Bud Deihl and I traveled north a few miles to attend the University of Mary Washington’s Faculty Academy 2009 in Fredericksburg, VA.  It was a chance to reconnect face-to-face with some of my Twitter friends like Martha Burtis (see her reflections on this day here), George Brett and Laura Blankenship.

One of the highlights for me was the lunch debate between the Right Reverend Jim Groom and John St. Clair on “Is the CMS Dead?“  In a lively back and forth, the original Edupunk Jim suggested that the course management system was only good for management, not learning, and as such, SHOULD be dead … but appeared to be more undead (I knew zombies would appear at some point in his talk).  John countered that he thought the talk was about CMS – conservative mid-sized sedans – and that he thought most people wanted a sensible automobile and not some do-it-yourself hovercraft!

Both gentlemen gave great passionate arguments to their side.  I talked to Jim afterward and asked why the question had to be CMS “or” open systems?  In the past two semesters, I have used the Blackboard CMS for the things it does well (document and link management, rosters, grade management), but also used blogging, Jing and wikis for collaborative work with my students.  In other words, Blackboard served as a portal and launching point for my students into the open web.  This seemed to me to be a case of “AND” rather than “or.”

I enjoyed the lunch debate, but in reality, the whole day was fantastic!

James Boyle gave an invigorating keynote on “Cultural Agoraphobia: What Universities Need to Know About Our Bias Against Openness.”  Having just come off the Board of Directors for Creative Commons, he was uniquely qualified to discuss this issue.  He started with a history of the internet and how openness was a bug meant to be fixed later, but the internet grew more rapidly than anticipated and openness spawned many wonderful opportunities and profitable enterprises.  It definitely caused problems and concerns, but also amazing positives in the business world, entertainment, government, and education.  Yet, Boyle stated that education has yet to deal with its concerns and instead simply is biased against openness.  He noted that openness meant not only the ability to copy but also the ability to improve.

Thoroughly enjoyed the talk.  Jeff Nugent has recently had us at the CTE discussing licensing our Center organizational web material with a Creative Commons license.

I attended a great panel discussion by UMW faculty on their use of blogging in their classes.  It was a chance to see a very diverse mix of blogs associated with writing classes, art classes, science classes and math classes.  One of the take-aways was that blogs allowed time for students to reflect on critical issues for which there just was not time in 50-minute classes.

Cole Camplese of Penn State University gave an excellent talk on emerging trends impacting teaching and learning.  I loved his observation that we view what our students do as “technology,” but that it is only technology to those of us born before technology.  To the students raised in a wired world, it is simply a means of communication and connection.  I was blown away by the fact he listed that 40% of students at Penn State no longer bring a TV to campus.  They get their “TV” and entertainment straight off the web.  He noted that our universities are still designed as if our students are going to receive our wisdom and reflect it back to us, when in reality, through their own content and knowledge creation, our students act more as amplifiers than reflectors.  At Penn State, they have cast blogs as a form of digital publishing and are exploring ways for students to keep their own digital content.  If blogs are viewed as personal content management systems, then digital expression is seen as a form of scholarship that must be systematically supported.

I was also impressed that a third of PSU faculty reported using YouTube instructionally. 

The last session of the day was a workshop run by Laura Blankenship on “Creating a Personal Learning Network for Yourself and Your Students.”  We will be discussing the same topic at our upcoming Teaching and Learning with Technology Institute in June, so I was interested in seeing how Laura presented this concept.  She did a great job by first focusing on problems that needed solving, and then brainstorming from the group web applications that could be used to solve these problems.  In the course of the discussion, we discussed RSS feeds, Google Reader, delicious, Jott, and a host of other tools.

One last side thought – Twitter was very active among participants, and the hashtag #umwfa09 made note-taking unnecessary.  However, Twitter had scheduled maintenance today which hit right at the end of Cole’s talk, and it was momentarily frustrating to lose it mid-conference (so much so that I complained about it in Facebook!!!) 

Great day – looking forward to Day Two tomorrow!

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.

With the Mass Comm class, we spent time talking about YouTube and Michael Wesch’s An anthropological introduction to YouTube.  This class of juniors and seniors were pretty insightful in examining how YouTube, which has only been around less than 4 years, has become a cultural landscape where people are connecting, communicating, and sharing multiple aspects of their lives.  Several of Jeff’s students blogged about the video in his class sandbox.  I particularly liked how one of Jeff’s students, Frances, stated it:

“Throughout the course of the semester, I have been looking at the tools we learn about on an individual level, interacting with them accordingly. I appreciate how Welsh shows the audience how all the tools really connect as a user-generated machine. A video is created in Youtube and tagged through user-generated aggregation sites like Digg and Delicious.  RSS feeds then serve as user-generated distribution. Content can ultimately get more and more views depending on what users like and find interest in. It is truly a massive user-dependent media machine. This knowledge makes me feel like my interaction makes me a part of the process.”

This morning, I met with the OT faculty as part of their every-two-weeks professional development.  A month ago, Jeff had spent time with them discussing what the research suggested about how people learn and how students are using technology.  My job was to follow up with a discussion on instructional uses of tools.  I therefore surveyed them this week to see their level of interest on ten different web applications.  The results were mixed, but in general the interest across the board was high.  So we spent two hours today playing.

We started by creating a wiki in Wetpaint to hold the resources we found.  We then spent time discussing possible uses of blogs.  One faculty is taking some students overseas this summer and saw the blog as a way these students could both reflect on their experience and stay connected with their peers back home.  Super idea!!!  From blogs, we played with Twitter (with a tweet arriving from Jeff at POD).  From some of the tweets they saw, we jumped into Flickr, which led us to SlideShare, and then back to Delicious.  Lee Lefever’s CommonCraft videos got quite a workout!  What they began to understand was how interconnected my network was across all of these tools…and they began to conceptualize how that fit their world.

As I said, a fun day!

{Graphic developed by Jeff Nugent}

Every now and then, you are reading a book or article, and a phrase jumps out and grabs you.  It happened last night on page 198 of David Weinberger’s delightful Everything is Miscellaneous.

“The task of knowing is no longer to see the simple.  It is to swim in the complex.”

Wow!

David’s book is an interesting look at how our attempts to categorize knowledge by systems such as the Dewey Decimal System worked for books but fails in the messy interconnected web world…and that is not bad!  In essence, the web allows every person to have a customized library of knowledge built around what makes sense to that individual.

Teachers and educators are in the “knowing” business.  When I work with faculty and suggest 21st Century solutions to their problems, I am generally met with resistance.  It is easy to understand why.   With the exception of a few early adopters, faculty generally have an established concept of how to do research.  They correctly note that they gained their success and became tenured professors through a time-honored process that did not involve the web.  Social networking has not been part of that process.

Tomorrow, Jeff Nugent and I will be working with operational research faculty at the INFORMS Teaching Effectiveness Colloquium. We are going to discuss what the research suggests about how people learn, how students have incorporated the web into their lives, and how technology can transform teaching and learning. We have a full day with them, so it should be interesting.  I am looking forward to seeing how open they are to ideas of messiness in teaching and learning!

Two nights ago, Jeff was a member of a panel discussing the Millennial Generation to Mass Communications students and faculty. One panel member stated that FaceBook did not have a place in education. Jeff countered that social networking was vital to education today. He noted how Twitter was typically the first means by which he learned of breaking news, and tried to describe how following in Twitter was akin to friending in FaceBook. He realized that the older members listening to him had no idea what he was describing. They did not get it.

I am starting to realize that one reason I do get it is that I swim in the complex every day. My normal routine every morning  and routinely during the day (7 days a week) is to first check emails, then Twitter, and then Google Reader, where I subscribe to over fifty blogs, a dozen news feeds, and some that are difficult to classify but definitely form part of my personal learning environment. I now assume that I will be part of a backchannel conversation in any meeting or conference I attend. This did not happen overnight, but it did happen in less than two years, and I now cannot conceive of returning to the old “manual” way of learning and knowing. It certainly is not simple, but it is right in line with David Weinberger’s reasoning.

Back in June, I used the stream analogy to reflect my emersion into Web 2.0.  It still fits, which is why David’s words resonated so powerfully with me. So, my advice to my colleagues is simple - the longer you try to keep your life simple and organized, the less you will know and the less you will be relevant.

Strong words or on target? Be interested in your thought!

I am not a Twitter rock star.  I follow 140 people who I truly believe help me grow, and I have as of this morning 163 following me.   I have found Twitter to be a powerful part of my PLN.  I continually learn from my network as they post interesting comments, ideas, and links.  It appears to me to embrace the concept of the Creative Commons – a community sharing alike.

When I get an email notice that someone in now following me, I check that person out to see if I should do likewise and add this person to my network (or block if it is obvious spam).

I got a notice that Todd Gilmore from Oklahoma was now following me.  I checked out his Twitter account and see that he is following 1,776 and has 227 following him.  From Twitter, I linked to his website – Technology Story.  This is where it gets interesting.  Here is what his site says:

“Executives must stay current on the happenings in the technology marketplace at this point. To do anything less is to become irrelevant as a leader. There is a fire hose of announcements, analytics, and trends getting published every day. No one with a real job could spend the time necessary to review all of this information in order to find the valuable pieces. This is what we do on your behalf. Technology Story is a filtered river of information that gets delivered every other day or so. It is reduced to easy to read bites so that you can invest as little time as possible and still be up to date on the latest. Subscribers also have the ability to search the archives in order to resurrect a piece of information they once read that has now become specifically needed. The feeds include many links to deeper resources, surveys, and recommendations. The cool Website of the day feature is alone worth the price of admission.”

The price of admission is $100 a year.

Now, I am sure Todd Gilmore and who ever he works with use more than Twitter to filter the river of information flowing each day over the web, but should I facilitate this through my Twittering?  Is he brilliantly using Web 2.0 tools in a way that makes money for himself or is he using my freely given intellectual property to profit only himself?  I am not seeing this as a Share Alike relationship.

Is anyone else bothered by this?  Should I ignore it, block him from my Twitter account, or follow him to see if he shares through Twitter and helps my PLN grow?  I would be interested in what others think.

{Photo Credits: Tallent Show, ryancr}

Since Twitter Streamgraph grabs the last 200 tweets that used the word “elearning”, it makes me wonder what happened on August 6th that jumped its usage so much.

Any ideas?

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}

My colleague Jeff Nugent just returned from a week of fly fishing in Western Virginia, including the story of the largest trout he had ever caught – an 18-incher on Mossy Creek (picture of fish here). However, what I “caught” today was an interesting metaphor associated with his forced disconnect from being online 24/7. He said it took a couple of days to stop wondering what he was missing on Twitter, and then a realization that, just as there would always be fish swimming by 24/7 and he would only catch some (if lucky), so too it is okay to simply catch and release from Twitter, savoring those you reel in but not fretting over those you miss. This Tweeter creek will continue to flow and you do not have to fish 24/7.

Sounds like good philosophy…and I don’t have to fib about the ones I let get away!

At the same time, I am mindful of some points Wes Fryer made today in his post “Here for the Learning Revolution.” What is fantastic about the new twitterverse is the continuing conversation unfolding. You can miss some…but you can also get up to speed pretty quickly as you join back in. For instance, I blogged yesterday about the amazing unfolding of the Advocates for Digital Citizenship, Safety and Success, spearheaded by Vicki Davis. This conversation is continuing to unfold and now includes a Goggle Group page, a collective tag “ad4dcss” (with 28 sites tagged in Diigo in the first half day), a wiki, and a growing number of members. A TweetScan for “ad4dcss” shows 32 tweets in the past day. A conversation is beginning to expand about a critical issue that is capturing the passions of some great teachers. Please join in yourself! As Wes noted, conversations can begin in Twitter or one blog, move to another blog, circle back around to Twitter again, shift to an expanding wiki or other social media site, move to Elluminate or Skype, and even show up in face-to-face gatherings…such as our Monday morning coffee sessions at our Center for Teaching Excellence. While pieces may seem disconnected, a synergistic whole emerges. I find this invigorating and encouraging for our future!

Thanks, Jeff, for the great fish story and the even better life balance suggestion. And thank you, Vicki, for having the passion to make sure certain conversations DO take place!

[Photo Credit: Savethewildup]

I have started reading Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody this weekend. I am enjoying it, but my mind is buzzing with implications. He discusses how, in the same way that the printing press opened people’s minds and the telephone increased two-way communication, so has the new web applications altered how groups form and interact. He had great stories such as how one website helped a woman recover a stolen cellphone when the NYPD was not interested in pursuing the case, or how Flickr now can develop groups around local parade photos (or national disasters) without anyone being in charge. One had only to watch Twitter early this morning to see Sue Tapp, Jenny Luca, Vicki Davis and Sue Waters get together on the fly through Twitter, shift to Elluminate, and end up creating a social networking site in Google Groups:

Advocates for Digital Citizenship, Safety, and Success

The power of social media to rapidly pull like-minded people together for collective action without market forces or profit motives is mind-boggling!

Yet, another quote that John Krutch brought to my attention through Twitter this morning seems relevant. John was quoting something George Siemens blogged yesterday, and I am taking it out context, and yet, am not….

“…technology cuts both ways. It opens and it closes. It frees and it imprisons…”

Technology cuts both ways. It opens and it closes. It frees and it imprisons. Wow! It captures some recent feeling I have had at the personal level. I have embraced social media and it has certainly opened new avenues of knowledge and communication, but has also tied up a lot of time and energy, leaving me at times feeling trapped and imprisoned by this technology.

Shirky raises some interesting questions regarding this new empowering technology…question similar to those asked by George Siemens. I feel connected with an amazing worldwide collection of amazing “friends,” yet see fewer and fewer connections with two of my office mates who work down the hall. Our office is splitting into Twitters and non-Twitters (and both sides proud of the fact). I have joined new groups fighting technologically relevant issues worldwide, and joining less with members of my local team. This technology is cutting both ways, it is opening some doors and closing others, it is creating the “haves” and the “have-nots.” This is an unsettling time and will work itself out…but I hope to feel freer and not imprisoned as time passes.

Anyone else feeling this angst???

[Photo Credit: Redwolfoz]