Monthly Archives: March 2009

An Online Identity Crisis of Sorts

hello

A few weeks ago I took my life into my own hands and faced certain ruin and potential eternal consequences.  I sent a tweet from church.

My wife had to leave service to take care of our young son, and I was left to my own devices.  Quite literally.  I decided to try an experiment and extracted my iPhone from my coat pocket.  I began innocently enough by using the Bible program I have loaded for reference, and then the forbidden fruit dangled enticingly in front of my eyes.  I thought twice, twitched slightly, opened TwitterFon, and sent out this nugget of wisdom.

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Inspiring, I know.

Coincidentally, almost immediately after I sent the tweet, I remembered that I have Evernote on my iPhone.  I used the application for the rest of the service to take notes, and I am quite convinced this is something worth continuing in the future.  In fact, I’m going to be writing a guest post on our church’s blog about using technology in service in the near future as a result of the experiment.  I’m sure it’s going to touch off a great conversation with those in our congregation who are a bit, how should I say it, traditional?

I also later confessed my sin to my wife, and a fascinating conversation ensued.  Much of it was centered around recent discussions regarding how presenting to an audience who is Twittering or backchanneling changes the presentation dynamics for a speaker.  This conversation likely merits its own post at some point in the future as well.

But the most telling outcome of this experience didn’t come from my digital note taking in church or the discussion with my wife.  It came a few hours later when I got home and checked my Twitter feed.  The responses to my tweet in church were both entertaining and intriguing.  It was this tweet that really got me thinking.

2nda

I wondered what would happen if I did actually start sending out updates from my church’s service.  Would people who know me on Twitter for my educational focus want to hear me talk about my faith?  I then sent out this question.

3rda

The responses ranged from unequivocally “I would unfollow you” to “I think you should do it as I prefer people to be all of who they are on Twitter.”  It was quite a range, and it was quite interesting to ponder exactly who we’ve let ourselves become in the social networks in which we run.  Perhaps even, who do we want ourselves to become?

I think of the growth of many online social networks and what this means for the community.  I’ve noticed as Twitter increases in popularity, I have more friends and acquaintances outside of education following me.  I’ve also had our local newspaper, businesses, and past professors add their name to my list.  It begets the question, “what do we do with this?”  I have to wonder if my friends really care about my thoughts on Marzano and his recent research on interactive whiteboards.  Do they care I don’t care for the overused and abused 21st Century nomenclature?  Do they care that I persistently pester one particular Canadian?

This question isn’t restricted to only Twitter.  It applies to all social networks.  What do you do when your mom wants to be your friend on Facebook?  Or your students?  It makes me wonder if we have to start setting up multiple accounts for all our networks.  There have been suggestions that it would be better to have a separate “professional” Twitter account and a “personal” Twitter account.  Would the bifurcation of my life result in a dilution of my personality in both spaces?

Personally, I like some of the inane chatter that happens on Twitter.  I like knowing when Dean spills on his shirt, or what Jon is cooking for dinner, or when Jen is engaged in an epic battle to get Z to bed.  It’s the sum of the small things in our lives that make up the whole of who we are.  I also know, however, that it’s tough to sift through all the chatter at times.  I’ve heard that complaint from several people as of late, and it makes me wonder about the merit of having two accounts.

I’m really not sure where to go from here.  I know this process will likely work itself out in an organic manner as these things tend to do with emerging technologies, but what will that process yield for us at its conclusion?

To end, I’ll have to go back to the beginning, and ask a question.  If I started letting more of my life into Twitter, would you stop following me?

*UPDATED CONCLUSION: March 28

After posting this yesterday, I’ve come to realize I did a tremendously poor job ending this post.  My intention was to frame the question more in a global fashion, and instead, I managed to focus it entirely on myself.  I apologize for that.  Please give me the chance to take a mulligan on the closing.  Here is what I really meant to say.

To end, I have to go back to our beginning.  Well, the beginning of an end to some regards.  We’ve been enjoying many of our social networking sites in the comfort of the audience with which we grew.  For Twitter, that was somewhat of a niche audience focused in technology and social media.  Now, as people from all walks of our lives begin signing on and joining in, the question becomes, “What do we do as our worlds collide?”  Thank you, George Costanza for that classic episode.  As Matt said in the comments, he’s long wondered what he will do when his parents join Facebook.  That’s how I really meant to end this post.  How will our expectations and experiences change with social networks as they begin to aggregate people from all areas of our lives in one location?  I remember what George said.

Thanks to Vanderlin for the Flickr image.

Conference Connections, or Lack Thereof

softball

Educational technology conferences are strange beasts.  Masses gather to focus and discuss technology, all the while maintaining throughout the discussions that it isn’t about technology.  It creates a rather odd juxtaposition.  I actually really like Ryan Bretag‘s statement he made a while back on Twitter that he prefers to go to content-specific conferences rather than technology conferences.  The reason that statement makes so much sense lies in the very nature of what most often transpires at a technology-specific conference.

I attended the Illinois Computer Educators’ conference a few weeks ago, and I was struck by a notable disconnect in almost every session I attended.  In almost every case, the session focused on a tool or on a specific technology devoid of any pedagogy or specific framework of how the said technology impacts a student’s learning experience.  It was quite troubling.  Many highly intelligent people were presenting tools that in essence, became sessions entirely about the tools rather than their implications.  A statement might be made at some point along the way, like, “this is really great for a math class” or perhaps, “you can see how useful this would be in a reading class.”  The problem is, that’s not pedagogy.  It’s not really much of a connection at all, to be honest.  Where’s the needed construct of what makes the technology truly transformative in the learning experience?

If a presenter took the first five minutes of a session to truly frame the discussion and base it entirely on a specific student learning skill, or set of skills, I believe the technology conference experience would be made much more powerful for attending teachers.  As it currently stands, a general classroom teacher enters a sessions, gets bludgeoned by a series of tools or applications, and then is left to leave the session dizzied and potentially disoriented as he or she attempts to draw a correlation between the dazzling tool just demonstrated and the learning experience he or she wants to afford students.  What if a presenter focused at the outset on foundational learning skills?  I don’t mean necessarily specific teaching content like math or social studies, but rather skills we know students need to be engaging in to be successful in life.  What if a presenter started off explaining the power of collaboration and communication in general terms-why those two skills are relevant and meaningful in today’s culture and built upon that foundation to frame the technology entirely within that learning context?  Discussions of pedagogy could then ensue.

For presenters, it would be like lobbing themselves up a nice softball to be hit out of the park from the very outset of the session.  If a presenter jumps out of the gate just swinging the bat, there’s zero change he or she will connect with anything outside of the occasion where the bat slips out of the hands and inadvertently strikes a nearby object.  An analogy that really does bear true in many technology sessions.  If a presenter is simply swinging that bat at the air, the only thing that can be said of him or her would be focused on the swing itself.  If the softball of learning is first lofted up, then it’s the connection that’s made that will be the focus of discussion, or perhaps the obvious lack of connection the swing of the tool makes with the ball of learning  Even if a weak connection is made and the ball is barely dribbled out of the infield, at least the discussion will be focused on where it should be, the connection that the swing makes on the ball.  It’s the whole point of why we learn to swing in the first place-to make contact with a ball and hit it as successfully as possible.

I hope more conference presenters consider this approach as they prepare for upcoming sessions.  Think about how you want your participants leaving your sessions.  Is it about the tool you are presenting or about the learning that ensues when utilizing the tool?  If everything we discussed was framed in the learning context, I believe we would serve the population of conference attendees in a much more powerful manner, and we might just find that we hit home runs with our sessions quite a bit more often.

Thanks to eschipul for the Flickr image.

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