Comments to weekly readings

I enjoyed reading these articles this week. Some were long but all had some great insights. In the article called, "Social Networking" (Weaver & Morrison, 2008) I was a bit perplexed by the idea that Google has to standardize social networking by creating a common platform(OpenSocial) on which things will be based. As large and all encompasing as the internet is, is it really possible to standardize things this way? I understand the benefits, but it seems like a common platform is impossible. The second article that struck me was called, "Web, Library, and Teen Services 2.0" (Bolan, Canada & Cullin, 2007). This article talked about library services for the new age. The one thing that struck me over and over was the mention of the word "trust". It is a great goal to reach the youth in terms of library services but how feasible will in be for this to happen on the scale that was proposed? Trust is a word that seems to be being chipped away at these days and it will be hard for our current library service people to have enough of it to make the changes that they are talking about. One other thing that struck me about this article was that it is cool to have a library in your own home but as a coach it has obesity written all over it. The last article that struck my thinking was, "Examining Social Software in Teacher Education" (Ferdig, 2007). There was a great deal of information that I found interesting, but the part that really got me was at the beginning when the author talked about finding his student on "Facebook" and how he saw things he really didn't want to see. As a coach, this is a huge issue! I let my athletes know that their "Facebook" and "MySpace" pages need to represent not only themselves well, but those who they are associated with also. Many college teams throughout the country are limiting what their athletes can put on their accounts with these internet networks. I agree with this to an extent. It is important that if students are part of our team and are striving to meet the expectations we have set, then certain things should not be part of these pages anyway. This year our team theme was "Purpose In Every Step" from 1 Corinthians 9:26. If we have purpose in all of our steps, including those online, then this won't be an issue anyway. What a challenge?