Organizational tools: using Facebook to network with professionals
Learn about tools you can use to organize your academic work this summer on the Biomedical Library blog. Between June 16 and July 21, you can read articles about software to help you manage PDFs and citations, the advantages of setting up accounts at Library-provided resources, how to incorporate RSS feeds, tables of content alerts, and other special features into your daily work, and social bookmarking and networking tools.
This post will focus on the social networking site Facebook. Facebook is a free website that is very popular on college campuses. (Many UCLA Library employees have Facebook profiles!) You might be most familiar with Facebook as a place to connect with friends or play games, but many in the academic world are also using Facebook to connect with colleagues and conduct scholarly work.
One popular way to use Facebook is to form or join groups. You can use groups to meet and network with colleagues.
Librarians from all 10 University of California campuses participate in the UC Librarians Facebook group. Members use the group to set up meetings, conduct discussions on topical issues in librarianship, and share web links. You can search for existing groups in your specialty area, like the Ecological Society of America , National Nurses Organizing Committee, or the American Dental Education Association Council of Students, or create your own.
You can also add applications to your Facebook profile to help you search for and locate information, like the UCLA Library Catalog or PubMed.
Facebook can be great place to conduct discussions, meet and keep up connections with far-flung colleagues, and locate important information. Leave a comment to tell us how you’re using Facebook to support your academic work!
June 22nd, 2008 at 3:09 pm
As you mention in your post. Facebook and other social network services have a great potential. But how to get people in the medical field engage with these technologies. Specially those who are over 30 years old. The web as a platform to do lot of things is an amazing concept.
But when the learning of the use of all those tools will become “serious” at UCLA. When will we have doctors with high developed “Health Digital Literacy Skills”?
June 24th, 2008 at 9:30 am
Thanks for your comment, Victor. I think all professions are unsure of how to incoporate web 2.0 tools into their work. However, I do think UCLA has made learning these tools “serious”: there are several types of course management systems (CMS) in place, and most classes require students to use the features of the CMS to conduct discussions and share materials. Perhaps once the “under 30″ generation is “over 30,” commonplace digital health literacy will have arrived.
Through July 21st, we will be writing more posts about web 2.0 technologies and other tools to organize academic work. I hope you enjoy reading the other posts.