Modeling social media in networks and bringing the pieces loosely joined together

I haven't posted here for some time, but I've been quite busy, as you can see from my last-century web page at http://vancestevens.com/papers/. I've got a number of articles in the works for 2010, and in the last days of 2009, I managed to complete and submit in Wordpress my latest article for the column I edit four times each year (and often write myself) for the TESL-EJ online professional journal.

The article is entitled Modeling Social Media in Groups, Communities, and Networks: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/past-issues/volume13/ej51/ej51int/. It's about the importance of teachers developing, nurturing, and interacting in networks and then modeling and demonstrating within those networks in order to scaffold each other's professional development. The Implications section starts out by saying:

"A major key to success in keeping current in one’s field is in nurturing productive contacts within a network ... the skill of leveraging networks is increasingly important in the 21^st century in plumbing and aggregating knowledge when that knowledge base is forever changing at an increasingly accelerated pace. For appropriate use of online social networks to be taught in schools, teachers themselves must be familiar with their impact on learning. One problem is that teacher-trainers without sufficient experience with technology and who are rooted in old-school methodologies are simply not modeling new age learning behaviors for their trainees by showing them how to reach out to networks."

It was only the second time I had used Wordpress for my submissions, and the first time, for the article I submitted 3 months ago, I scrupulously followed directions including watching a 20-minute screencast on using the interface.  But this time around I tried to wing it and missed some steps, resulting in my article being the one to hold up the works as the editors were trying publish the issue.  Pressed to finalize my part of the process, I got up at 5 a.m., went through the article one last time, put in some final touches, and hit the publish button, then headed down to my car to drive off to work.

When I commute I listen to my mp3 player, and the program that I had been listening to was from the Worldbridges megafeed, and it happened to be Wesley Fryer speaking with Kim Cofino, who had recorded a keynote presentation for the 2009 K12Online conference entitled Going Global: Culture Shock, Convergence and the Future of Education, http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=424.  Worldbridges had hosted a "fireside chat" with Kim, mounted on their website at http://www.edtechtalk.com/node/4613. I had been listening to the first part of the chat earlier, so the part that came on just as I was pulling away from the house was the part of her keynote where she was talking about the importance of nurturing networks, how those already in such networks can model their cultivation for others, and suggesting six ways to start one.

It was uncanny that as I pulled out into Abu Dhabi traffic I heard Kim say almost exactly what I had just been working and re-working in my head in my apartment just then and for the previous week as I massaged my article to completion. Her words resonated with me at just the right moment, and I felt as if a jigsaw puzzle of thoughts inside my head and Kim's were coming together on my drive to work.

I decided to extract the part of Kim's talk where she made those points and share it here: http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com/f/KimCofino2009FiresidechatPLE.mp3

My daily commute is an important part of connecting with my network for me.  This is a time when I listen to what others in my network have recorded and podcast online, and I often arrive at work itching to get onto my computer and check out web sites and URLs I've heard mentioned while I was driving to work.  Podcasts are a crucible of ideas for me, like Twitter, something I can monitor in the background and extract the nuggets of knowledge that are lurking in the stream as I run the sounds between my ears.

When Kim, and her colleague at International School of Bangkok Jeff Utecht, gave their keynote talk at the WiAOC online conference in May, 2009 (http://www.webheadsinaction.org/node/364), I introduced them by telling the story of when I met Kim in Bangkok while traveling with the FLNW (Future of Learning in a Networked World) traveling roadshow in January, 2008.  This story is a great illustration of how networked worlds collide to release energy quantum levels above that of the disconnected component parts.

The FLNW roadshow is an un-event, loosely organized in 2008 by John Eyles who got Michael Coghlan, Trish Everett, and I to meet him in Bangkok for a few days or a week or two, whatever time we could spare, of hopping from one educational institute to another as John worked his way toward Thai TESOL in Chiang Mai and on to a village in Laos where he would deliver some books he had arranged to be donated there.  Our first event was a stop at ISB.

• I recorded the event here: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html
• and Kim blogged this: http://www.blogcatalog.com/blog/always-learning/04cc1ccaf9963683f905ae93219700b5

Talk about coming full circle and fitting together more pieces of the jigsaw, I have just re-read that and noticed where Kim said in that post "Not only was it fantastic to have three so well-respected and knowledgeable visitors talk to our teachers in a casual format about their questions, issues and problems, but it was so great to have them reinforce so many of the things Justin, Dennis and I say on a daily basis."  So here we are, echoing one another again.

At the time of this event I had never met nor heard of Kim, she had not yet become a part of my network, and I was there simply because John had arranged a van to pick us up and take us to ISB. John had mentioned we had been asked to talk about reading, so I had prepared a slide show on that topic, and as one does when illustrating the future or education in a networked world, I had arranged with Doug Symington on Vancouver Island in Canada to webcast our meeting, which I had hoped to stream from Bangkok out to the networked world at large.  We had of course asked in advance about the facilities at ISB and we were told we could have access to anything we wanted, but a disconnect occurred when we arrived on site and found that this was true only if we had specified in advance what we needed, and then their IT people would have allowed us to breach their firewall.  However, I arrived and discovered that having arranged with Doug to meet him online at a certain time, I was totally unable to connect to Skype or Elluminate, and I imagined Doug having rearranged his schedule to accommodate ours and having set up a webcast, trying to reach me but being unable to, and not having any way to tell him what was going on.

Meanwhile, the ISB folks had set up their own webcast via Ustream, which they had working, having made the necessary arrangements with IT.  And who should be in the chat there but Doug Symington!! So the network had come to the rescue.  Doug was in Kim's network, whose tendrils had reached out and roped him in, and all was fine, the network had saved the day.

I find it really fascinating how a system so prone to chaos and entropy so often works through the wisdom of the crowds that populate it to keep the pieces loosely joined all heading in the same direction.  Something is quite in synch here, and I hope in this post that I've been able to get at one small part of it.

You can share this post via http://tinyurl.com/advanced100101


Comments from the Twittersphere (Jan 14 and Jan 3, 2010):

Future of Learning in a Networked World: Gala Dinner in Bangkok

My son found the above video when he Googled 'Youtube' and 'Vance Stevens'. It's from the FLNW event I attended in Bangkok recently, a kind of spontaneous, ad-hoc, movable feast with an unconferency feel to it. I thought this would be a good place to put it, and next day I found a posting in the Learner Autonomy and iLearn group on Facebook with a question getting right to the crux of the future of learning in a networked world. While preserving the identify of the poster (or if he asks me to, I'll credit him here) I decided to post his question here with my comments:

The question

I've been wondering if technology does really enhance teaching/learning or if we just use it because it is out there and looks good in our resume! At a conference, I heard the question: “Do we use technology in ELT because it solves our teaching/learning problems? Or do we use it because it is out there for everyone to explore?

I believe that many(?) of us come from a generation that was not born with computers around and less in our foreign language learning processes. This background surely limits our views on the real advantages of modern technology.

I have mixed feelings when I see myself or others struggling with technology. Our heavy training was not on technological competencies and it seems we cannot leave those tasks to more technically competent co-workers from the computer science department. As foreign language teacher/advisors, we are expected to add all these new skills to our old bag of tricks. I bet it's time to make our discipline a multi-disciplinary profession.

At times I see how we bend technology for our own sake and we tend to believe that it is just a nicer, faster and more colorful way to achieve the same academic goals we have already 'achieved' with a pen, paper, chalk a board or a book in our hands.

Thanks for any comments this may raise.

My reply

Your comments get right to the point, and I'm happy to say the answer is YES, technology does indeed enhance exactly what you already know how to do with a pen, paper, chalk, etc. Pens, paper, chalk are in fact technology. Sometimes these are the most appropriate technologies to apply to a given pedagogical nut you wish to crack. I myself use a board marker and whiteboard (slightly tech advanced from chalk etc, but does the essentially same thing). In part 2 we'll ratchet up the technology scale ...

You might say that a WIKI is a tech advancement over that and in some cases, where you want to preserve your chalkboard, and let students write on it AFTER class, and say embed video or audio in it, or have students record with Audacity and embed their own audio, and bring that to class next time and start from there, might POSSIBLY be an improvement over the old method where the board is erased at the end of the day.

No matter what the metier, workpeople are constrained by available tools and knowledge of those available. Nowadays when so many new tools are coming online, it's good for teachers to know what's available. How do you do that? You join a community, for example Webheads at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads where you can LISTEN to conversations on what tech is available and how teachers are using it, the same way you would learn a foreign language, just go where it's spoken and listen, and when you feel comfortable, join in.

This would give you a better knowledge of what tools to use. After that it would be up to you to decide, with your improved knowledge of what tools you could alternatively use, which ones would be best suited to the pedagogical nuts you wish to crack.

I think that any reasonable argument would reach the conclusion that it's best to at least KNOW what is available and then consider from that perspective whether it's best to continue using the tools you have available now or to try out some new technologies if those appear better suited to the job at hand.

The most important point, as you have pointed out, is that the job at hand has not changed. Your methodology does not change. You can and should continue to teach using the techniques you find effective. The question which you asked and which we all should seek to answer from an INFORMED perspective, is when does technology HELP what you are already doing, and when might it get in the way.

So no, we don't use it just because it's there, but because it's there, we should seek to inform ourselves what is out there, and use that which will help our students achieve a better grasp of whatever it is we are trying to teach, or more correctly, what it is we are trying to help THEM to LEARN (which is another issue, relating more to the autonomy side of our discussion).

As with learning a foreign language, it's not enough to go to a country where the language is spoken, you must go with intent and desire to learn that language. With technology, teachers must WANT to learn it – that is accept that it might be a valid addition to a bag of existing tricks. At that point, where you are truly receptive (where you are AUTONOMOUS, another way of putting it), you find that it's all around you, and if you converse with others trying to learn it, easy to pick up.

Hope that helps, and sorry for the delay in replying,

Vance

The Future of Learning in a Networked World, and the Reality

The session reported in the previous post was really great. Shortly afterwards I reported to Webheads something like this (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/message/17653):

I said, in so many words: Starting on a good note, we had an excellent session in Ustream. It was set up and running by Kim Cofino who is to be Jen Wagner's guest on Women of Web 2.0 this week. She'll be worth listening to. She has twittered me recordings of the session here:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/TKRcHIoaxJPcdL2rwLIJW5.VBYK3cgTY (view in popup
if any problem), and http://www.flickr.com/photos/superkimbo/sets/72157603729759649/

Doug Symington was kind enough, not to mention being on the ball enough, to webcast the event, and we're hoping to enlist him for a similar favor on Jan 18.

Now, for the downside, you never know what you'll encounter when you go on these gigs at schools in strange places, in this case in a foreign country. We were asked to prepare presentations, or at least to be ready to address the issue of reading in the context of the school we were visiting, and we thought we were promised wireless. That didn't seem to have been registered beforehand, but no problem, we were walked up to the IP dept where someone dutifully typed in our fixed IP addresses. We returned downstairs and prepared to set up our session. I had the usual ambitious mix of online venues planned and was trying to reach Skype, when someone noticed my browser swimming and said, Skype? You won't be able to skype here, that's locked down. Meanwhile edtechtalk.com chat room was not getting anywhere, Java chat apparently locked down too.

I tried Elluminate. There are three proxies to configure, your browser, Elluminate itself, and java. I hit all three in succession. My computer is slow, so this took some time. Over the course of an hour of trying different browsers, and rebooting the computer, I realized that this kind of traffic was also blocked on the ports we were given to use. Meanwhile, the Ustream had started and our session had begun.

I couldn't reach Elluminate as promised but talking in Ustream I directed traffic to my slide show at
http://www.slideshare.net/vances/reading-and-the-internet-228977/. Doug Symington, via the Twitter and Skype and Worldbridges networks of Kim and Justin, our tech-hosts, had smoothly twigged to our change of plans and was webcasting the event as if we had planned it that way, despite my inability to reach him in our pre-arranged venues. So cool the way the network works.

But that is the reality of the networked world as it is, and the experience got us all reflecting on the state of learning in the online environments we find presently. Someone asked on the futureoflearning listserv how we found the facilities at ISB and I replied that it was impressively endowed with technology, but we had trouble with the firewalls. Kim responded that we would have had any kind of connectivity we wanted had we requested what we needed in advance, but I hadn't intended my comments to reflect on her or her school. So I dashed off an email that I thought was worth blogging, and here it is.

----------------------------------------------------------

I didn't mean to complain about anyone or facilities or turnout at what has been an incredible experience. I was simply characterizing the nature of the beast. There is so much we can do through systems we know and control ourselves, but turning up on site with a laptop and trying to connect in the familiar ways is never going to work they way you expect unless you have a clear and robust connection to the Internet, and that doesn't happen in many schools anywhere. So connectivity problems are to be expected and I'm always impressed that things work so well.

Kim and her colleagues were switched on and accommodating. I had arranged for a webcast but our webcaster, Doug Symington in Vancouver, was already in the Ustream that they had set up for us at ISB so it was but a hiccup on my part to try (and fail) to reach him through Skype etc but discover he was already there and streaming through this network of which Kim and Justin were already a part.

Anyone turning up almost on spec to attempt complex Internet logistics through a firewall is going to be thrown off stride a notch, but the wonder of it all is that it connects and works. Hopefully the FUTURE of networked learning will entail more of a superhighway rather than this potholed road we sometimes find ourselves bumping along on, but we are on the road, and it's great to meet and have opportunities to work productively with its denizens along the way.

We had a similar interesting experience with the accommodating Thai teachers in Khorat. Our program of blogging etc required that they have Google accts but the Google spam guards attempted to thwart us when they detected multiple attempts from the same computers to start Gmail accounts, so almost half the teachers were not able to proceed through the gatekeepers at Google's website. What to do? The IT dept suggested that we reconfigure proxy2 to proxy3 etc, and lo and behold all these teachers were going into browser settings and figuring it out. It was a hiccup but in the end another hurdle smilingly overcome.

I found Elluminate blocked from Khorat (and also my own Homestead site with the handout I'd prepared for the workshop) but Adobe interactive presentation software worked (flash memory to the rescue on the latter issue) and I was able to connect with Alex who'd announced his Adobe session in the wiki. BUT 20 min into that my LAN password expired and I was thrown out of there. It was my excuse to go to lunch, but again, I don't wish to appear to be complaining about these techno challenges. The wonder of it is that we put people in touch around the world despite significant challenges.

Things can't improve until we describe the pitfalls. The wonderful thing about progressing through an environment like what we found in Thailand (and what I find in many countries I visit throughout the world) is that we have a chance to step outside our ivory towers and discover the reality on the ground that covers most of the planet, and then find means of coping with what is there. I really don't mean to be whinging about what we encounter at one site or another. My message is intended to be two-fold. One (fold?) is to acknowledge and describe the situation, the reality as it exists, and the other is to marvel at how people overcome obstacles to achieve the connectivity for which there is an overwhelming desire. By overwhelming, I mean to suggest that the movement for net neutrality is eventually going to overwhelm obstacles to it. Or at least I hope so.