On Blogging: HNFE Librarian's 100th Blog Post

This is the 100th blog post on the Notes from Newman blog!  A happy coincidence, I was able to speak with HNFE 3224:  Communicating with Food on the topic of blogging, and "understanding social information."  Originally, I titled my presentation (embedded at the bottom of this post) "Understanding Social Media," but the presentation that developed really had to do with creating and consuming information via various social media platforms and tools.  So much information that students use these days comes from website, blogs, social networking sites, and other formats besides books and journals:  how can we address this in research-oriented courses?  Even the new APA style guide (6th edition) gives examples of how to cite blogs, vlogs (video blogs), podcasts, and even social networking (Facebook) pages.  This is a whole new world of information accessibility!

In addition to thinking about how new researchers (students) are accessing and using information found on the web, it's also important to think about the social information that students are putting out on the web.  In today's class, I spoke about online identity management; specifically, the class discussed ways that new or emerging professionals (today's undergraduates) can be proactive in developing a positive online identity.  "Personal branding" is sort of a trendy term these days, and really gets at this idea of consciously developing a certain image or reputation through social media and other web-related tools.

To bring this post back to the idea of blogging...blogging is a great way to do this--consciously develop a positive online identity and promote your intelligence and creativity!  For Communicating with Food, the instructor and I developed an extra credit opportunity that revolves around students writing blog posts for National Nutrition Month (NNM) and eatright.org's blog festival.  During NNM (March), nutrition bloggers have been asked to address the theme "Eat Right with Color," and students from HNFE 3224 will be writing and publishing posts for this theme on this blog!  Stay tuned for more information about that...I'm so excited about this, though, that I've already placed the NNM widget on my blog.

To accompany this presentation, I created an ePortfolio:  Social Information for Nutrition and Food.  This site lists books and journal articles that address using social media tools appropriately, specific social media tools, and best practices for using these tools.

The entire presentation from today is available:

Understanding Social Information

View more presentations from Rebecca Miller.