I probably read too much into this, but it suggests that people are not interested in the conversation about “why” one should or should not blog, they just want to know “how” to do it. And one reason I read too much in to it is that whether we are talking 4 or 12, few faculty in general even consider blogging as part of their professional life.

The issue may not even be blogging per se, but rather “workshops” as a verb.  Few faculty in general see a need to change how they do what they do.  While workshops remain a necessity to efficiently provide training, those who read this probably have shifted much of their professional development to the social media landscape (as I have).  But the majority of faculty do not use social media for their PLE, and if they see no need to change, they probably view workshops as something they do not need.

This was on my mind when I opened the April edition of Tom Peters Times newsletter, which arrived today in my email and contained several interesting articles on customer experience.  It linked to the following video of a Southwest Airlines flight attendant rapping his mandatory pre-flight  safety announcement.

You have to admit that this person delivered his message in a new and compelling way!

I am not suggesting that I begin singing my workshops…that would definitely drive down participation.  But I do think we in faculty development need to [re]examine our approaches in light of social media.   Taking a cue from the marketing types, networks like Twitter, Yammer, and Facebook could all be used to announce and draw in participants.  But more importantly, I need to look at the total delivery.  Would a “conversation” about blogging with faculty here be enhanced if bloggers from around the world joined the conversation by live streaming?  Why do I look at workshop format as locked in stone?  As the flight attendant noted, maybe I need to shake things up a bit!

And if the “customer experience” was enhanced, would word of mouth spread that news around campus, growing demand?

Be interested in your thoughts.

{Stone Carving from Flaming Text}

I had the good fortune last Tuesday to participate in a podcast with Kathyrn Murphy-Judy, professor of French in the School of World Studies here at VCU.  Facilitated by Jeff Nugent and joined by Bud Deihl, we spent nearly an hour discussing the uses of social media in our classes.  As Jeff set the stage, he noted that as faculty continue to explore ways to take advantage of the learning opportunities afforded by the participatory web, they face new challenges about how to assess student learning in a context that values collaboration and shared knowledge building.  After all, we want students to collaborate and build knowledge together, but at the end of the day or course, each student must be assigned a grade.

As always, I learned a lot listening to Kathyrn and bouncing ideas off my two colleagues here in the Center for Teaching Excellence.  Have a listen – I would be interested in your thoughts and feedback!

{Photo Credit: JustABigGeek}

I used these slides to guide the conversation:

My framing questions revolved around (1) “What is a community?”, (2) “Does building community enhance student learning?’, and (3) “What web tools can now be used to build connections and community?”.  I used three vignettes to illustrate my thoughts on social media and connections.  First, my many connections with Gabriela Grosseck through College 2.0, delicious, Google Reader, our blogs, Slideshare, and Facebook, all of which have informed my own teaching and learning.  Second, the viral reach of Slideshare for one of my presentations from last year.  And finally, a Twitter shoutout by Will Richardson earlier this week and the resultant comments tweeted by others.  These all illustrated connections, but I asked the participants to reflect on how one gets from connections to community (and the image below evolved out of a sketch Jeff made on the back of a notepad):

One participant said that social media to her was like visiting the SPCA.  She could not go in and choose one dog.  All dogs were lovable, all dogs needed to be adopted, and she would leave crying and unfulfilled.  When I suggested that maybe she needed to just rent a dog this week and a different dog next week, she said, that would be like timesharing dogs – an unworkable solution!

The conversation that resulted was rich and nuanced.  It flowed from professional versus personal digital identities, issues of privacy, student misunderstandings on their own digital identity, and time management regarding the tools.  Jeff made an excellent point of differentiating users of social media between broadcasters and instructional.  Broadcasters have to be present in multiple applications and visibly engaged in multiple applications.  Instructional uses suggest more nuanced approaches with clear boundaries.  Bud Deihl illustrated how “conversations” could start in one application and spill over into other applications, such as his networking with his fellow graduate students through LinkedIn.

There was some concern about how we as educators advise our younger students when we are just trying to figure out the – as Michael Wesch calls it – mediascape ourselves.  Conversations like we had today are one way – and commenting via blogs is another.  I would be interested in the thoughts of my readers on how you visualize using the Read/Write web to build connections and community, both professionally for yourself and instructionally for your students.

Of course, one benefit from today’s session was that I did pick up several new “friends” in Facebook! 

ps – One unrelated and yet relevant event today.  I posted the above powerpoint in Slideshare last night so that I could embed it in our wiki and here in this blog.  Overnight, I got an email from Slideshare noting that the editorial team had selected it to be showcased on their Education page.  I also got tweeted by Gabriela saying that she had seen it there,  Another example of connections and community.

When I first arrived from Mexico to teach here, it was very noticeable for me to see that students here are more used to that kind of fast, graphic and entertaining way of displaying information or teaching and it took me some time to adapt to those “new students’ needs”. Here I have been in the process of becoming a digital resident.

I think that in developing countries, this change is happening but at a much slower pace because of the differences in access to the internet, just by looking at your ‘ClustrMap’ (in your Blog) and the red dots representing the access numbers from different countries, I could realize the way many countries are so far behind in terms of Web 2.0 tools usage.

I have been looking at the ClustrMap and seeing the connections spanning the continents.  He looked at the same map and saw the missing opportunities being illustrated by the sparseness of some of the dots.

This is one of the reasons I enjoy working with international faculty.  They help ground me in some fundamental truths.  Friedman, Shirky, and Weinberger have all pointed to the democratization afforded by the web.  All true, but evolving slowly and not there yet.

Bud Deihl and I were brainstorming this session (and he earlier also blogged about it).  As we talked, we realized that “community” is very nuanced.  The following slide emerged from our white board doodling:

So that got me wondering.  I belong to many communities.  Some of those communities overlap and others do not.  I use different tools with different communities.  In discussing the tools and their use to build connections, I thought I would tap into my blogging community to see how you would list tools matrixed with communities?  Does one tool suffice?  Do conversations in one tool spill over into other tools?  Are certain tools optimized for certain communities?

Some obvious tools that could be discussed as part of building community and connections include:

• Twitter
• Yammer
• Blogs
• Delicious / Diigo
• LinkedIn
• Google Apps (Reader / Docs / Sites)
• Ning
• Wikis
• Netvibes
• YouTube
• Flickr
• Slideshare
• Jott

What am I overlooking?  Be interested in your thoughts.

Photo Credit: Dietmar Offenhuber, Judith Donath, MIT Sociable Media Group

Blogs have begun to move beyond personal journaling to emerge as a possible form of academic publishing.  Blogs today provide a reflective medium for publication of teaching and research, and provide a point of connection for community building within one’s discipline.  How do blogs fit in with other academic duties?  How can blogs help scholarship and is it possible for blogs to harm scholarship? Should students blog as part of their learning journey, and can students effectively blog if faculty do not?  This workshop will explore the use of blogs in both classroom and academic disciplines.

The last time we ran this session in September, we spent the entire time discussing blogging as scholarship.  As it turned out today, in polling the participants up front, no one was interested in blogging as scholarship, but each either wanted to have students begin blogging as a way of fostering student connections and communication, or they wanted to blog themselves, or both.  I found this fascinating, because several have discussed in the past week the concept that blogging is dead.  Paul Boutin in Wired magazine wrote Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004.   The CogDog barked that “Maybe Blogging is Dead After All (Or Our Conceptualization Is).” Yet it seems that when early adopters move on to something else, the majority backfill the void and pick up the practice. As Jon Becker noted in “Greatly Exaggerated,” he was not buying that blogging is dead…and the interest I saw today demonstrated to me the same idea.

So I moved rapidly past the discussion on blogging as a public intellectual, and instead focused on instructional blogging.

One example that I could rapidly showcase is the work Jeff Nugent is doing with his Mass Comm Learning with Digital Media class.  Jeff has his students blog as part of their weekly assignments, and has collected their blogs in a Netvibes site.  As Jeff noted over coffee earlier this week, he has been gratified that some of his students are now making connections with the global blogging community, and are no longer writing for a grade, but rather for a readership that they value.

What drives that value are comments.  Blogs are a great personal reflective journal, but when others begin commenting, and one returns the favor by commenting on the blogs of others, connections get made – exactly what several professors today wish to have occur in their classes.

Blogs are not mainstream…yet.  The ECAR 2008 Study of Undergraduates and Information Technology reports that about one-third of students contribute content to blogs.  I would hazard a guess that blogging by faculty is much less percentage-wise.  Yet, a small group of faculty registered for our workshop today so that they can begin.  I find solace and hope in that!

{Photo Credits: CogDog, Salendron}

followed by:

In the first, Steve Rubel pointed all of us to a blog post by Leah Jones entitled Enabled Serendipity. Leah talked about how Twitter continually enables her to find and meet other people who are passing through life in the same places she is at. If she is in an airport or passing time at a restaurant, she will tweet that fact and find other people doing the same thing, and hook up with them. I was not sure whether she was tweeting with a laptop or a cellphone (and it probably does not matter), but the fact remained that she had taken a communication application and turned it from a virtual connection tool into a physical connection tool.

She noted:

“Due to the Enabled Serendipity of Twitter, I now have a global community. I’ve met people around the country and abroad. I’ve fallen in and out of something close to love. I’ve been able to make introductions that turned into jobs. I have a new group of friends in Chicago that don’t roll their eyes when I talk about nerdy-nerdy things and I’ve even got most of my family on Twitter…”

Not sure I have the cajones to serendipitously meet people this way, but I find it fascinating that she is so comfortable doing it. As we become more “wired” and wireless, will this become more common and an accepted practice?

The second tweet came from one of the participants in our summer Teaching and Learning with Technology Institute, Audrey Short. At the Institute, Audrey teamed up with another participant, Cindy Kissel-Ito, so that both would begin using Twitter and also have their summer students use Twitter. Audrey was teaching an ESL course, while Cindy was teaching a World Studies course. The combination gave non-English speakers access to partners to practice English, while the World Studies students gained access to individuals from other cultures. Audrey’s tweet pointed us to her Tumblr site where she reflected on the course and her students comments on their experiences. It was obvious that the pairing of the classes had a positive impact. One student said:

“The most enjoyable activity in this speaking class for me is to talk with the world study students because I am shy person and this activity helps me to remove my shyness and this activity help me try to find some word to make the person understands me, so this activity improve my vocabulary.”

As Jeff noted to me, we are beginning so see this “free” tool used in some interesting and unique ways, with little regard as to its long-term viability (which has been rocky to date). It appears to be already becoming part of the landscape even though no one knows whether it will be here in six months – or look the same, and we are certainly not seeing many people asking:

“Who owns all of this social data?”

“How is this data being used?”

I don’t know…and if you do, send me the answer (in 140-characters or less). But…as more and more systems try and regulate (or ban) social media (for instance), I find it refreshing that we have two positive examples of uses of Twitter. The whale wins in these cases!

{Photo Credit: Lemasney}

I passed a milestone today, in that I tweeted my one-thousandth tweet in Twitter. As I thought about that fact, it reminded me that last Friday, I saw a blog post from Karyn Romeis, who said she was exploring the impact of the use of social media on the professional practice of learning professionals for her dissertation. She wanted to know educators’ stories, and in particular:

• How did you get started with social media?
• What was your introduction, and how did the journey unfold?
• What difference has it made in your professional practice?

A milestone day is a good day to tell my story.

If I had to entitle the last year of my life, it would be the year of social media. In January of 2007, I was teaching online, but I was not using any of the social media tools that I now take for granted. I had just recently joined the Center for Teaching Excellence here at VCU. Part of what helped my journey unfold was the job transition. I am not sure I would have been able to adopt these tools to the degree that I had if I had remained an administrator and faculty at my former college. I would have been using the same “no time” excuses I routinely hear from faculty. So part of how I got started was simply by moving in to a new position that gave me the freedom to explore Web 2.0 as part of my job description.

The second factor that helped my journey get started and unfold is that I was not doing it alone. My colleagues here at the Center, Jeff Nugent and Bud Deihl, cajoled me, prodded me, (or “poked”in Facebook terms), and certainly mutually supported me as I began my journey. It is easier to use “we” rather than “I” in discussing “our” journey. The first one that stuck was social bookmarking and del.icio.us. We also were trying out some of the new Ning social networking sites such as Classroom 2.0 and College 2.0. Through these connections, we began to build a network of colleagues worldwide. We began to use RSS feeds to aggregate feeds from various blogs, Ning sites, and delicious networks…and we would frequently discuss what each of us was seeing and feeling around coffee each Monday morning. As we became increasingly connected with others virtually, we grew to cherish our physical connections here in our office, and so our weekly coffee conversations remain important to us.

For about six months, we were fine at this level but did little to add to the global conversation ourselves. However, Jeff suggested to us that we needed to model blogging ourselves if we were to effectively sell it to our colleagues, so Learning in a Flat World was born (as were techne and Exploratory Learner). Again, it was a mutually supportive effort in shifting from lurker to producer. It was good timing, as Sue Waters was launching her Edublogger blog at about the same time, and her tips and advice helped us craft our blogs and improve our delivery through this spring.

Jeff talked often about Twitter and whether that was something we should also examine. About three months ago, he sent me a short email that basically said – I dare you to start Twittering! He knows me too well! I dove in, built a network (based again on my blog companions and THEIR Twitter followers), and in three short months, have a small but respectable following of over a hundred colleagues leading to my thousandth tweet today.

Karyn importantly asks what difference all this makes to my professional practice. I have found it transformative. I was working with some faculty last week and they noted that one had to be physically present with people to form any type of relationship. I strongly disagreed and noted that I had friends in Australia, Uruguay and Romania that I have never met and may never meet – yet I consider them friends. I share laughs with Sue Waters (Australia) and know that her husband is fishing-challenged (something we share). I also admire how she effectively uses technology for adult education. Gabriela Grosseck (Romania) helped me set up my classroom use of del.icio.us. I have seen the passion with which Wes Fryer (Oklahoma), Michele Martin (Pennsylvania), Jeff Utecht (Shanghai), or Vicki Davis (Georgia) attack global problems and have added my voice to theirs. In a sense, the impact lies in the fact that I now see myself not as a player on one campus but a player on a flat world – contributing to the scholarship of teaching and learning on a scale I would not have conceptualized several years ago.

Two years ago, I would have had a hard time conceptualizing that I would connect with and interact with hundreds on a daily basis, yet I now find delicious, blogging, Twitter, and Ning part of my life. These connections have added a richness to my professional life that makes the “before” life seem dull and single-dimensional. The challenge is to remember that the vast majority of faculty have not (yet) discovered this transformation, and so to work towards facilitating their journey.

How has your experience differed (or not) from mine? Let me (and more importantly – Karyn) know.

[Photo Credit: janusz]

I was trying to describe to these students the differences between using Six Sigma for quality and using Lean processes for quality. In a nutshell, Six Sigma focuses on effectiveness and reducing defects while Lean looks at efficiency and reducing waste.

Most American corporations operate at around Four Sigma, which means they will have around 6,000 defects per million (or about the quality of the old Ivory Snow commercials at 99 and 44-one-hundred’s pure). A Six Sigma company reduces that defect rate to an almost impossible 3.4 defect per million. To a degree, it is somewhat funny (in a non-funny way) to think about the Sigma number associated with K-12 systems that have drop-out rates at 50% or university systems that have graduates after 5 years of only 60%, but it would be between one and two Sigma.

But I am not going to go there…my thoughts revolved around my recent introduction to Twitter and what I know about Lean processes. Toyota first pushed the Lean Manufacturing method and moved to number two in the USA car market. A Lean company understands that waste, or “muda” in Japanese, comes in many forms. There is the waste of overproduction, excess inventory, non-value-added processing, product defects during manufacturing and the associated rework to correct defects, dead time, underutilized employees, and wasted motion.

For the last few weeks, I have immersed myself in Twitter…and in so doing, have made some wonderful connections. I was already reading blogs of some now in my network, but I feel that I have gotten to know them even better. I see real interconnections between Twitter, blogs, and social bookmarking (whether delicious or diigo). In other words, I think that my effectiveness as a faculty developer has increased through my ability to tap into the voice of the crowd.

At the same time, there is NO…let me repeat…NO doubt that Twitter is the time-sucker from hell. Or at least, it is when you first start. It is seductive for the very reasons it is valuable. It is just so darn interesting to see what your colleagues are doing, what they are reading, and what they are thinking. I actually have a laptop next to my desktop with Twhirl running so that I can see the tweets as they arrive and if so moved, immediately respond. As Joe Kissel noted, this is a constant interruption to my train of thought and my work process. I am not sure how many forms of muda are encompassed by Twitter, but I do know that my efficiency has dropped.

As with all things, change requires an adjustment and realigning of priorities and routines. I definitely see value in Twitter, and that value feeds into my blogging, my work with faculty, and my own personal growth. My goal is to integrate it into my processes in such a way that my overall quality rises and both my efficiency and effectiveness increase.