Up close and personal with your learning network

[caption id="attachment_288" align="alignleft" width="300"] Back and forth inspiration[/caption]

"We take ideas from other people, from people we've learned from, from people we run into in the coffee shop,and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new. That's really where innovation happens." Steven Johnson on TED

Twitter search tells me I've tweeted 42 times about coetail (with 49 likes). Some of the pebbles I cast into the vast Ocean of Microblog caused ripples, while others sent not a single wave across the surface. A couple of my interactions during CoETaIL, however, have given me some satisfying back and forth.

During the first course, my former colleague, Matt, tweeted at me from the Learning2 workshop in Vietnam. He had heard about a model for learning with technology which he thought I might like (he knows I'm suspicious of most models). I incorporated the concept, PATER, into a blog post (Way of the SAMR eye) and tweeted it out mentioning its author who read my post and commented on the blog.

 

Tweets about coetail from:steveweatherell


[caption id="attachment_289" align="alignright" width="268"] Acknowledging ideas[/caption]

I had a similar experience with a later blog post which I published as a video (VLOG!). The post was inspired by the works of Emily Bailin and Will Richardson. They both read my post, retweeted it and replied.

Since I started using Twitter more than eight years ago, I have tried to make it work for me. It is where I discovered the screenshot app Jing (thank you @stephenfry!); I have encountered some very inspiring thinkers who flourish in the medium (such as @brian_bilston); and I have kept up with the life events of some of my friends. During CoETaIL, I have shared my blogposts; sought inspiration for my project; supported and replied to the posts of others in the cohort. But in truth, it's been a bit of a chore. I did not make waves. I know people who share a lot and learn a lot on Twitter, but it is only a fairly small feature in my own tech seascape. Similarly, Facebook and Google+ are not places where I have successfully amplified my professional voice.

This is not to say that I am self-sufficient in my work, nor in CoETaIL. Without the ideas and support of other people, I would not have been inspired to create my own artifacts, whether blogging, making movies and music or taking photos. One of the pleasures of CoETaIL has been the back and forth below our posts. I have kept track in this 14-page document of my comments.

I like my learning network to be within arm's reach and I celebrate the way in which schools are microcosms of societal expertise. You want to know how to work with iMovie? Understand bitcoin? Organise a committee? There's someone who can help you. Work with eight year olds? Exercise efficiently? Play music? They will explain it and they may even have the kit for you to borrow. Ideas for a blog? Advice on a first draft? Comments on the published version. People are there for you. But you do have to ask. And asking for help can mean making oneself vulnerable because it can seem to imply ignorance. I have seen, in my role as a technology facilitator, that a large section of my colleagues never reaches out  for support (would you be surprised to know that this is more true of men than women?). I wonder if some people are less reticent to seek help online from strangers.

We should not ask: Where can I go for inspiration? but rather: Is there any place where you cannot find food for thought? Most people welcome the chance to be asked to think along.

So in my CoETaIL journey, the back-and-forth of ideas came from many places:

• CoETaIL Online7 cohort, in our blogposts and comments, and in the very fruitful skype conversations during Course 2;


• Face to face at conferences, with international educators including CoETaIL graduates;


• PD visitors to the school such as Ron Richhart who helped me develop some new teaching tools;


• My teaching and admin colleagues who represent a wide spectrum of attitudes and experiences in education;


• Students who are at least as thoughtful and expert as adults when it comes to technology in their everyday lives;


• Reading in all its many forms and exploring with other readers our differing interpretations;


• Happenstance, chance remarks, connections, anything really, which lights a spark;


• And, yes, online networks too, where friends and strangers wrestle with the same questions CoETaIL has made me ask.

We all have our own PLN, and if we neglect to include an online element, then it will be weaker, but it is just as important to honour the knowledge in our own immediate vicinity.

Dear committee...

"Thank you very much for your continuing support of the Social Media Committee. We have now had 2 meetings which were very productive, I feel. At the recent meeting on Friday 27 October, we generated, sorted, connected and elaborated our conclusions from the first meeting, and as a result, we have an idea-web with which to move forward. Our ideas came from other schools' policy exemplars; our existing digital citizenship agreement (DCA); and our own reflections and research. These were sorted and connected into themes."

in search of a good thinking routine

 The weekend before our second meeting, as luck would have it, I attended a seminar given at our school by Ron Ritchhart and learned a new Thinking Routine which matched closely the goals our committee had for expressing our thoughts: Generate, Sort, Connect, Elaborate.

Our new Director of Educational Technology, John Mikton, who is responsible for the social media committee, has given me some freedom to organise the activities with him. As the pictures show, we have so far held two meetings in which students, teachers and administrators explored other school's ideas and our own unique situation. By the end of the process, we shall have met six times. The UbD planner with goals and evidence are here.

And here is a summary of the activities:

"In preparation for the third meeting, we all will reflect and research the different types of phrasing in the Policy exemplars from other schools in this folder or in any other examples we find. This will help us to establish the tone and style of the policy we will develop."

We are building up a collection of policies from a variety of schools and other institutions here at Diigo.

"Also, in preparation for the third meeting, a Draft Team sub-committee will meet to review the themes emerging from the idea-web. This team will propose to the full committee a framework for the draft policy which we will discuss on 14 November."

In the UbD template, I have summarised what I would like the participants to have learned by the end of the process.

Explain	the important features of a social media policy
Interpret	everyday behaviours with social media in terms of benefits or concerns
Apply	experiences of personal social media use to recommendations for the community
Perspective	of which behaviours with social media are positive for the school community and which are not
Empathize	with those who struggle with social media (through ignorance, misuse, overuse etc)
Self-knowledge	of personal strategies which emphasise the benefits and minimise the harmful effects of social media use

"As I said in the meeting, I would be interested to meet each committee member to record a short audio or video interview about your learning experience in the committee. I'd like to meet you in your place of work if possible. Please let me know if you have an appropriate moment for this discussion (10 minutes)."

Here are the questions I shall use to establish how the members of the committee have come to understand the process of implementing a social media roadmap.

"Thank you for your support. We have made a lot of progress and benefited very much so far from your variety of knowledge and perspectives. I'm looking forward to achieving our goal together in the coming meetings."

Social media are changing who we are

"Our body is physiologically rewarding us for talking about ourselves online" Moffit and Brown, ASAPScience video (below)

[youtube]https://youtu.be/HffWFd_6bJ0[/youtube]

It is clear from the research behind this video, that using social media not only changes what we do, but also who we biologically are. Most people in one study regularly experienced Phantom Vibration Syndrome. Being online all the time can have serious consequences. How long before smartphones get statutory health warnings?

I have been talking this week with two CoETaIL colleagues about the guidelines for using social media which our schools need but don't yet have. Our project was structured around four face-to-face skype calls over 12 days during which we evolved a process; set ourselves homework; tweaked our plans; and got to know each other. I have met Stephen briefly before in real life, but I've never met Valerie. It is appropriate that a social medium has been one of the crucial elements in our project.

"We would like to collaborate in a process to gather information and ideas to help each of our schools arrive at some guidelines for teacher and student use of social media." (Valerie, Stephen and Steve)

Our process is woven from a few strands:

1. We each conducted an investigation in our school, wishing to know how their different cultures would influence the process of drawing up social media guidelines. I received 99 responses to my survey (see right). The anonymous findings are collated in a document. We then read each other's summaries, commented and asked questions. It's not only a document but a rich conversation.


2. Early in the project we read "How to create social media guidelines for your school" (Anderson). It gave us a starting point for our fruitful discussion and suggested a possible process we have elaborated into our roadmap to social media guidelines which reflects the common understanding collaboration has led us to. We intend to present the document at each of our schools as a proposal for a way forward. It is embedded on my CoETaIL projects page.


3. Research into the solutions which other institutions, both educational and secular, have drawn up to support their individual circumstances. This included a pertinent exchange with John Mikton.


4. Frequent back and forth between us; not only the skype conversation, but also dozens of emails.

When that is all done, and this blogpost is finished, I will have completed CoETaIL Course 2. It has been a rewarding experience, not least the current collaboration with colleagues who, although we work in different countries, are nevertheless similarly faced with teachers and students in need of guidance about social media. As I concluded in a blogpost I wrote elsewhere, collaboration can be really difficult. We all bring our ideas to the table which enrich the project, but we must equally abandon some of them. The reward is a more complete product than any individual could have made. That has definitely been the case with Stephen, Valerie and me - and it was painless too.

During Course 2, I have been immersed in ideas about what perpetual connection to the Internet might mean:

• What will we do if the platforms to which we entrust so many of the stories of our lives do not live forever?


• How do we properly advise our children about social media when, if we are honest, we do not know many of the answers ourselves?


• What is the incentive to play fair about copyright when the chances of being caught are minimal?


• Is it wise of us to accept, however knowingly, the Faustian bargain of Facebook?


• What will be the long term effect of the digital contrail we are constantly leaving behind us?

These were the questions posed by my five blogposts during the course. I am certain that we do not definitively know the answer to any of them.

I greatly admire the performance artist Marina Abramović. You may have seen the film in which she sat in the MoMA in New York and met thousands of members of the public in silence, one-to-one, staring into their eyes, day after day. It's amazing to see.

She has a very clear view of the ways that we live our lives and how we can make changes which expose the assumptions we had taken to be facts. Speaking on the Note to Self podcast, she recommended:

"switch off your telephone... take a chair next to the window... and do absolutely nothing... What happens to all that energy that you have? You start thinking about the things you never have time to think about... you get into this state of peacefulness... three hours of your life" (Marina Abramović)

Is that really so extreme? I don't think so. We often spend three hours on activities a Martian would find strange. Sometimes, you can learn about the ubiquitous only when it is removed for a while.

So, following a couple of months in which I have spent a lot of productive time on CoETaIL, thinking about familiar things in new ways; learning to write regularly; making new friends, I have decided to call time on my life on the Internet. I don't know what it will be like, but my plan is to be completely off the grid for at least two weeks. I hope that, by cutting loose temporarily, I will gain an insight into what it means to be continually connected for the rest of the year.

"Christmas is supposed to be fun and you want to lash yourself on the back?" (my son on hearing my plans)

"We have to trust this gut feeling that we are completely f****d up with technology" (Marina Abramović in Huffington Post)

 

5 must-use social media for 21st century students

You clicked! Are you also tempted by list blogposts and then find the content disappointing? There is a list at the end of this post, however.

When I asked my colleague Dave's class of 13 year-olds here in Northern Europe how many of them were regular users of Twitter, I expected, if not a forest, at least a copse of arms. Three. All boys. In a class of twenty. Further interrogation revealed that only one of the three used his account actively (to keep in contact with players of a particular game). Other classes turned up the same picture. Dave and I had planned to use Twitter as a means to generate real-time conversations among the students. They dutifully cooperated, but treated it as a quaint adult preference. We persevered for a short time then looked elsewhere.

[caption id="attachment_105" align="alignright" width="467"] Subjective selection of data by SW[/caption]

My finding was confirmed in an interesting spreadsheet of bandwidth use on our school's wireless network shared by Olivier, the IT manager. I extracted a subjective selection of sites which I believe are used largely during students' leisure time and generated a graph. Top of the list are four 'consumption' sites, followed by Snapchat which leads the social networks. That's Google+ resting his lazy butt on Twitter, Pinterest and WhatsApp.

The idea of online social networks is still young. If it was born in 2003 with myspace.com, then it has only just become a teenager. Soon Facebook surged ahead and has maintained that lead as it continually evolves. Twitter joined the pack but seems to be flattening out in terms of active users. Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, PutieDami. When I told my students about the graph above, they were unsurprised that Snapchat is top of the tree at our school. I predict, though, that in three years' time, 13 year-olds will be communicating with a network we haven't even heard of yet. Who could have foreseen 10 years ago that the brevity of 140 characters would be so alluring, or that pictures that expired within 10 seconds would captivate a generation?

[caption id="attachment_108" align="alignleft" width="167"] Everyone has his own tech landscape[/caption]

Though claims of exponential change can appear exaggerated, social media platforms do seem to have followed an accelerating pattern. With growing frequency, each cohort of young people seeks its own medium which excludes not only their parents but even their older siblings. We do not know what will happen given that apparently big beasts can became evolutionary dead-ends within a few years; the social network ecosystem is savage.

There are consequences for our approach as educators. Many of us have realised that we must harness the power of the tools of the digital age, whose astronomical processing power and global reach enable billions to interact irrespective of geography. It makes the magic in wizarding fiction seem tame by comparison. But since your students may not be using the same tools as mine; since their younger peers are already looking elsewhere; since every tech start-up has the incentive to ensnare the next generation with novelty, what are the universal principles which will guide us in helping them to use the proliferating platforms beneficially?

It's all about communication. Do we comprehend each other? Do our exchanges promote respect and understanding? Are we making the world better? I'm not talking about digital social media here, but all of the ways in which groups of people can share ideas.

 

FIVE SOCIAL MEDIA ALL STUDENTS MUST MASTER

1 Language

Language is a medium for social exchange. We must teach our students to use it to convey meaning; to avoid misrepresentation and to develop new understandings between people.

2 Kindness

It is too easy to let our impulses get the better of us and to behave unkindly in the heat of the moment. We must help our students to recognise that there are myriad ways to treat others with consideration, each of which makes the world a better place.

3 Emotion

All human interactions have an emotional element. Our students must learn not to be afraid to communicate how they feel and to be able to read the emotions of others.

4 Critical Thinking

We have access to a virtually limitless ocean of information, much of which is unmediated by quality control. From an early age, young people must learn how to weigh carefully the words and images they are served.

5 Culture

The more we are exposed to different points of view and ways of living, the more we realise that what is familiar to us is merely one mode of being. Educators must help students to see that human experience is diverse and that no culture is superior to any other.

Survival of the Twittest

https://twitter.com/steveweatherell/status/782484974352080897

When talking about Twitter, there's only just enough vocabulary to write a nonsensical haiku. Knowing the lingo can get you on the first rung of the ladder. Yet not everyone gets it. I wanted to find out why.

I confess... I don't do Twitter very well. I mostly lurk; when I post, the ripples are negligible; I overthink retweeting. My total number of Tweets is in between my Follower and Following counts. My Likes broke single figures, but most of them are probably me. And I've got zero Moments (I don't even know what that is). Imagine what it would be like to have a K in one of those numbers!

But I do get it. I think I know why others love Twitter and why my work would benefit if I could fit it into my life. This week, I have been reading a lot of the good advice around, looking for the specific pieces which will help me to move up a level.

routine

"You've got to make some time to use it" (Ted Cowan @tedcowan7 quoted in Twitter: A Cultural Guidebook by Raisdana @intrepidteacher and Beasley @klbeasley).

"I skim through posts for 20 minutes each morning and afternoon." (Ferriter @plugusin in Why Teachers Should Try Twitter)

Whenever you try to fit a new activity into your busy life, something else has got to give. Let's make sure it's not sleep that gives, but even brief and immediate Twitter won't work for you if you don't give it the time. I will have to be deliberate and build it into my routine.

"Monitor the most popular hours for your Twitter followers, then concentrate your most important messages in those hours for more effective tweeting." (The Teacher's Guide to Twitter)

No. Life's too short.

patience

"Be patient, and you’ll build a group of valuable followers." (Teacher's Guide to Twitter)

"The trick is to keep putting it out there" (Louise Phinney @louisephinney in Twitter Cultural Guidebook)

https://twitter.com/steveweatherell/status/782500144335974400

curation

"I have easy access to a stream of customized information and ideas that motivate me" (Ferriter)

"Check out the follow lists of people you find interesting and connect with them." (Teacher's Guide to Twitter)

https://twitter.com/steveweatherell/status/782504199405858816

There's no excuse for a boring Twitter feed, but it doesn't happen by itself. I have been learning from other users' tricks. Interesting people follow other interesting people. Hashtags, chats, trending topics, events, lists are all places to go to find a greater concentration of quality which you can divert into your own stream.

But I follow fewer people on Twitter than I have Facebook friends and that seems the wrong way around. Twitter is not even mutual; you are unlimited in what you can choose to let in. The famous Couros brothers, followed by a quarter of a million Twitter users, also follow between them more than 100 000. They seem to me to have a more sophisticated understanding of the meaning of Twitter.

production

"(As a lurker,) you still aren't sure what is worth sharing and you filter yourself often" (Raisdana and Beasley)

"The real magic happens when you share, too." (Teacher's Guide to Twitter)

Everyone has their own Twitter landscape. Lurking is an option and if I hadn't, I would not have discovered Jing at a very early stage, nor some really great lesson ideas which I now use frequently. Others only ever seem to retweet lists. Who are we though to criticise someone else'e Twitter? But there is a distinction between the consumer and the producer and that is the line I feel I should force myself to cross. One of the beauties of Twitter is its restrictions and learning to express myself and to attract attention is a new challenge.

understanding

Technology is understood largely by metaphor. Most of its language is appropriated from other walks of life (amazingly, a lot of it pre-Gutenburg: scroll, tablet, stylus, file etc). Understanding Twitter also requires some good analogies.

"You have to view Twitter as a river. Whether you’re in it or not, the river is going by. When I have a chance to go dip my toe in, I catch a few big fish. I don’t need to know what I missed." (Patrick Green @pgreensoup in Raisdana and Beasley).

This metaphor has long appealed to me. You only see a small amount of the huge stream that flows by, but so long as you trust that it will continue and that the interesting voices will be amplified so that a great tweet you missed may well be retweeted, there is no stress in the times when you are not busy with Twitter.

But the Twitter river image also has its limits, because the feed is not just linear, (as Manuel Lima says about trees) it is also a network with links along more dimensions than just the arrow of time. What strengthens these links is the power of an idea, what Richard Dawkins called memes. By appealing to other users, everyone's ideas, including your own, are subject to a version of Darwin's Dangerous Idea: The Survival of the Twittest.