One her blog, my writing and teaching partner, Dr. Kay Lehmann, summed up an excellent networking experience we had using LinkedIn over the last two days. Since she already wrote the post and it was a shared experience, I shamelessly asked for her permission to quote it here.
Yesterday I saw a message requesting proposals for book chapters posted in a discussion group on LinkedIn. I belong to several groups on LinkedIn, the particular one where I saw the message was Technology-Using Professors. The message was actually 10 days old and the deadline for proposals had passed, but I went ahead and made contact with the gentleman anyway.
Between yesterday and today a flurry of emails went back and forth between the gentleman Dr. Charles Wankel, my co-author (and partner in all things non-criminal) Lisa Chamberlin and I. As of this afternoon we will be writing a chapter for a book entitled Higher Education and Social Media. Our chapter will be about the use of Twitter in higher education. I also got a minor teaching job off one of the job boards on LinkedIn a couple months ago.
My point is… There is great value in spending a few minutes a week maintaining your professional networks. I actually had not been on LinkedIn in a few weeks and nearly missed this opportunity. If you are not on LinkedIn, you really should be. This is not the only professional networking site to which I belong but LinkedIn is a highly varied collection of people and widely used by business folks. LinkedIn is definitely not just for educators.
What she said!
Open Ph.D. - An Experiment in Higher Learning 