My Shifting Landscapes of Professional Learning

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.

My Twitter Update

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.

Twittering a network

So Phil Macoun,  in his recent comment on this blog, recommended I give Twitter another try in response to my commenting that I didn’t really get it. So I’m doing so, a full-on commitment to twitter for a month and see how it goes. Already you’ll notice the twitter widget in the sidebar. To date I’ve found 41 people worth following (including Barack Obama along with 135,841 other followers) and 27 people are following me. That’s not a bad start to a network, but in the end it really depends on what I learn, contribute and gain from it all.  As my real interest here is in how it could possibly be of help to overworked classroom teachers, the vote is definitely still out.

Claire Thompson, one of my new contacts from KnowSchools, has tweeted me already to check that I’ve got some system set up for managing all the tweets.  Of course, I don’t as yet but she’s pointed me in a good direction and so I’ve just downloaded Flock. I’ll give that a try. If social networking is the way to go, and Flock is better designed to support that, it is certainly worth checking out.

Watch for an update or, better still, follow along with this little experiment on twitter.