In Defense of Pinterest | Wired Design. Illustration: Matt Owens Therapists often run into a curious problem during treatment: Clients aren’t very good at describing their emotions. How exactly do you express the nature of your depression? So this spring, relationship counselor Crystal Rice hit upon a clever idea. She had her clients use Pinterest, the popular picture-pinning social network, to create arrays of images that map out their feelings. It’s a brilliant epiphany: While emotions can be devilishly difficult to convey in words, they’re often very accessible via pictures. And Rice’s idea, as it turns out, is a clue to a question that’s been debated a lot: Why the heck is Pinterest so popular? Critics love to hate the site, which lets you assemble collections of themed images. Beyond that, there’s also a gloomy suspicion that Pinterest, like Twitter before it, is an assault on literacy itself. This is almost certainly untrue (not least because women handily eclipse men in book-reading).
Email: clive@clivethompson.net. Social media find place in classroom - USATODAY.com. M.guardian.co.uk. Users of social networks have been found to have an average of 121 friends online, as opposed to 55 in real life. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP After clocking up more than a few acquaintances online, it might come as a particular blow for keen social networkers like Barack Obama, or even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg himself.
But it seems – whisper it – that there really is something in that lingering suspicion that most users of social networking sites have more friends in cyberspace than reality. The average person has in fact double the amount of online friends than physical ones, according to research commissioned by the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, which found users of such sites have 121 online friends compared with 55 physical friends. The study also claims that people tend to be more open, confident and honest with their virtual friends than their "real" counterparts. The findings highlight how social introductions are also changing. How to convince your boss that social media is right for your business.
Talk to a non devotee about social media and they will still tell you that it’s either a tool for geeks or for students that have nothing better to do than share what they had for breakfast. Although many of us eat, sleep and breathe social media marketing, I still talk to many businesses who don’t believe and aren’t active in social media marketing. But as usage of tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus and Twitter continue to escalate, even laggard-like companies are belatedly starting to think about getting a slice of the action. In this post I’ll show approaches you can try to convince your colleagues, clients or even friends that social media investment pays. Here’s a taster, when I’m faced with a room full of social media sceptics one of the first things I do is show this video: [Editor's note: thanks to @CIMSolent who shared the latest version -see below - really shows the human side of social media nicely - I've included the original since the style is different] About Me.
Social-media-facts.png 580×9,613 pixels. “In a time of drastic change it is the learners that inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists” 5 Reasons Not to Ban Social Networking in Schools. With an understandable concern about preventing cyber-bullying some schools and local authorities take the nuclear option when it comes to social networking and ban those sites wholesale. I’m tweeting to the choir here – but here are 5 reasons why social networking sites, whether they be open or closed, have a valid and important contribution to make to teaching. 1) Banning Social Networking At School Won’t Stop Cyber-Bullying If anything it will move it from an environment which you at least some control and visibility to one where you have none whatsoever. 2) Children Need to Learn How to Use Social Media Safely Just as importantly, children need to be taught how to use social media safely and securely, and they can’t do this in a vacuum.
In the modern age securing your identity online and understanding the consequences of what you share can have massive consequences that they need to be prepared for. 3) Anyway, What is a Social Networking Site These Days?