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Hey! … Lend Me Some Novels?

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I was sitting at my kitchen table tonight working on my report cards and thinking about how I was frustrated in my classroom. I wanted to work with the book The Wave by Todd Strasser. But I have 29 students and only 24 books.

I decided to give twitter a try. In about 20 minutes, this is the conversation that followed:

books1 books2 books3

 

That simple.

Now I’ve used twitter for a lot of things, but not usually for actual, physical stuff. People have been generous with their time, their files and other resources, but real physical stuff is different. But yet, the problem I had was easily and simply solved. And an even more interesting part of this is that this is quite possibly the first interaction that Mavis and I have had on twitter.

People are good and generous.

 

Not Quite the Middle Ages…

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I thought this little story was worthy of sharing.

As we approach the end of the school year (only four days left to teach until final exams!) we are studying the Middle Ages in our social studies class. We’ve talked of course about knights and castles and the idea of shields came up. So we decided to make our own paper versions. Their shields needed to show things that are priorities in their lives, things that are important to them.

One of my students finished hers yesterday.

Guess what one of the things that is important in her life is…..

 

Five Years on Twitter

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John Evans sent me a message on twitter this morning that reminded me of his twitter birthday. Of course, being the curious type, I went to check my own.

Ends up my five year twitter birthday is coming up in only a few days.

I remember not really getting it when I first heard about twitter. I didn’t sign up at the beginning. Then, a little later, Darren Kuropatwa was doing a few inservices with librarians and had them signing up so I thought I better jump in.

Ends up it was a good idea.

I occasionally have a love – hate relationship with the service, but overall, it has absolutely widened my network, changed the people I communicate with, and has been the best place for connecting with new people that I have found online. I’ve found hundreds of new resources to use in my classroom and hundreds of professional resources that have helped me to see literacy, learning, technology and knowledge in new ways. I’ve been challenged, offended and had my share of good laughs from things I’ve found on twitter.

Being there for 5 years (which is about 163 in internet years), I’ve also seen the service evolve from a novelty/interesting place of connection, through to becoming an essential source of news and communication. I remember when hashtags and RT’s first came around. I remember hearing of the tragically downed Air France flight 447 that was flying from Rio to Paris and the death of Michael Jackson first on twitter. I followed the uprisings in Iran, Egypt and Syria closely on twitter. A service that is evolving and continues to change through the people who use it and the lexicons they can dream up.

Overall, I think twitter is a service that needs time to percolate before it becomes any use to a person. You need to build a network and actually talk to people. You need to wade through the garbage that is posted there and doesn’t interest you. You need to be patient and find the people who are right for you and your interests. It will give you very little in a day or a week,  but over a month or two, the conversations you have, the people you connect with, and the resources you’ll find will leave you wondering how you ever did without it.

 

Liquid Information

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These two short videos from flickr show the flow of information on twitter in and out of Japan directly around the time of the tragic earthquake and tsunami that took place on March 11th:

Information is a liquid. It flows and ebbs. It has it’s busy places filled with rapids and large flows. It has it’s quiet backwaters and slow spaces.

I don’t believe information can be “managed.” (and I also believe that’s a good thing. Tools that promise us the ability to manage information are most likely censorship tools).

Information that flows is fresh and flushed out. In spaces where information does not flow, it quickly becomes stagnant.

While classrooms collaborate globally for different projects and units, I don’t think anyone has managed in a school setting to create a long term global network of learners. That means that with all that we’ve done, we still haven’t managed to really take advantage of these tools with our learners.

Information in classrooms might trickle, but it doesn’t flow like it does in authentic global spaces.

A Small Town and Global Channels

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See this? This is the look of the future.

Well, at least this is the look of a small town catching up.

The Chief Administrative Officer of our community (CAO) had the presence of mind to register this account previously. Unfortunately, it was never used as the previous mayor and council didn’t feel it was needed so he was never asked to use it.

I (as you might imagine) have other ideas.

I’m interested in having our small town gain a global footprint. We need to communicate with the people in our community, and across the globe. To do this, we need to take advantage of all of the communication channels we can.

Between our CAO and I, we are starting to learn our way around a network of networked communities. It’s different than the education space that many of us are familiar with. We are searching to build our own network and expand our connections. I’ve emphasized the fact that these connections need to be global. While finding people, communities, companies and organizations around us is important, it’s not half as vital as simply building global connections that we can communicate with and learn from.

As a municipality, things like this are not a nice “extra.” They are not a waste of time or dollars – even for (maybe, especially for) small places like ours. This is one step. We have more that we will be taking in the coming months: YouTube, flickr, etc are all on our radar. As elected government officials, we need to do all that we can to share information, to promote our place, and to learn from others.  This is how this looks in our time.

twitter.com/townofsnowlake

Add us to your network.

Twitter and the Blacksmith

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I’ve always enjoyed teaching grade eight history. As in many places, here in Manitoba we have to do standard Western civilization kind of stuff – ancient Egypt, Rome, the Middle Ages in Europe, etc. I love history but have been challenged to find ways to deeply integrate 2.0 tools and philosophy into this curriculum. We’ve tried a number of things as a class over the years. I’ve had the students write blog posts with another student from the point of view of an explorer and the other writing as a native person. Interesting conversation and ideas raised in an assignment like this. We’ve used the web for a lot of research, made wikis and a whole host of other things.

But this year we’ve had a new one: the story of twitter and the blacksmith.

One of the students in my class has become interested in blacksmithing, swords and armour during the middle ages but was frustrated by the amount of information he could find. I tried to help him but quickly ran into a wall of basic information that we could not found our way past.

What to do?

Push it out to your PLN of course and ask for help.

In literally a matter of minutes people I knew were putting me in touch with other people who I had not heard of until that day. The email flew and within a few days my student had received several emails, complete with links, photos and promises of more help if needed.

The morals of this story?

1.) As a teacher don’t be afraid to ask for help. You don’t have to know everything.

2.) Build a large PLN. These people can be invaluable from the largest ways to the smallest.

3.) Don’t be afraid to allow your students to make contacts with others outside of your community. With this student of mine, I helped him make the connections and supervised the contact to ensure that he was safe. But the contact, the questions and the information was all his.

4.) Don’t be surprised at what kinds of information those people around you have access to. When I first considered reaching out to others about blacksmithing, I hesitated simply because I couldn’t believe that someone I knew would know anything about a topic such as this. I was completely surprised when, within a few minutes, I was put in contact with two people with the promise of one more to come. The power of network connections draws us close to people we have never imagined.

In the end, it proves once more that this is not about tools. It’s about people.

From Creating to Chatting

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First, take a minute to look at this infographic:

I think this is similar to what many people in the edtechosphere have seen. There have been a lot of comments in the past year about the “death of blogging.” While I think this is taking it too far, the fact is true that we have seen a fall in the number of people who see blogging as their first or most important space for connecting with others. We have seen that move to twitter (mostly).

Don’t get me wrong, I love twitter. It is a source of always on connection that lets me feel I can connect with others around the world easily and quickly. I feel like part of a community. But that is also it’s problem. As with almost anything else, from food to learning, anything that happens “easily and quickly” needs to be circumspect. “Easy and quick,” if we are talking about food would bring me to McDonalds. “Easy and quick” if we are talking about relationships; well that isn’t good either. Twitter as a platform lets us connect with others and link to new ideas; but it really does not work effectively as a space that moves our thinking forward. 140 characters is just simply not enough to explore and idea and flesh something out.

The same thoughts need to come around to our students and their use of technology. When students move into microblogging platforms and formats, does that move their learning possibilities into sound bites as well? It gives them a way to connect, but not to dig deeply, think and explore. If this is the pattern of emerging technology usage, what are the effects and consequences of this?

Good Morning is Different on Twitter

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When I get out of bed in the morning and once I have a bit of coffee in me to keep me conscious, I usually (OK, always…) grab my computer and check in with the world.

I usually drop in to twitter and simply say “good morning” to anyone who’s around. It’s interesting that people from around the world will reply and wish me a good day or tell that they are having their evening meal in another part of the world.

Good morning takes in a whole new meaning when you get connected internationally. Nothing profound, but this short video posted on vimeo shows how it looks when you put it all together.

GoodMorning! – Full Render #1 from blprnt on Vimeo.

“[blprnt.com] is a Twitter visualization tool that shows about 11,000 “good morning” tweets over a 24 hour period, between August 20th and 21st. And this is just a simple sample of Twitter activity around the globe. All tweets are color-coded: green blocks are early tweets, orange ones are around 9am, and red tweets are later in the morning. Black blocks are ‘out of time’ tweets which said “good morning” (or a non-english equivalent) at a strange time in the day.”

The network effect even for something simple.