Me too!

Nancy White has a great post about how she uses social media. Here’s a summary with some of my favourite choconancy comments in italics.

• online community

“Eminds” was where I learned that online relationships can be real, how they get real, and  how they break and fail.

• online learning together

But regardless of the technology, how we use it always matters.

• communities of practice and learning

…social media has changed what it means to “be together.” It has changed our experience and understanding of being part of a group, a community or a network. It has created a massive multiplier of the options we now have to be with other people.

• global networks and knowledge sharing

When the door to connection is open, watch who walks through and follow them, not those who stand at the doorway and naysay!

Social media offers us incredible intellectual capital opportunities to link up the best and often most diverse minds to address a problem or opportunity.

• weaving across silos

Social media keep networks, their content and activities knitted together.

• (drawing) pictures
• blogging and doing business

The second great value blogging gave me was a place to “think out loud” with my network, to offer half-baked ideas and solicit help to finish baking them. It is the easy-bake oven of learning. Write, hit post, and you are in the learning lab.

• writing a book
• liberating my inner geek

Particularly as a woman of 51 years of age, this enormous software playground has given me a way to bend stereotypes of middle aged white women and technology. I look proudly at my mom who at 79 is rediscovering high school friends on Facebook and enhancing volunteerism through web tools.

Nancy concludes with the patterns she’s noticed:

• learning
• getting work done
• finding and connecting with people
• getting stuff
• exploring and pushing my boundaries

She says: “My practices have been radically changed and shaped – yes, even transformed – by social software.”

And I’m going to conclude by breaking one of the rules of social media. I’m not as far into my social media journey as Nancy, (and someone is sure to remind me that I still haven’t written that book) but nonetheless, ME TOO!