#thing8

Facebook is arguably the king of social media. It gives you added contact to people you know (and really, your friends list should be people you know only). For me, it is great to break the ice on a group chat before you meet someone but that is the only time I personally feel is acceptable to speak people you do not know on the platform as these people will be on your course and will likely meet you. As suggested by the previous sentence, university life may have been harder to adapt to if it was not for the platform. 

Like it or not, more and more people are starting a Facebook account with some children lying about their age in order to get one! This means that a lot of practitioners/teacher/social-workers will often have an account. This is where Facebook’s privacy settings should be utilised. 

On a desktop, if you click on the drop down menu (small triangle pointing downwards) and then click settings and then privacy, you can see how people can view your account. After doing this for myself, I was glad to see all my posts are only visible to my friends with only a few public ones that come in the form of my music compositions. I also have an opportunity to review posts I have been tagged in. Currently, anyone can send me a friend request and that I am not worried about this because I still have full control over who I accept and who I do not. Before I changed it to friends only, anyone could view all of my friends on my friends list. 

I made the changes above for similar reasons to being wary about social media and your digital footprint. People in childcare could put the service users at risk or breach confidentiality by sharing locations, confidential information that may be found if hacked and inappropriate posts. Unfortunately, it is quite easy to access this. This is why I changed my privacy settings so hacking or finding personal information is made more difficult. I would also like to mention that discussing confidential information is not good practice and if possible, it should be face-to-face. 

Now that I have assessed my own profile, I had a look at the “Sarah Smith” example on the SSSC 23 Things Digital website (http://23digital.sssc.uk.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Sarah-Smith-Social-Media-Profile.pdf) 

Sarah’s intro does not reveal crucial information and I would say that is absolutely fine to share your interests. She has shared her location as “Dundee” but has not gone into detail about where exactly in Dundee she lives. She has shared her workplace but I cannot see an “Add Friend” button so perhaps only friends of Sarah could see this but it is not clear. She has shared her date of birth and once again, I do not think that is harmful to share. There is a remembrance day post on the profile and I think this is a good message to spread on the platforms and promotes support for a good cause. The post below, however, is not as tasteful. Sarah seems to be complaining about a work member who was absent which resulted in her having to stay behind at work. The post below also says “families don’t make the effort”. This shines a negative light on the workers, the workplace and the service-users. Sarah, although she has only shared the posts with friends, should not be discussing her work on a social media platform. If there’s an issue, she should look into that at her workplace.

I was also made aware of Facebook groups. I think these are incredibly useful and have used them for S6 house meetings, university courses and schools. I particular like that you are not forced to become friends with the members of the group before joining as I may not know these people and may not want to share details with them.

Overall, I think Facebook is a lot more successful in privacy settings out of all the social medias but be careful, this is only the case if you have them turned on! 

I have decided to log on Academia.edu because I don’t have a profile on it and I think that it is relevant for me and my research work. For start I will try to search for papers and authors that I have cited in my previous work.

Since my wife and I have become paleo, exercise has also become a larger part in our lives. I downloaded the MapMyWalk app to try out. There are things that I like and things I do not like.

Things I do like:

It pretty accurately tells you the distance you have walked/jogged/ran.

It allows you to post your progress to Social Media

Weekly progress reports.

Things I don’t like:

When you phone goes to sleep it no longer keeps accurate times.

The voice that speaks is super annoying, but you can shut her off.

Organising yourself : Google Calendar

Woah, back to something I know about!

My institution doesn't use Google Calenders, but I do use it to organise my personal life. I have an Android phone so I find it quite useful to use in terms of setting reminders for things like my train bookings (you can automatically upload bookings straight to Google Calenders). I have added the CPD23 calender to my calenders, but I don't see the need to share my calender with anyone else except maybe my partner (unlikely).