Betty Online – Time Out

My previous post, Or This with the Girl Effect video, prompted Dave Truss to update his Pair-a-Dimes blog with a lovely post about the inspiring women he knows who are educational leaders. His post caused a bit of a furor, as readers wrote in challenging his choice to be gender specific.  Liz Davis, one of the educational leaders he named, politely told him that it was perhaps  “a tad condescending.”  In response, Dave posted again explaining what may have come across as unintentional bias.  One again, he was inundated with comments. The dialogue on Dave’s site has lead me to write the following:

I believe that public acknowledgment of the accomplishments of women in any field is beneficial although I also understand where it may be taken as condescending. However, there is definitely a bias in the world I inhabit, which I don’t believe is all that unintentional as a general rule. Sure, I know many men and women who never intend it, but it is everywhere as Dave points out.   We don’t think critically enough about it often enough. Blog posts like this with the accompanying comments therefore are useful in the much needed raising of awareness. Though honestly, it is only a crack.

I don’t know any women who aren’t aware of an “old boys” network, as Vicki Davis (aka Cool Cat Teacher) speaks of, in so many areas of our lives. Certainly edtech.  And the way I see it is that “being unbelievably good” so as not to be ignored even carries bias because “good” in this context means participating in that male network in male-ways-of-being-successful.  This implies that being successful might mean something different for women and I think that is really what Silvana is referring to.  If so, I heartily agree that we need to caution against holding up women being measured against male standards of success as the role models for our children, both boys and girls.

Giving a very personal example here, I will never move high in the ranks of our school board, take on a principal position or be the best blogger or best edtech person around simply because I will not give up that kind of time with my family.  I see myself as highly successful, but perhaps not in most of the ways that count in the “male” world.   I work hard when I work but am most dedicated, as is my husband, to our family and the causes we take on together.  In that way we are working to be the best role models that we can be for our two daughters and our son.  To be honest, I don’t worry a whole lot about who they look up to outside of our family, after all my best role models were definitely my own mother and father.  From them I took what I agreed with and changed what I decided I needed to do differently. So I work at being the most “successful” I can be without ever having my family come second.

Photo from Flickr by Funadium

Ok, but this doesn’t really get to the problem of encouraging women to participate, let alone be successful in this world.  Although more and more I meet women who just choose to opt out.  (Why participate IF it is a male dominated world?)  Louise Maine raises an excellent question when she asks “Why do the female teachers think they do not know enough to speak at a conference?” Or Dave Truss’s own comment about women being cut off at meetings.  The world I want to participate in is one which has shifted towards more inclusive ways of operating through forms of dialogue such as appreciative inquiry or any model that allow for every perspective in the room to be heard.  I want to work where we encourage decisions based on consensus rather than lobbying, bullying, back room deals and even majority votes.  Certainly if we want to move towards giving women voice, we need to be sure that we make room for them to be heard.  Then, I believe, we’ll start to see a really different and interesting measure of success and it will be easier for women to see and feel the value in all that we do.

Back on November 16, I wrote a blog post declaring my intention to give Twitter a try for a full month. Today I’m going to summarize what the experience has given me so far.

1) An amazing network of people: Initially I had a four people to follow from my short venture into twitter last spring; as I picked it up again I added a few more, and then a few more until I got up to a critical mass of about 29. At that point I figured out how to go to the twitter pages of the people I want to follow and check to see who they follow, so I found a few more and so on and so on. Eventually I got a tweet from MrTweet who’s bio says “I am your personal twitter assistant – add me as a friend, and I’ll suggest to you which influencers and followers you should check out. (More coming soon! ).” True to his word Mr Tweet somehow looked at who I had already decided to follow, checked out who they follow (are you following?) and recommended who else I should follow. I took his advice and now have 82 that I am following, with more being added as I find discover more people that I want to network with.

2) New tools for connecting: So Twitter probably wouldn’t work without good webtools to make it easy to keep up with. A month ago I was using Firefox but knew that there had to be an easy way to see tweets as they came in. Firefox wasn’t doing it.  Then Claire Thompson suggested Flock, so I downloaded that to give it a try.  Today I’m still using it though probably not yet to its full potential but I do like what it gives me. I can have twitter on in a sidebar, or switch to Facebook which I use more for my family network.  There is even the potential for network in flicker and possibly so much more.

A couple of weeks, or about 20 tweets, into my trial I started noticing some posts that said posted from Tweetdeck. That sent me off looking for Tweetdeck which I’m now using.  While I still often have my sidebar in Flock on, I find that using Tweetdeck at the same time works well. It provides a better system for reading back through past posts whenever I come back on line, a nice consistent alert systems, and system for sorting the posts more easily. There are still functions in it I’m just learning about but even in this simplified way I’m using it, I find it very useful.

There are still tools I need to check out and learn more about. These include twhirl and twitterfox (maybe I left my firefox browser to quickly). And who knows, if Santa’s good to me this Christmas maybe I’ll get to try using twitter on an ipod with twitterfon.

3) Increasing involvement: By 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.  With it I’ve become involved in a network of people, many whom I’ve never met, but who have agreed by letting me “follow” them, and often “following” me back, to allow some conversation between us.  These are folks that I don’t know well enough to email out of the blue given that I’m a relatively shy person. But folks with whom I seem to have a lot in common such as an interest in education, specifically technology in education and/or online tools for communication and education. So more and more I’m finding myself willing to try a response or even (more daringly) a direct message in response to some tweet from someone else.  The first one I received was exciting; the first one I sent, a little scary. But more and more I’m having fun with it and really learning a lot. I’ve started engaging in conversations that I wouldn’t have joined into before. The next conference I go to I think I’ll be much more willing to step up and introduce myself.

4) Great new resource, blogs and updated information: Perhaps this is all just the benefits of an expanded network but with regular tweets coming in as people complete accomplishments from posting a new blog post to publishing a book, I’m finding myself much more up to date with relevant and important information.  I’m reading new blog postings much more immediately.  I’m learning about good tools and resources that fit well with my work.  For example, through Twitter I learned about Liz Davies revised edition of 21st Century Technology Tools; Tutorials for Teachers, 2nd Edition which I’m just settling in to read. You can be sure though that I’ll be keeping my twitter on while I read.

I’m often trying to do several things at once. I do a great deal of my work via email, keeping contact with students, mentors and colleagues. At the same time I follow several online discussion groups through SCoPE and KnowSchools, ETUG, VSS and so on, yet I seldom feel that I’m on top of everything. Last week, listening to several voice threads posted on a forum about managing online environments, I related to one fellow who described the constant push to get to “inbox zero.” While secretly congratulating myself on actually having a strategy that is considered viable by someone else, I questioned the wisdom of engaging in the process itself, probably because it is one in which I seldom achieve success. These days “inbox 99″ usually feels pretty good, which means I never really get there. I’m never caught up. And that is only with my online work.

Last week I finally got to reading a couple of chapters from Heather Menzies book “No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life.” After carting it about for several months hoping for a brief interlude in the demands on my time, it was oddly symbolic to find that Menzies is actually criticizing the online world of abstract communication for changing the pace of life and thus leaving us with no time. Tom Synder in his online review of Menzie’s book states it as the following:

A result of increasingly abstract communication, Menzies argues, is that the value of particular locations in time and space (a “space of places”) has been replaced by a “space of flows”, with data and symbols achieving primacy over lived experience.

To be honest, Menzies argument caught me off guard. Am I sacrificing quality for quantity through my participation online? Why am I so drawn to this venue for communicating and connecting with others? In education we argue that online environments open up new avenues for students to get real life, real time contact with experts. But is that all really just data and symbols? Are the real connections lost because it is online? How can we ensure that there is a quality and a reality, that time isn’t sped up through the whizzing of 1’s and 0’s through virtual space? How can we not be overwhelmed? These are good questions worth pondering. So now, rather than just making sure I am effectively “managing” my online environments, I’m slowing down and making sure that I am managing to have my online environments be effective in really contributing to my life, my time and the quality of both.

I just arrived home from a workshop for university faculty and students on the question “what is global citizenship?” This question is being asked in answer to UBC’s trek2010 visioning statement which claims that UBC is committed to preparing exceptional global citizens. To this end they have put together the Road to Global Citizenship: An Educator’s Toolbook, which is available as a free download. The toolbook is an excellent resource for anyone wanting to examine their practice and their assumptions about teaching and global citizenship. The book was edited by Yael Harlap and created by the UBC Global Citizenship Community of Practice through the Center for Teaching and Academic growth. Unicef supported the printing costs through their Education for Development Program, sponsored in part by the Canadian International Development Agency.

I’ve been reading through the book, slowly working my way through the exercises and generally am finding it useful, though in some ways to me it is like preaching to the converted. That isn’t to say that I don’t still have a lot to learn, but I am already at least already committed to the task of becoming a better educator for global citizenship. The activities and exercises matter to me but I’m curious how the unconverted would find them. Would they find them tedious, meaningless, less thought provoking, inconsequential? Could this book really make a difference to how someone treats their students, plans their activities in a class, considers what content to include, what to ignore, or how to assess?

Yael commented at the workshop that one of her colleagues, after reviewing the book, noted that it really just professes good teaching. True to some degree, I would say and thus all the more reason for faculty to get on board. Interestingly and perhaps to my disappointment there were more students at the workshop than faculty which led me to wonder what strategies exist for students to negotiate appropriate knowledge, dispositions, communication and thinking skills into what and how they are being taught? What support is in place to facilitate students being able to insist that their curriculum is indeed placing them on the road to global citizenship?

As I read blogs, and I read a lot of blogs, I marvel and wonder about what keeps each blogger writing. I wonder when in their day they find time. What inspires them to choose that topic? What makes them believe that what they are writing is worth blogging about?

Last Friday I attending UBC’s Noted Scholar Lecture Series sponsored by The Center for Cross-Faculty  Inquiry in Education (CCFI). This one, A Faculty of Education Celebrate Learning event, Learning 2.0: Digital Cultures, Media and Citizenship for a New Millennium, featured Megan Boler, Darin Barney, and Douglas Kellner.  All three were fascinating with different perspectives on the role that digital culture and new media are playing in the creation and participation of citizenship in today’s world. Megan Boler spoke to her research which really looks at how people are participating and making sense of what she refers to as “truthiness” – that stance that politicians or others take that they are certain about something whether it is true or not.  She distinguished between video (tv, online video, etc.) and blogging, finding that the same truthiness is not generally found in blogging, but is indeed in “viral video” productions which more often invokes satire and humour.  Darin Barney spoke more to the increased politicization of technology and then Doug Kellner, in a very humorous and down to earth presentation explored the idea of media spectacle through tracing the US election thus far.  All this lead me to think a bit about the role that blogging is playing in politicizing us and involving us in more active citizenship.  So bloggers may blog for political reasons, to sway an audience, to provide a point of view or some kind of “truthiness” to borrow Boler’s phrase.

Certainly that is true in educational blogs as well. Educational bloggers, like political bloggers, blog to share ideas but is it more than that.  Are we blogging to create a “camp”? to sway others to our way of teaching?