Betty Online

In a blog post last November I set off on a one month trial of Twitter, mostly to see what all of the hype was about but also to look for any practical use for classroom teachers. This post is a second follow up on that venture to describe a little of the huge impact Twitter and other social networking applications have had on my “shifting landscape of professional learning.” While I’m still not convinced our too often over stressed and isolated classroom teachers have time to add this on, I’m also starting to believe that making the time might be the best way of beginning to reduce stress and creating connections to change thinking and alter classroom learning. For me this foray into the world of social networking has caused a significant shift in my personal and professional learning networks. And, while the shift is mostly for the better there is also a down side to it all.

One needs to understand that I am a relatively shy person. It isn’t easy for me to “cold call” people. I’m not the type to walk up and introduce myself easily. And when I do, I have trouble following up with the requisite small talk. Yet I’m social in that I love good conversations, I am comfortable being part of groups, and I enjoy listening to others discuss and debate when I can get myself in there. So like the quiet student in the classroom, or the isolated teacher behind the classroom door, the use of Twitter and Facebook has moved me into some new and different spaces in ways that it wasn’t easy for me to be a part of before. As I reported in my Dec 17 post “[b]y far the most exciting result for me has been the fun I’ve had getting up the courage to participate in the interaction. Twitter offers a kind of light weight connection, if you will.”

The tools:

Mostly I use Twitter for my professional network and Facebook for my more personal family and friends network, although the boundary between the two blurs as family and friends have begun to find and follow me on Twitter while colleagues “friend” me and invite me to groups from their Facebook accounts. For my own clarity I maintain the boundary more by separating the use of the tools than the people by keeping my tweets generally about education and work and my Facebook updates of a more social nature. I open Twitter while working and save Facebook for other times of the day. The colleagues I choose to “follow” are generally those who use Twitter to tweet about topics that are of interest to me professionally.

By having Twitter on in the background while I work, I’m alerted to and reminded of the digital network of colleagues around me. When I suddenly don’t know how to do something, find something new and interesting or just need to pause and be inspired I flip to Tweetdeck where I can tweet and/or scroll back through any one of several columns that I have running. Generally I have an “all friends” column beside a “local friends group” column as well as up to five or six for any current gatherings or topics of interest at the time. Today I’m following #celc2009, the hash tag for the Canadian eLearning Conference (and ETUG workshop) as well #necc2009, #iranelection and #education. I find other hashtags to follow often by watching those that my colleagues are posting to. Through those topics I find other colleagues to follow because of the tweets they post, and on and on it goes. As I come across tweets from respected colleague with suggested sites to check out and/or questions to ponder, I reply with tweets and allow myself bits of time to check out new tools, sites or posts.

Which of course leads to the downside: how to constrain those “bits of time”? First off, it is important to let Twitter posts go by. I often hear new twitter users ask how one can possibly keep up. The answer is simply that one can’t. But with all that I read, and the sites and tidbits that are of interest, Diigo is helpful because it allows me to bookmark, tag and organize sites without needing to fully explore everything I wander into. I can mark things as read or unread and can write notes and comments about the site to myself as a way of knowing what to come back to if and when it might be a useful thing to explore more fully. I have yet to really learn to use Diigo to its full potential, but as I use it more and more I see that it too allows for social networking potential on a much larger scale than Del.icio.us. Getting to know it better is my next challenge.

The people:

The number of people I’ve come to know since first signing on to Twitter is quite frankly, for a shy person like me, staggering. I can easily divide the 256 people that I follow into a few simple categories: 1) Bloggers and thinkers whose writing/work I follow, 2) Known colleagues with whom I interact in person and/or online, and 3) People who have chosen to follow me and have represented themselves on their Twitter page in a way that makes me curious about what I will learn from having them in my network. Once that follow and following connection is struck, the playing field levels out and I view them all as my colleagues regardless of how they may choose to read my posts. I allow myself to freely “tweet” to them all as I would any colleague and similarly I reply to their posts from that same perspective of being on equal ground. In my mind, that opens up the room for dialog and sharing that makes this all so valuable. Similarly, replying and commenting in Twitter, which is referred to as microblogging, is not that different from using an RSS reader to “follow”, read and respond to blogs. Both create a similar shift in one’s learning landscape in terms of the people connections that are built.

The challenge to my thinking:

In a school, college or university where the working space is limited by the physical space, it is all too easy to close doors and physically distance oneself from differing views and opinions. For me one of the greatest advantages in networking via blogs, tweets and online social networks has been the ease with which I am finding that exposure to other perspectives and ways of thinking. In an easy and fluid way this forces me to keep a critical mind. Because I am interacting with individuals with whom I may not yet know well I am challenged to listen, to think and to enter into discussions especially when silence might be seen as agreement. In my opinion this discomfort and unfamiliarity is clearly the most valuable aspect of social networking for developing professional learning networks.

A bit of a hiatus since my last post but all for good reason. Quite honestly I’ve been overwhelmed by the amazing blogging world. Then add in twitter, so micro blogging, and I was struggling to find time for work, let alone my family. Life has to have a balance. On top of all that I’m still bound and determined to learn Spanish and I’ve increased my efforts at that to really honest daily sessions. Estoy haciendo progresos finalmente. At the same time my colleagues at SFU and I have begun doing some solid research work around Self-Study, plus I’ve been attending various conferences including this week a small SFU sponsored conference with Amanda Berry and John Loughran from Monach University in Australia on Self Study. (See my previous post on Self Study.) Yesterday I sat in on Day one of the Virtual School Society Conference: Learning Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere. I am feeling so immersed in thinking and learning. I am fortunate to be surrounded by amazing thinkers and excellent, supportive critical colleagues. But it has all stewed enough and once again it is time to write.

So the inspiration which has pushed me to do this today is Tod Maffin, the end-of-the-day-keynote at the VSS conference. The first time I heard Tod Maffin was on CBC radio early one morning when I woke up to him being interviewed about why he had just deleted his Facebook account; yes, he deleted his Facebook account! His friends were all, rightly so, immediately concerned about his well being. Tod is funny, articulate and provocative. Thinking back to that, I shouldn’t have been caught off guard when he spoke, but I was. While I don’t have today’s speech but if you haven’t heard him speak before, its worth watching one of his YouTube videos to get a sense of who he is:

Appealing to the Facebook generation isn’t particularly contentious, nor really was today’s talk. Early on he asked who believed in multi-tasking. A good portion of the audience raised hands, me included. This was bold on my part given some of my previous thinking on the subject such as one of my earlier blog posts on LIveJournal in 2007 Flow vs Multi-Tasking. But understand that since I wrote that post I’ve been immersed in teaching with technology. I’ve become a real blogger AND a microblogger on twitter. I now have my own ipod touch and I’m learning spanish partly through long walks with little white wires dangling from my ears. So while I do still find it rude and I would agree 100% that one cannot totally be at one’s best when multi-tasking, I would not agree that learning and multi-tasking are incompatible. But I guess one has to start this discussion with actually defining learning and that may be wherein lies the real meat of the argument. Tod Maffin didn’t go there.

His talk though based on his opinions was, he said, well backed up with research or at least reading he has done. Certainly there is lots of research coming out about brain plasticity and how digital media and imagery is changing the way brains are developing. We both agree that children’s brains are developing differently. Children who spend a lot of time using digital media scan a page of text differently. They process images differently. He spoke to the over identification of learning disabled students in a world that might really be about learning disabled teaching environments. I applauded that point as well as when he started to look at what an amazing creative, critical thinking generation of students we are beginning to see emerge from this digital, imagery driven world. Then he took a turn back to three ways to help these digital student learn better, presumably in our text based world without really ever bringing up the question of what learning really is. His example, two university classes one in which the students kept their tech toys while the in other students were asked to leave them at the door, may have demonstrated that the students paid attention to his words differently, but says nothing at all about the learning, the critical thinking, the retention, the risk taking or creative thinking that may have come from what was presented in either group. This is of particular interest to me as I consider with my colleagues in our self study the question of what learning really is. What do we except as evidence of learning?

So while I do agree that we do want to be attentive to helping our students to monitor the learning space (consider the tech toys, rethink multi-tasking), by informing the habits (get enough sleep, have a good breakfast) and by informing the balance (be mindful, keep perspective) I’m not yet ready to buy in to believing that learning just happens if we set up the right environment. Learning needs active participation on the part of the learner that I still believe might be enhanced by keeping the tools in the learners hands. All good food for thought though. Thank you Tod for an inspiring, stimulating talk.

[Editor's note: this post inspired by "quiltily" watching and contributing to the #VSS2009 twitter conversation during the Tod Maffin talk while also note taking. So I ask you, what do you consider to be evidence of learning?]

I just read Cool Cat Teacher’s blog on the dumbest generation which starts off with this YouTube video by Don Tapscott.



Like many parents and teachers I do worry about what the amount of “screen time” our children engage in, yet I can’t help but notice a growing awareness of issues spanning across generations. Sure, I don’t see it in every person young and old or maybe it is simply my own growing awareness and concern for more systemic issues and connections. Yet, knowledge changes and shifts so quickly and it seems that perhaps those who are “tapped in” are more adaptable because they are experiencing this movement and shifting tide. They are perhaps more willing to challenge and question information because they can so easily find conflicting, skewed or divergent sources and opinions. They have more access to and control over what information they are “fed”, digesting it in different ways. The digital generation, whoever it encompasses, is beginning to be cognizant of a mass access to creating, mixing, mashing and producing. Knowledge as power has taken on a new meaning.

I think this second video, one created for the AARP U@50 video contest in which it placed second and posted on YouTube by metroamv adds to the discussion.

In her post Vicki Davis (aka Cool Cat Teacher) writes:

To me: ethics, digital citizenship, cultural awareness, global collaborative skills, and discernment are all things that should be part of our student’s upbringing. Then, we will inoculate them against becoming corporate executives who lie on their financial statements to get ahead - people who build bridges with other cultures instead of burning them, and people who treat each other with ethics.

Whether we want it or not, whether we teach it or not, these issues such as ethics, digital citizenship, cultural awareness, global collaborative skills, and discernment are a part of our children’s upbringing. The students themselves are bringing them into the classroom right along with their cell phones, digital cameras, mp3 players and social networking spaces and accounts. More and more teachers are bringing them out of the students’ pockets and into the teaching/learning arena because our students are insisting. That’s how the students engage and any good teacher is engaging too.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on Don Tapscott’s introductory video or on the Lost generation video. If you decide to comment in your own blog, please use the technocrati tag netget_stereotypes so that your response can be “aggregated from the blogosphere!”

Anyone who’s followed this blog knows about my ongoing struggle to bring together technology in education with the principles and ideals in support of global education.  While in many ways it is a natural match as well as perhaps an inevitable contradiction, I’m always curious why we aren’t seeing more of the two coming together, or more aptly, ed tech supporting systems thinking and global perspectives.  Today I’d like to highlight two brilliant examples and direct you on to the blog posts that describe them. First visit Jennifer Whiffin’s new blog at In Pursuit of Purpose where she details how she uses Kiva to teach 4th and 5th grade math. Then have a read of  Phil Macoun’s guest blog post on TLITE Online.  Here Phil has written about the Digiteen project.  Kudos to Jennifer and Phil for their excellent work.

This post is the result of several things I’ve been reading and listening to lately, starting with Dave Truss’ recent open letter to the Fraser Institute on Pair-a-dimes.

I’ve always wished that I was more articulate and quicker at responding on my feet, but I’m learning to accept that I’m just not. Things need to stew. Dave calls writing blogs in this way “slow blogging” and I rather like that term, like cooking with a slow cooker. And often, for the very reason that I always need time to mull things over and listen to a lot of perspectives, I’ve shied away from appearing to take a political stance particularly with regard to my teaching. That isn’t to say that I haven’t taken those stances, only that my stance has usually been expressed more through my affiliations and my actions, or unfortunately most often, through my silence.

The ed tech blogging world is full of cries for change; Calls to get on board and “get with” the digital age; Advice for ways to engage this era of the digital student. I’ve often described myself as having one foot in that camp. My job involves teaching teachers to use technology, to help them learn to do this very thing. At the same time, my heart and passion is with the global education world, teaching for social justice if you will. There is always tension there for me, how much does the digital world and rapid growth in technology help us and how much is it distracting us from what we need to be paying attention to? In what ways are we making sure that the use of technology in schools is moving us towards more global perspective and a better, more socially just world. So personally my challenge becomes making the Venn Diagram in my head that is Social Justice in one circle and Teaching with Technology to engage in a digital world in the other, overlap more completely.

Then I read Claire Thompson’s latest blog post. She writes about seeing her students, good students, opting for easy courses and jumping through hoops instead of mucking about in the learning. And she says:

The system is also to blame. We often focus on “these are the courses you need to graduate”, “this is the minimum number of credits you need”, instead of “we have some wonderful courses that you’re really going to enjoy, learn a lot from, and serve you well in the future”. Maybe we need more inspiring courses.

At the end she asks what her readers think. I almost started to comment. I want to say yes, of course we need more inspiring courses. We need to not be teaching to the tests, to the FSAs or to our provincial exams. But as that comment was slowly formulating in my head I was considering all of the various confounding factors. I’m not actually anti-assessment or even anti-testing. I do understand the need and desire to have measures for comparing students particularly while we have limited spaces in our post secondary school systems. I honestly believe there is some content that must be taught. Truth be told, I’m actually a strong advocate of some form of our Planning 10 curriculum, of Physical education classes throughout high school, of Civics 11 and of Socials 11. I think Social Justice and Environmental Education courses should be mandatory or better, woven through all curriculum. Children should, I believe, be taught more than just basic skills of communicating, calculating and computing.

Yet another ingredient in the slower cooker that is my brain was the lovely, inquiring letter from a self-professed “confused and concerned new teacher” on the BCTF Social Justice list serve on February 2. She has given me permission to post it again here. She starts it with Hi Everyone,

I am not sure why the BCTF has to pass resolutions on issues such as the Palestinian situation, prostitution, or any other global issues. Is there a possibility that the BCTF is casting its nets too widely, and so concerns that are local to BC are not getting enough attention? While I am concerned about global issues and big questions like prostitution and polygamy, I am not sure I want my union dues paying for them to be debated and put forward as resolutions. Has the mandate gotten too big? Was it always this way in the BCTF or is this a recent development?

A great question I think, because as teachers we get asked some form of this question often and it is certainly one that has sparked some great explanations and further discussions on the list serve. It took courage to ask.

At the same time I’m preparing for my next class with my Learning and Teaching with Technology group and so rereading Brooksfield, S.D. (1995). Becoming a critically reflective teacher. Jossey-Bass: San Francisco. We’re gearing up to explore what critical reflection is. Brookfield clearly defines critical reflection as being very different from the constant reflection that we teachers all do, because critical reflection is that which examines with our thinking, the power structures we operate in and the underlying assumptions we operate from. But the clincher for me, in terms of why we need to do this work comes in his argument for needing to engage in critical reflection to increase democratic trust.

What we do as teachers makes a difference in the world. In our classroom, students learn democratic or manipulative behavior. They learn whether independence of thought is really valued or whether everything depends on pleasing the teacher. They learn that success depends either on beating someone to the prize using every available advantage or on working collectively. Standing above the fray and saying that our practice is apolitical is not an option for a teacher. Even if we profess to have no political stance, and to be concerned with purely furthering inquiry into a discreet body of objective ideas or practices, what we do counts. The ways we encourage or inhibit students’ questions, the kind of reward systems we create, and the degree of concern we pay to students’ concerns all create a moral tone and a political culture. (pages 25-26)

So here I am, all these ideas poured into the stew, simmering away. Up until now I’ve cooked mostly for myself, always trying to get the right taste before I could serve it up. In this way trying to pretend that my stance appears apolitical, while knowing full well that it is not. I choose to engage with technology in my teaching because I believe in weaving social justice through the curriculum. I believe in bringing the learner’s world into the classroom and working to understand from the students’ perspectives as well as sharing my own. I choose to support our union in engaging in large global issue debates because the stances we take as individuals and as teachers as a group are what our students are really learning about. As Parker Palmer says in his 1998 book, The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of the teacher’s life (Jossey- Bass: San Francisco)

We teach who we are.

It follows then that we must strive to be the best that we can be, the most political that we can be, the most just (fair, full and open-minded), optimistic, engaged and involved that we can be. That is what our students will learn from us. That is what they will take with them into their own studies. When we see that not happening, when we see students striving for the minimum we need to turn to ourselves and ask what we are striving for ourselves.

Picture from jennifermackenziej on Flickr at http://bit.ly/zvpo