Comment Challenge, I’ve found lots of value in the community of people I’ve started to interact with. It’s still early days, but one thing I’m interested in is the size of the community that I’m exploring (mostly educators interested in web 2.0 and social software/e-learning) and the one that I might make for myself as time goes by. I’ve recently started Twittering and I’m currently following 89 people and guess I will probably look for/ stumble upon/ find a few more. I’ve noticed some people are following over 1500! How do they keep up with this? Just what is the optimum number of people to follow? Will I be able to keep up with all the tweets? Will I want to? What value do I get from it?

I think my interest is more professional than anything else, in how these technologies can support learning. I have tinkered with the personal side of all this and it is a bit of fun – but I’m not getting the same ‘reward’ (as from the professional aspect) as what I’m finding are mostly inane activities that do nothing for me – I’d even dare to call a lot of it spam… You might like to read Jon Husbands piece, Social Networking Stunts Your Growth which features a great video that provides a nice reflection on the ‘Social Networking Wars’.

Facebook, MySpace etc. have their uses, but I can only see value for myself in some of their functionality (let alone the myriad plugin applications available) – maybe I need to explore further and even ask for advice before I make judgement. But people (like Danah Boyd) who are better qualified than me have written about this… I am aware that some colleagues are using Facebook and setting up groups to supplement their teaching (even though all our units are in BlackBoard Vista) and I’ll need to investigate further to see how they, and their students, are generating value and building relationships.

I suppose I’m sitting around the leading edge of the bell curve with regard to using social software/networking. Not at the pointy end, but closer to the mainstream (what/where/ever that might be) which is probably at the geeky end of things for someone of my vintage. So, I’ve started to think about the time and energy I’m investing in this social networking and social software. I liked the question Sue Waters asked recently in a Tweet, “How does Twitter support your learning”? I didn’t respond as I’ve only recently begun to tweetThinking about that, I can probably mention a few things, that’s for a later post.

But, I want to get to my question(s): How big will my social networking community get? How many relationships can I sustain? I’ve heard that we can deal with up to 150 acquaintances before our capacity to have a meaningful relationship starts to run a bit thin. I wonder how many ‘close’ friends will I be able to have? 15? Maybe it will be about finding the right mix of people with whom I can engage, people who might challenge and nourish me. I suppose it’s all part of the Comment Challenge and the development of networks and finding those who will support my growth as an educator/learner both professionally and personally, in both the online and face to face contexts. I suppose that over time things will become clearer and the number of meaningful ‘connections’ will settle at some happy medium where I can be part of a network of like minded souls like me.

What do you think? How many is too many friends in Facebook, or people to follow in Twitter? How many blogs/rss feeds can/should you subscribe to? Anyone have a comment to share?