The Next Step

I have been promoting this on Twitter and Plurk the last couple days but can’t say enough about it so have to post here in case you haven’t seen it yet.  Michael Wesch presented at the Library of Congress and, in addition, asked his students to gather 40 minutes of Youtube footage to create this 55 minute video. The result is mind blowing.

Somehow he has the ability, as an abnormally good Anthropology Professor, to take a pop culture tool like Youtube and analyze it for the scientific affects it is having on our world’s culture.  And, and, he makes it entertaining which is the opposite of what my Anthro teacher did when lecturing in college.  He makes me want to be an undergrad again just so I can go to KSU.

If you are too busy right now to watch an hour long video (I understand, had to literally stop working on my final project for a Masters class to fit this in) then go to your Google Calendar, or iCal, or Outlook Calendar and “pencil” in some time.  This video helps explain the power of the social web in a way we have not studied or read about prior!

If you haven’t see Michael Wesch’s other education related videos, click here and here, heck, watch them all.

There is a lot of power in social networking and specifically the synchronous interaction capability of Twitter despite the many valid concerns people have raised.  Without going into all the positives and some of the negatives, I just want to share a cool story.

Yesterday, late afternoon, I was working (watching a video) at my desk (dining room table) with half an eye on Twitter.  A tweet came up from Kelly Dumont who, in the relativity of a global social network actually lives fairly close to me.

Instantly my ears perked up and my eyes widened.  I started thinking, wow, thats the closest any of my Twitter friends have been to my little neck of the woods (St. George is a beautiful little town in Southern Utah which is only about 2 hours from me).  So I tweeted back:

My comment obviously wasn’t one of my intellectually shining moments because Kelly said right back:

When I made the previous comment, I hadn’t been thinking about meeting Kelly at NECC, only about seeing a Twitter friend near Vegas, and I never saw Kelly when he visited my campus last school year (but had heard the story so still should of known better .  So, I responded in my normal sarcastic way that also acknowledges I had obviously said something foolish:

From there the joking took a turn, and this is where a Twitter conversation turned into a life experience that I will appreciate for a long time:

I checked out the site he linked me to and saw he was presenting about using social networking tools in school at a conference that caters to student and faculty tech leaders in K-12 schools throughout Utah.  I quickly thought about what the next day held, and since I was working on projects that could be put off an extra day I said:

From that point, we figured out the logistics through a series of more tweets and in a little more than 12 hours from the beginning of the conversation I left Las Vegas for St. George.  I arrived about 20 minutes before the presentation began, said hi, quickly outlined what we were going to be talking about, and ended up co-presenting at a 3 hour workshop this morning with Mr. Dumont.

I had no idea Kelly was going to be in St.George before he posted that first tweet so to be able to go from joking around on Twitter to presenting at a conference in less than 16 hours was quite an experience.  Kelly and I don’t have each others phone numbers, we have never emailed, we have never Skyped, but we were able to seed and grow an idea in a matter of minutes that brought us together at a place to teach.  A power of Twitter.

I first joined Facebook a year-and-a-half ago as a way to try and connect with my students in a place they were already hanging out online.  I created a group for one of my courses and invited my students to join voluntarily.  A handful did and we ran some discussions and small projects from inside the network.  I wasn’t happy with the use for education and moved over to Ning, administrating (with my assistant principal) a much larger private network last school year.

I basically left Facebook alone for the last year, except when an occasional student would send me a message or a friend from the past would say hi.  Slowly more and more friends began to find me. Then about a month ago it seems like my little high school discovered FB, and we now have reunions happening on a daily basis. That’s a problem. I now have high school friends, college friends, employment friends, random FB friends, and former/present students of mine on FB.  Interestingly, the one group of my life not represented is my PLN.

The risk for something inappropriate (old pics, wall comments, etc) getting associated with my name started becoming a concern so I went back to FB to explore my privacy options.

I was contemplating just creating a separate identity for my high school students and redirecting them to that persona, but was happy to find that I could take care of my accessibility concerns through customizable privacy settings.

The first thing I did was go into Privacy and select Profile.  Since I am most concerned about the Wall feature and an old friend leaving an undesirable message in public, I just turned that off completely. If anyone wants to say hi, they can just as easily send a message.

Now in order to customize my privacy settings I had to create lists to separate people, basically: family, high school friends, college, colleagues, and students. To do that, just go to Friends, and on the right hand side you can select ‘make a new list.’ Add each of your friends to the appropriate list.

Once I created lists then I could determine who could see what throughout FB.  Since I didn’t want my students to see any videos or photos with my name, I just went into each of those categories and selected Customize, then excluded certain groups (note that I put family in the same exclusion category as students….haha):

Im pretty sure with these changes I’ve created an environment that allows students to still find me, to private message me, and to chat with me when they want but have eliminated the possibility of my personal life overflowing into my professional one.

This is the only network I belong to that has any students or non-professional friends on it so had to take extra precautions. What have you done on FB, or even Myspace, to ensure professional integrity?

I want to call out educators to try and actively promote a Plus 1 policy when registering for conferences this year.  Most of us attend conferences that we feel comfortable in, conferences where we are supported by other like minded individuals, conferences that allow us to take part in conversations we feel pretty knowledgeable in. This was especially true at NECC 2008, and its true in the online conference I am actively participating in right now.

While I was in the backchannel chat today, I thought “wow, everyone in here is ahead of the curve and is pretty sold on what this conference is promoting,” which happened to be Web 2.0 tools.  The theme of the conference isn’t the point, but the fact that we were all chatting away in a gigantic Echo Chamber started to bother me.  There wasn’t anyone on that chat that was disagreeing with anything that was being said, even when prompted to.

The point is, most of us really want to change education.  We aren’t going to do that until we get more teachers, administrators, district personnel, lawmakers, and politicians involved.  To do that, we should invite them places. Get them to witness what we are trying to do.  Get them to argue with us and make us justify why we are changing education in this particular vision.

So, for all the conferences we are planning on going to this upcoming year, let’s either make sure we bring a person that doesn’t agree with us or might not understand what we are doing, or if money is an issue, have them REPLACE us at that conference.  You know they will get more out of it anyway.

This will take some work.  We will have to be unselfish, almost altruistic in some cases.  In other cases we will have to work hard to convince colleagues they should attend and will have to hound them to say yes when they don’t want to work over the summer or write extra lesson plans for a sub.  Whatever it takes. This is easy in the scheme of changing education!

Conferences in the next year that I really want to go to and will make PLUS 1 a reality in: K12 Online Conference,  Virtual Schools Symposium, Educon 2.1, NCCE 2009 , and NECC 2009

I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership recently, largely due to Influencer: the Power to Change Anything, and despite not having any ‘power’ at my job, am trying to influence change.  Thats where printing this idea comes to play.  In the past, I might of just kept it to myself but am trying to influence public discourse in some small fashion.

Your first thought might be, how are these all connected?  They’re not.  I was just playing with them last night so decided to put them all together.  I know, not my greatest show of deduction.

Wordle is one of those sites where you can enter in text and it gets turned into a word cloud.  You can copy your url, a blog post feed, your delicious account or just simply paste some text. I came across it here, and after reading Karen’s post wanted to try out my own blog to see if my ideas were being backed up by my words.   Glad to see they are.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I’m always looking for little quirky Web 2.0 programs that I can introduce to my students so really enjoyed coming across Stripgenerator in one of Larry Ferlazzo’s many posts about about web tools.  I see it as a tool kids can use for making introductions to unit projects or spicing up presentations.

At NECC Week, I had been playing with a Flip Cam that my work bought for students taking my Web 2.0 class next semester.  I needed to learn how to use it in case kids had questions , so brought it along and recorded a few short clips.  I was more interested in playing with the camera rather than making a video, but decided to put together a pretty disjointed compilation of what I was able to record.  It has a few highlights though, some scenes from EBC including, Ewan Macintosh’s request for Pearson Learning to turn off their cameras (he was intimidating so I did too after that).  It also has a bit from David Warlick’s session, from Steve Hargadon’s Social Networking in Education session,  and a few other snippets if you’re interested.