Category Archives: social networking

Thinking About Media After the Marathon

I’ll start by thanking Chris and Melissa Bugaj for re-energizing my enthusiasm for podcasts. I used to listen to lots of podcasts but, for some unknown reason, stopped. Maybe it was just media overload, or switching to iOS from Android. After participating in the recent VSTE webinar (scroll down to find the archive) on integrating audio in the classroom, I installed the Podcasts app on my phone and iPad and added a few podcasts to my library.

On of my previous favorites had been On The Media, a program sponsored by WNYC. Brooke Gladstone takes an engaging, reflective approach to the workings of the media, often interviewing journalists involved in the week’s news about how and why they did the things they did. Not surprisingly, this week Brooke focused on the Boston Marathon bombings and the somewhat shoddy performance of the media in their seeming willingness to abandon long established principles such as confirming stories with multiple sources in order to beat others to the story. They reported erroneous information rather than wait to make sure it was correct because if they got it right, they would be heroes and if they got it wrong, they could just blame fluidity of the situation. That excuse ignores the important role of the formal media in our live: we rely on them to get the story right before they tell it.

But, there seems to be a very fuzzy line these days between journalists and bloggers and tweeters with journalists being lured away from their role as the nation’s fact checkers. Reporters are monitoring police dispatchers and, according to On The Media, those dispatchers were actually monitoring Twitter and reporting on things they heard. It became a closed loop where no one was doing any fact checking at all.

And, of course, there were the fake twitter accounts from the bombers that immediately got reported as real messages.

The program is worth a listen and, I hope, will prompt discussion about the role we all play in the exchange of information. Meanwhile, Slate offers some good advice about what to do the next time there is a breaking story. I’m planning to finally read Proust.

Surrounded by Community

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I spent most of yesterday online with educators, exploring the meaning of community. Several hours were spent in Elluminate as part of Powerful Learning Practice‘s ongoing professional development program. From there, I moved to Second Life for VSTE’s weekly meeting where we explored educational groups. We ended the evening with a snowball fight and, as you can see from the picture below, I dressed for the occasion. (Always wanted to have wings!)

I just felt energized the whole day, having access to all these fellow travelers without having to leave my house! We shared both professional and personally; we learned; we had fun. It was the kind of experience I would wish for learners of all ages.

Besides being reminded of the power of online community, I learned some specific content. I was introduced to Google notebook, a tool I had not explored before. I installed it and was eager to try it out this morning. So, I logged into Twitter, knowing that someone would have a link to a good article to read. Twitter has increasingly become a big part of my virtual learning community in a way that I could not have imagined when I first joined. I was not disappointed this morning as Will Richardson had posted a link to a New Yorker article on teacher quality from Malcolm Gladwell. My primary job right now is working with pre-service teachers and identifying good teachers is always a concern.

I read the article and, as Will suggested, skimmed the football stuff. When I got to the first paragraph that was really about education, I discovered that it had already been highlighted by someone else, using Diigo. I moused over to read the comment and discovered it had been made by Michael Scott, who I had just seen last week in Roanoke and who is a member of the VSTE Ning. I took a break from reading to add Michael as a friend in Diigo. The next highlight and comment came from Clay Burrell, a fellow Twitterer whose blog, Beyond School, is always thought provoking. All I could think of is what a small world it was since, according to the Internet World Stats, there are nearly 1.5 billion people online these days.

I think the lesson here is that online is a real community, as real as the face to face community I enjoyed at last week’s conference in Roanoke. It’s something my non-networked friends just don’t understand. And it isn’t something that happened overnight either. But it is part of my life now, and as I sit at my desk working alone from home on a rainy day, I feel the presence of that community. Thanks to you all!

Community Made Visible

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I tend to be a loner. I like to do things on my own, including learning. Given a choice, I would always choose to work alone on a project or learning activity. I’m comfortable in my own company. Working from home has only exacerbated that tendency.

But, yesterday, as I headed out to vote and then, later in the evening, as I waited for the election returns, I found I wanted to share with others besides just my husband and the dogs. And, happily, there was my online community. Over the past year, I’ve made an effort to become a more active participant in that community, and last night, almost for the first time, I could really see that it at work, mostly through Twitter. During the day, we exchanged voting stories, how long the lines were, how we felt about what we had done. Many people posted pictures and videos. Then, as the polls began to close, we gathered to share our anxieties, to celebrate the milestones, and, finally, to take a deep collective breath as we realize what had just happened in our country.

Looking back, I can’t point to a specific moment when I joined the community. It’s been a gradual process, one that I suspect will continue. One positive step I’m taking is to do more with this weblog by following along with Teach42’s 30 Days To Being a Better Blogger. I’ve only gotten through the first challenge, to update my About page. I was surprised to discover that it was woefully out of date, like from 2006. My other plan is to do more reading and responding to others both as comments and as blog entries as a way of making connections.

Another step is going to do more with the Ning community I’ve chosen. I’m a member of VSTEOnline. This semester, I had my pre-service teachers sign up. They’ve been doing a great job posting their ideas and questions and interacting both with each other and the other Ning members. Sad to say, I haven’t done much except monitor their progress. It’s time to make this community a priority.

It is easy to get distracted by multiple communities, something John Hendron recently wrote about, so I’m going to try to focus my energies. I’ll still Twitter, of course, since I’m rapidly discovering how much I’ve come to rely on those little updates from my tweets, and just last night welcomed several more friends to my Twitter world.

Thanks to all of you who make up my learning network…some of you know who you are, others have no idea. (But I’ll be sending out a few thank you notes so you may find out soon.) Together, we are living, learning, and growing together!

Just What We Need: More Negative Publicity

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I taught in a small, rural school division where students still called me “ma’am” as a sign of respect. Each year, the community hosted a huge weekend festival that, over the years, had begun to attract thousands of people from all over the region. I never attended but from the stories I heard, it was a somewhat raucous event with lots of drinking and revelry.

I worked on a team with several younger teachers who had grown up in the community. The week before the event, the principal arrived at our team meeting to remind us that, as teachers, we had a certain standing in the community, and he expected us to act appropriately if we attended the festival. In particular, he suggested that we should not spend too much time in the beer tent.

Well, the beer tent is now online, according to The Washington Post, and it is called Facebook. Thanks to Tim over at Assorted Stuff for pointing me to the article on young teachers and their Facebook sites. You probably don’t have to read the whole article. Just the headline–When Young Teachers Go Wild On the Web–gives you the sense of the direction this article takes.

I have written several articles about social networking for the VEA News. My goal in those articles was to encourage veteran educators to explore social networking as both a way for them to learn more about it and as a way for them to collaborate with colleagues. It’s a tough job both because of the technology but also since social networking sites get such bad publicity. So, a big thank you to the Post for adding some more negative press to combat.

I will forward the article to my pre-service teachers as a reminder of what they are getting themselves into as teachers. Or, maybe I shouldn’t both. Tim points out that many of these young teachers won’t last beyond 3 years anyway so why should I give them yet another reason to consider a different career right off the bat?

The article does ask a serious question: “Do the risque pages matter if teacher performance is not hindered and if students, parents and school officials don’t see them? At what point are these young teachers judged by the standards for public officials?” But I did laugh a little at the notion of standards for public officials. ken Blackstone from Prince William helped out with a definition of those standards: “But as public employees, we all understand the importance of living a public life above reproach.” Do we? Or are these young teachers following in the footsteps of some of the great public officials like Eliot Spitzer? His “public life” might have seemed above reproach until his not-so-above-reproach private life came into view. And, I think in this case, these young teachers are living up to those standards: it’s my life and I will get away with it until I get caught.

I think I’ll give my pre-service teachers the “grandmother” advice: if you wouldn’t want your grandmother to see it, it probably shouldn’t be on your public Facebook page. Pictures from your wild 21st birthday party are probably best circulated privately. Not everything has to be shared with the world. These are actually some pretty simple media literacy skills. The girl who suggested that her work and social lives are separate clearly does not have a solid understanding of how the Internet works. I would hope that if she is a good teacher (or since she’s young, has the potential to be a good teacher), school officials will be willing to work with her rather than just firing her.

I’m also going to continue to encourage my students to use those social networking skills for their own professional growth and, maybe even, for the growth of their students. This semester, I asked my my pre-service teachers to join VSTE’s ning site. It was a way to expose them to older teachers who had harnessed a “digital native” type technology for their own purposes. I wanted to show them that social networking can be about your work life as well as your social life. And, hopefully, to spark in them an idea for how they might use these technologies with their students, to break down the often oppressive walls of the classroom in ways that promote powerful, collaborative learning.