Epic Bummer

In all honesty, I am not loving Linkedin. My first impressions of it were good because it is very similar to Facebook but the more I try to figure out what to do with it I find myself more and more disappointed. Right now in my life, I prefer Facebook.

I think this site would be very useful for someone in a more professional career (a desk job) but I work at a preschool. I have no real need to connect with people in the professional networking realm.

What I do like about Linkedin are the other sites you can connect to through Linkedin. There is a Linkedin Blog available to read about all the latest updates on Linkedin and what people are saying about the website.

You can also connect to tungle.me on Linkedin and get super organized for meetings (I love organization). You can also connect to Microsoft outlook, Twitter, Tripit, an Amazon reading list and Events.

There are a lot of valuable tools that can be used through Linkedin, which I like. I also like that through using Linkedin I learned a lot about my friends that I didn’t already know. Such as, the different careers they have held, the schools they went to, and the degrees they attained.

Another cool facet of Linkedin is the ability to get introduced to your friend’s connections that you hold things in common with. One of my friends is connected with a woman who he used to work with but is now working at a preschool like me and was also an English major. I have never met her before but I can get introduced to her through my friend on Linkedin and form a new connection to add to my contacts.

You can also create workspaces with whatever contacts you invite into that space and have discussions through discussion board posts.

Linkedin is definitely a writing tool but I had a hard time deciding whether it could be used as a writing space.

There are tools on Linkedin which allow you to post your thoughts and share them with others but does that make it a writing space?

 Like Bolter said, sometimes it is hard to know where the writing space begins and the thinking ends. “The behavior of a writing space becomes a metaphor for the human mind as well as for human social interaction” (Bolter 13).

Unfortunately I am unimpressed with Linkedin. However, like most of the stories in Selfe and Hawisher’s Literate Lives, I taught myself how to navigate the website.

I think if I had someone who already knew how to use Linkedin efficiently showing me how to navigate it better, I might be able to use it. 

However, I just don’t have the time to sit down and figure it all out.

I would like the website a lot better if it was formatted differently so that all of the tools were easier to find and clearly laid out.

It is nice that there are options on the homepage which guide you in how to complete your profile, but once you click on those steps you are pretty much on your own.