twitter – Autodizactic

Let’s not be the cows of online information

A few days ago, a colleague stopped by my desk for one reason and stayed to understand what she saw on one of my monitors.

“You’re like a day trader,” she said, noting the stream of information that was scrolling by.

It was my twitter feed. More to the point, it was many twitter feeds, burning through multiple columns of TweetDeck.

“Are you reading all of those?” she asked.

No, I explained, they were segmented pieces of the whole, and I’d broken them apart so I could look at the information in a way that made sense to me.

Selecting one of the more depressing columns via which I follow the hashtag #phled, I explained how I controlled and decided what went where and why.

Picture your feeds, whatever they may be, as gallery spaces. And the art, rather than a hodgepodge of what’s been bequeathed, is rotating collection of the latest works by those you consider to be masters.

After a few minutes, I think she still thought me addicted, but she walked away a little more informed, so that’s something. It took me back to this Wall Street Journal piece I’d bookmarked years ago via Will Richardson’s blog on the neurological effects of information grazing.

It struck me as a better metaphor then, and I’ve used it since when talking with schools and organizations all over the world. Still, it is imperfect.

What I do on twitter, what I look for on Feedly isn’t exactly grazing in the sense of what is conjured up by the word.

I don’t know about you, but this Illinois son sees cows meandering through a pasture, glutting themselves on whatever they’ve stopped in front of.

This is also what likely scares newbs away from social media and connected learning – visions of the human equivalent of those cows with pastures replaced by the digital fields of the InterWebz.

So, let’s think of it differently.

From time to time, often by way of vouching from one of those whose work you appreciate, a guest artist’s work is invited in for a probationary period, and you decide whether or not to make that artist a resident.

And the thing about this gallery – and really it’s more like a collection of galleries spread across the geography of your network – is that it’s there, rotating, waiting for you in your pocket or whatever screen is handy.

You visit it like you’d visit any other cultural institution – whenever you like, for as long as you like. Sometimes, it may go days or weeks between visits. Other times, you may lose whole days to wandering its virtual halls. Depending on the requirements of your time either or both of these is exactly the perfect approach for appreciating information.

One other piece, one of the best pieces, (written about in much greater detail by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green) is the ability to share pieces and artists with other galleries.

This is where the grazing metaphor is most fallacious. When we graze, we consume. We take in and negate access for others. When we curate galleries of information, we put on display those creators and works we appreciate and want to share with others. It’s not about transparency as much as it’s about publicity. Of all the information we curate, not everything is worthy of sharing. The pieces that are, though, are easy to spread.

34/365 My Four Rules for Conference Session Attendance

Before my second session at IETA, ran to the vendor hall to snag a pad of paper. I’d rushed in to my first session without laying down some ground rules, and figured writing them down would help me to remember to say them aloud this time. The photo below are the four rules I count as key to positive conversations where learning is involved.

1. Yes, and…
It’s a key to improv, and experience has shown it to be a key to getting anything done that might look like a solution. If you’ve ever spoken to a group of teachers (or any other group of adults in a system who’ve grown accustomed to how things are done), you know the tendancy of a momentum-killing phrase to pop up, “Yeah, but…” By asking folks to agree to a mindset of “Yes, and…” for at least 90 minutes, you’re able to stave off comments that sound a lot like, “Yeah, that’s a great idea, but here’s why it won’t work in my school…” Instead, “Yes, and…” asks participants to approach new ideas from the perspective of, “Yes, that’s a great idea, and here’s how I’d have to modify it to work in my school…” If I can get people to agree to this line of thinking for the 90 minutes, it’s possible we might get some actual work done.

2. Assume positive intent.
My friend Mike believes what he believes. At the same time, he’s willing to hear other people out and change his mind if the argument makes sense. “I always assume positive intent,” he told me at the beginning of the year. “Even if I disagree completely with what other people are saying, I assume they’re coming from a positive place.” It was the first time I’d heard the idea put in such a way. It was more adult and less Pollyanna than, “I look for the best in people.”
When working with a group, I ask them to assume positive intent. At IETA, for example, the room was full of school, district, and state administrators as well as classroom teachers. These are group that can be counted upon to gripe about each other behind closed doors and mumble those gripes when in the same session. By explicitly asking (and reminding) people to assume the things they heard and disagreed with were coming from a place of positive intent, I hoped to help folks look for common cause.

3. We are raising barns.
One of my professors started class last year by having us read this article on taking a “barn-raising” approach to class conversations. Acknowledging the fact that ideas in groups can quickly get floated and then sink when the next speaker makes clear he was really just waiting for his turn to talk rather than listening, this piece sets a different tone. It asks participants to listen to those who are speaking and comment from a place of supporting or building on what’s been said instead of moving to a tangent. The approach helps a group keep focus and allows for the following of ideas to deeper and deeper places. It’s a beautiful thing.

4. Twitter for Introverts
It’s a back channel with a purpose. Lately, I’ve been trying to make room for people who have questions or disagree with what I’m saying in a space. This comes from my increasing realization that, as an extrovert, I’m fine speaking up in a group. Others, as it turns out, aren’t as comfortable. If I start by inviting folks to tweet me as things move on with questions or comments they don’t necessarily feel comfortable saying aloud, I can invite a richer conversation. The key is remembering to check my phone for updates. This tactic allows me to tailor what’s going on to a larger portion of the room, keeps my ego in check and clears a path to follow-up conversations later.

There are other hopes and norms to be set when working with a group. These four, though, set a tone that I hope for in a classroom of students, but don’t have time to work on so gradually in a conference or breakout session. Plus, when it works, it’s a beautiful, iterative, and solutions-oriented conversation.

An analysis of the how and who of congressional tweets

This sort of helps me understand how SOPA and PIPA came into being…

Browse more infographics.

Capitol Tweets: The Yeas and Nays of the Congressional Twitterverse | Edelman Digital.

Things I Know 356 of 365: The network worked as it’s supposed to

This was the status that caught my eye:

An email showed up to tell me I’d been mentioned. (I want this service in real life.)

I in Central Illinois clicked through to see what Aaron in New Jersey said to start the conversation.

I jumped in to suggest some possible widgets or sidebar options for Aaron’s plan for 365 days of documented fitness training. He mentioned considering signing up for a marathon and triathalon to have specific goals and be able to compare results. Mary Beth in Philadelphia hopped back in to suggest we both try running a few miles and then heading to a yoga class. Aaron liked the idea, and then Heather from northwestern Illinois chimed in to second the running+yoga idea.

As all this was going on, Pete in New York tweeted some suggestions for embeddable apps for tracking training. I followed up with a suggestion for running the D.C. marathon in March and the Chicago marathon in October. We discussed it a bit more and I had to head out for lunch.

The whole conversation happened publically across 4 states and included hyperlinks for reference.

The cherry?

Hours later, when I opened Words with Friends on my phone, I had a chat message in one of my games. Michael in Colorado had seen the twitter conversation and said he was up for a shared workout plan.

Every once in a while, I’ll see a tweet or facebook update from someone asking for examples of social networking in the classroom. Those are fine. I’ve had many of them myself. What happened this morning, though, across the span of a few minutes, was an example of social networking in real life. In a conversation of 6 people, I’d met three of them face-to-face, but each had something positive to contribute to the conversation.

Things I Know 353 of 365: It isn’t all for everyone

A successful tool is one that was used to do something undreamt of by its author.

– Stephen C. Johnson

My stepdad was explaining at lunch today why Facebook just wasn’t how he connected to people. I understood.

“What about Twitter?” he asked. “I haven’t looked at that.”

Knowing him as I do, I told him to stay away. “It wouldn’t be useful to you.”

I get the feeling this is was unexpected piece of advice coming from me.

It took less than a semester for people at Harvard to come to expect my nerdiness.

Even at SLA, a school that breathes technology, I was one of the nerdiest.

Here’s the thing to remember, I like technology. I will totally geek out on the newest gizmo, gadget or app. Being a beta tester is a source of pride for me.

When thinking about systems and considering a task to be completed, however, one of the last things I’d advocate is technology for its own sake. Out of context or usefulness, there are few things I can think the use of which I’d advocate for their own sake.

This is because the misuse or thoughtless application of tools, structures, and systems can be an ugly, counter-productive thing.

I’ve seen it in the teacher with access to 1:1 laptops who makes the worksheet using Word and distributes it for her students to type in their answers and then print them out to be submitted.

I’ve heard it in the arguments of those who call for changes in schooling so that students can, as a result of those changes, do better at school.

While I think most every teacher could benefit from jacking in to the network of educators on Twitter, I don’t think every teacher should. Requiring every teacher in a school to sign up for this account or that account is a great way to insure you’ll never have 100% participation in that market.

The best way to make a tool useful is to wait for the use of that tool and build the capacity to recognize when it is called for.

Had I encouraged my stepdad to sign up for twitter, I would have been giving the world another person complaining about twitter’s uselessness.

That’s not my bag.

Things I Know 276 of 365: #ThingsThatNeedToEnd

I’ll get to things I’m thankful for tomorrow. Tonight, twitter’s trending with #ThingsThatNeedToEnd and a few popped into mind.

Talking and calling it conversation.
Not saying anything and calling it listening.
Walking by the person on the street asking for change because you’re sure they’ll just spend it on alcohol, but never donating a dime to your local homeless shelter or food kitchen.
Assuming.
Requiring people to take their shoes off at airport security.
The Bachelor.
Calling schools failing and then asking them to muster momentum to improve.
Illiteracy.
Abuse.
Fast food.
Pay inequity.
Anything that would lead a kid person to feel less than.
Talking about teachers as though they aren’t trying or don’t care.
Talking about students as though they’re incapable of learning and creating amazing things.
Admiring the problem.
Fracking.
Complaining that social networking is keeping people from truly connecting, while still remaining silent in every elevator.
Seeking the one silver-bullet answer.
Claiming you’ve got the one silver-bullet answer.
Taking ourselves so seriously.
Calling anything that highlights a difference we don’t understand or wish didn’t exist “the X gap.”
The McRib.
Teaching by telling instead of showing.
Feeding students anything other than the best possible food for lunch.
Marketing electric cars while completely ignoring the source of most of America’s electricity.
Leading with anything other than a question.
Asking, “How are you?” with anything other than the utmost sincerity.
Letting others do the heavy lifting.
Subscribing to a belief in the importance of caring for the least among us and then denying them access to health care.
Comparing anything that’s not actually Hitler to Hitler.
Treating the symptom while ignoring the problem.
Expecting more from people without giving them space and resources to grow.
Ignoring the value of personal experience.
Valuing personal experience as though it is representative of the group.
Daylight Saving Time.

Things I Know 141 of 365: The message about the medium matters

Whoever said that things have to be useful?

– Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder and CEO

NYT Executive Editor Bill Keller wasted space in his own paper last week.

In his column for the Times Magazine, Keller wrote a piece titled, “The Twitter Trap.”

I don’t take issue with Keller’s dislike of Twitter. My mom doesn’t like Twitter either, but she and I get along fine.

Keller wasted space in allotting column inches to an argument that’s been had since the service’s launch in March 2006.

Technology’s depleting our ability to remember, you say?

Social media is curtailing “real rapport and real conversation,” you contend?

Excellent, you’re ready for 2007.

I’ve seen several speakers recently bash twitter and then be rewarded with full applause.

“This guy’s onto something,” they cheer, “We’re all stupider because of Twitter!”

Then someone makes a joke wittily tying in the word twits.

It’s not that Twitter’s making us less thoughtful that’s worrisome to me, it’s that it’s allowing us to make the less thoughtful arguments.

Knocking Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook is easy.

Writing for the most important paper in the country should mean you don’t get to make the easy argument. It should mean you swing for the fences every time.

Keller’s argument would have been fine as his Facebook status or as a post on his blog.

From the column in the magazine, though, I was hoping for a meditation on the fact that many people learned of Osama bin Laden’s death via Twitter before the Times website could publish the story. Working through a reasoned argument why deep, long-form journalism remains relevant and important in an age when people like Andy Carvin are harnessing Twitter to cull immediate reports from the ground during the middle eastern revolutions would have engaged me as a reader.

To use his pulpit to make a case that’s nearly half a decade old, strikes me as easy. More troubling still, making the easy argument, Keller’s not trying to do anything with his writing. He should be.

Writing that attempts to inspire, change and challenge – now that’s fit to print.

Things I Know 95 of 365: Aaron has more followers than I do

Aaron has 2,489 followers on twitter.

When he started following me March 13, it felt a little strange. He was only following 65 people at the time. Now he’s up to 69.

Normally, I’d have a strange tinge of embellished pride if someone so discerning started following the brain lint I put out on twitter.

This was a different matter.

Aaron is one of my students. In the eleventh grade, he has over 1,000 more followers than I and has a little more than 1300 fewer tweets.

The whole thing made clear to me the fact that social structure and hierarchy are subjective in online environments.

Add to that the possible number of empty accounts I’m following or who are following me and then apply that same reasoning to Aaron’s account and the perceived prestige connected to higher or lower numbers in the physical world crumbles.

My human drive is to make meaning, but the schema I’m equipped with doesn’t apply.

All these tweets in and I’m still trying to decide what makes someone worthwhile on twitter. I’d like to think it’s more than virtual speed dating, but I’m not sure.

Beyond all of this, I was curious about Aaron’s relationship to twitter. Easily, I could have written him off as another teen statistic engrossed in his social media like all the kids these days. But I’ve sat through that argument and read that study.

Today, I sat down with Aaron to talk about twitter. Our conversation is posted below.
Aaron and Twitter by MrChase

If you have any follow-up questions, feel free to post them in the comments, and I’ll make sure Aaron sees them. Then again, you could just hit him up on twitter – like 2,500 other people.

Things I Know 52 of 365: My classroom should be as democratic as twitter

A great democracy must be progressive, or it will soon cease to be a great democracy.

– President Theodore Roosevelt

Teachers dig Facebook. They like ning and twitter and youtube and social networking. I mean, they really really like ’em.

A TON of teachers who like these online affordances also like to build the case for their inclusion in classrooms and education.

Of the Ton,I get the feeling many, if not most, of them work in schools or districts where those online affordances are blocked, banned, outlawed and censored.

I’m not sure many of those teachers really want the access or understand the shift in pedagogy that use would imply.

I’ve been reading Sam Chaltain’s American Schools: The art of creating a democratic learning community. You should too.

Chaltain holds that American schools should be places of democracy, but are not. No whiner, he then works to outline what he sees to be the keys of democratizing classrooms.

Before I picked up the text, I had been reflecting on the role democracy plays in my own teaching. While I’d wager it’s greater than many, I still struggle moving from compliance to choice.

Most recently, I’ve struggled with accepting the idea that saying, “Pick one of these three options,” isn’t the same thing as choice – not true choice.

Chaltain quotes Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick:

[I]f the world takes our ideas and changes them – or accepts some and discards others – all we need to decide is whether the mutated versions are still core. If they are, then we should humbly accept the audiences judgement.

When the Ton trumpet the use of the aforementioned online affordances in learning, they invariably speak of students’ abilities to choose, create, re-arrange, remix and “like” in the spaces they can inhabit online. In essence, they like that those online spaces would give their students the chance to do what the Heaths say sticky ideas do.

This leads me to question what’s been limiting those options in the physical spaces of their classrooms in the first place.

I know what’s been holding it back in my classroom – me.

No pedagogical prude, I attempt to take learning styles, intelligences and modalities into account as often as possible. I differentiate and modify and accommodate. In the end, I’m realizing much of the work in my classroom is still closer to conformity than I’d like. And perhaps, that’s limiting the contribution of those voices from whom I’m most waiting to hear.

“We should evoke contribution through freedom, not conformity,” Chaltain writes.

I agree.

To the extent that I work within a system that expects certain outcomes from my students, I agree. To the extent that I have a picture in my head of what my students can do once they leave my classroom, I agree.

It might be fear that leads me to the caveats above, but I don’t think it is.

There are pieces of being able to read and write that I know will prove detrimental if they are not within my students’ abilities when they leave my care. The democratic classroom I envision isn’t one without goals. It’s chock full o’ goals. Those goals are also balanced with choice.

When I write about improving choice in my classroom, I do not mean to imply the abdication of structure or goals. I mean to say I need to give greater and truer choices to my students in how they journey to those goals.

And to the Ton, I want to reference something Jerrid Kruse brought up tonight on twitter. He referenced his frustration with online ed discussions veering toward the tech and not the teaching. I don’t yet know if I agree with his claim that this happens in the majority of online conversations. I do know that it’s complicated my thinking.

If you’re clamoring for these online affordances backed by the argument of the democracy they bring to learning, have you done the hard, uncomfortable work of making your classrooms democratic so your students are better citizens when the tools show up (or don’t)?

Things I Know 13 of 365: You get what you pay for

I’ll gladly pay you tomorrow for a hamburger today.

– J. Wellington Wimpy

Ordering pizza a few nights ago, I sound like a non-hilarious version of “Who’s on first?”

“Can you repeat the last four number?” says the lady taking my credit card number.

I say the previous four and start to say the next four when she begins to repeat the orignal four back to me and as we’re talking at the same time, no one hears the other.

“I’m sorry,” says she, “Can you call back? This is a horrible connection.”

I hang up and hit redial.

As it’s ringing through again, I want to get frustrated with the connection.

It’s not the first time I’ve had trouble being understood when calling out.

Then, again, I have no room to complain.

I’m using Google Voice through my Gmail account – two services for which I’ve not paid, but use on a regular basis. Were this the halcyon days of wireless communication, after my pizza was ordered, I could have called customer service to report my dissatisfaction with my calls. I would have spent upward of 45 minutes on hold and been awarded the golden fleece of customer service, an account credit.

And, yes, I realize, I could report these inconveniences to Google, but I’d feel silly.

I felt silly yesterday when I tweeted out dissatisfaction with my inability to track changes in Google Docs. The student whose paper I was grading was a comma splice junky, and inserting a comment to denote where each comma should have been was proving an onerous task. Fed, up, I released the tweet to the world – another service for which I do not pay.

Others with similar frustrations replied with affirmations of their likemindedness. Someone even suggested I check the “revision history.” This was something I’d considered, but it wasn’t what I was looking for.

“I want track changes,” I wanted to explain, “Just like they have in Microsoft Office.” (I know, bite my tongue.)

Still, though, there was something nice about the days when we bought big, beautiful, bug-ridden software packages. They were brimming with new features we’d uncover by mistake and then spend hours trying to disable.

Then, when that one thing we wanted to do wouldn’t work, we could complain in beautiful, consternated poetry and be justified because we had paid.

I get the argument that we’ve paid for Google. Today, when I logged in and saw someone on Facebook had liked my request for revision history on Google Docs because that tweet was sent by Interwebs magic to my status updates, I was reminded what I’ve paid. What were once the asides that filled my days like mental belly button lint are now pieces of data to fuel the machine and generate pageviews.

Yes, we can have the existential debate of what it means to give over our thoughts to corporations so that they can make money, but that’s not the conversation we’re having now.

I’m talking money. I haven’t spent any of it on Google.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m fine with our agreement. My life is easier because of the free.

So, I’ll continue to keep mum about my frustration with the passing of Delicious which has been an invaluable volunteer link-sitter for the past few years. I’ll ignore the next commercial on Pandora that interrupts the songs piping through the station I’ve been doggedly curating for months now. And, when Hulu asks me which lady I’m most interested in watching test drive a new car while I’m catching up on episodes of Stargate: Universe, I’ll click without protest.

Free, has a costs.

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