Facebook group of sociolinguists

My daughter invited me on Facebook two years ago…That was a mistake, she had simply added all her e-mail agenda and taken my address by mistake! At first, I didn’t think much of it. I am, as it is, supra connected in real life, super surrounded by various cercles of academic and business colleagues, overwhelmed by the human quality of my best friends who are scattered around the world but also by those whom I meet regurlarly at the Pain Quotidien in Geneva…the PQ girls, for example…

It thus took me a year to realize what fun you could get, but also what good you could achieve from Facebook. Of course, I’m on LinkedIn too…but these are very different concepts and frankly, so far the latter has been a disappointment rather. And so has Xing or Twitter…but who knows, this may change too!

As for facebook, as a communicator, I seized the opportunity to be able to communicate or get some news about my colleagues with a glance at my friends list. If I needed more, I could write to them, and if I needed networking, I could achieve it with the creation or joining of a group!

This is exactly what happened with the groups I created. One is just for fun, it celebrates my favourite aromatic herb, the Coriander, and the other two deal with what is the core of my academic involvement:

Académie Sans Frontières promotes the values of Education and intends to gather educators of all walks of life and origins in order to simply reassess the most important human right if we want human rights to be respected: the right to education, all the other rights, in my mind, derive from this pre-condition.

This note is actually an addition to a previously posted one and since then, I’ve created a brand new group called Electronic Shabess in which I suggest we pick one day in the week when we don’t do e-mails or social networking…

Last but certainly not least, the most focused one and getting the best response so far, is Sociolinguists on Facebook…We welcome those of its members who visit us here and certainly invite sociolinguists who are on facebook to visit us. We are going as far as starting to initiate panel sessions in International Congresses! A truly international group, we have managed to gather 25 nationalities, from Eastern Europe to South Africa and from Japan to Argentina. This could lead to some rather unexpected networking and alliances between confirmed researchers and questioning students. Check and contributed to our poll on the languages we speak on doodle (if you are a member…otherwise don’t bother, it’s an internal stuff!

Do visit these pages and tell us about your opinion and comments!