Interview with Alex Hayes from EDUPOV

On  September 15, 2010, the combination TESOL pp107 Multiliteracies course, TESOL Arabia EdTech SIG professional development series, and the regular Webheads meeting each Sunday noon GMT conducted an interview with Alex Hayes.  Alex is the CEO of EDUPOV (http://www.edupov.com/), a company that sells wearable technology for education.  Because it's wearable, it presents itself from the wearer's point of view, or POV. 

Alex left us his PhD proposal to read in preparation for his talk:
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1_TGVgWsJjbx5f0wxLQPSSjdsAluvF2Bgpnk9XMw1K4Q

In reading this over, if I were a Wordle, the word I would make most prominent in Alex's proposal is CONNECTIVISM. On p.8/16 of his proposal Alex mentions the role of connectivism in networked learning to be one where participants build "a living literacy that embodies electronic connections amongst all other human considerations," which seems quite relevant to the topic of the Multiliteracies course. He says also that his proposed research "posits a Connectivist theoretical framework as most suited to examining  the risks inherent with adding more veillance to flexible education settings." Wearable POV technology is as rich with affordances (for vocational training, for example) as it is fraught with potential for invasion of privacy, especially when the technology is geo-locatable, contains photographs of others, etc.  These latter issues conjure a world of veillances: sousveillance, uberveillance, and of course surveillance, which we already (think we) know about (http://works.bepress.com/kmichael/187/).

This word 'connectivism' stood out for me because although Alex and I have never met in person, we have interacted on numerous occasions.  Alex and some friends of his held a relaxed chat for example as a keynote address at the 2009 WiAOC convergence, which I moderated (http://wiaoc09.pbworks.com/AlexHayes; I haven't located recording yet). Apart from that I have occasionally crossed paths online with Alex sometimes socially but always in connection with some learning event.  This is not surprising because connectivism is how we both learn best (Siemens, 2005: http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm).

Quite a lot of what I know about Alex I acquired not live but asynchronously, through podcasts (http://talkingvte.blogspot.com/, for example).  He is an organizer of conferences in Australia (e.g.http://mobilizethis.wikispaces.com/). Because Australia is a big country with huge distances separating learners from places they would previously have had to go in order to learn, their educational system tends to be strong on distance learning innovation, and the conferences Alex organizes feature speakers discussing how POV technologies help trainers overcome some problems inherent in those distances. Having had this wider context in which to understand Alex's work, I realize that participants in the multiliteracies course I'm teaching might, without this perspective, be wondering what connection his work has with them. 

Thus the frameworks underpinning Alex's work are not so apparent when Alex discusses the products of his work; however, I hope that we are modeling here with one another new insights into connected learning. One good example of connected learning was reported just the other day when a teacher in Brazil had her students blog and then requested comments on their posts through the Webheads list. This message reveals the serendipitous outcome of that:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/message/26545

Another practical intersection of Alex's work and pedagogy is where Alex mentions in his proposal the New Media Consortium's Horizon Report.  The NMC's annual reports of what's new on the near and distant horizon in educational technology make interesting assessments of trends for the near and far future: http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/. For example, this trend: "People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to. Life in an increasingly busy world where learners must balance demands from home, work, school, and family poses a host of logistical challenges with which today’s ever more mobile students must cope," http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/chapters/trends/ helps explain the prediction that "On the near-term horizon — that is, within the next 12 months — are mobile computing and open content." http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/chapters/technologies/

So I invited Alex to talk with us because I too feel that mobile technologies are crucial to the near future, if not the present, of connected learning, which is in essence the field that Alex is working in. I think mobile technology is moving faster than teachers are at this point; for example in Argentina, almost all bars and restaurants have wifi which customers frequently access through their mobiles, which they all seem to have; yet classrooms there block mobiles and seem resistant to technology of any stripe. Where I am in the UAE we are at the stage where all students have mobiles, often more than one, and bring them to class, and use them to get on the Internet, yet teachers here in the UAE are not really exploiting even computer-based internet that much in teaching (I mean, falling short of its true potential; mobile tech hardly at all: Stevens, 2010, http://tinyurl.com/vance2010calico). I noticed when traveling this summer that more and more travelers are carrying smart phone and using them in conjunction with Facebook for what they used to do in Internet cafes.

This question of how what Alex talked about is relevant to teachers touches on the issue of cohesion, which has been raised in the multiliteracies course I'm teaching. There is some suggestion that cohesion could best be achieved if we worked from one learning platform (Desire to Learn, for example) rather than spreading ourselves thin on the Internet (wikis, blogs, Ning, YahooGroup and Grouply).

Cohesion should not be confused with simplicity. Simple things are easy to understand.  For example if I show you black and white and frame these with respect to a color scheme, this is cohesive, and easy to understand.  But if I explain that color is only one aspect of human subjectivity, and that the importance of color might depend to some extent on whether you are right or left brained, and whether your eyes can detect colors in the first place, whether you have a prior schema based on racial prejudices or the color of hats in early cowboy movies, then you might feel that this topic is not so simplistic, though we might be able still to supply cohesion to our discussion.

We would have to provide a platform for our discussion.  If I chose just one then this might simplify our task of discussing the topic, but when the topic itself is multiliteracies and connectivism and how cohesion is achieved when people try to learn and disseminate knowledge on the Internet, then not modeling how that works through some sort of emulation of real life in choice of learning management system could in the long run be detrimental, like presenting simplified native-language based language learning materials as opposed to exposing students to authentically communicative situations.  Of course if the students know nothing of the language then some simplification is in order, but if the topic is multiliteracies and connectivism and new ways of learning and knowing via networked learning environments, rank beginners are becoming fewer and farther between.  Some degree of immersion is appropriate.

One way to draw a distinction between beginner and experienced learners of a topic is to ask whether they are ready to learn on their own.  If they need guidance at the start of their learning path, then the teacher can consider simplifying both the material to be learned and the platform for delivery. But if the learners are capable of driving their own learning, then a real-world simulation might be the best platform for them.

This what I was hoping to discuss with Alex, some of the connections between his work and new literacies, and how we achieve connected knowledge by mobilizing that!

MobilizeThis! and StreamFolio are two initiatives of Alex's I also hoped to get him to talk more about.

• http://mobilizethis.wikispaces.com/
• http://www.streamfolio.com/

Also, Alex and I had both reviewed the slide show here
http://smarterware.org/6561/what-to-expect-from-google-me?
which I intended to ask about with respect to a podcast Alex left online recently at the Australian eLearning09 conference: http://talkingvte.blogspot.com/2009/12/elearning09-alex-hayes-streamfolio.html

This would have been a discussion of interface vis a vis what people actually do when using social networks online. The issue of privacy would have come up (veillance and uberveillance, and Adams's thoughts on distinguishing your networks by strength of ties, and preventing items meant for one set of ties, close friends for example, from getting out into another, a professional network for example). You can judge how closely we came to these goals when you listen to the recording of the interview in Elluminate at: http://tinyurl.com/150910alexhayes.

Tiny URL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/evomlit100915hayes


One further comment, and thanks for this one, not sure I deserve it but I am humbled

A cookbook for 21st century project management

I just returned to Abu Dhabi from the CALICO conference in Amherst where I talked about my chapter in the book for which I was a section editor and that was featured on CALICO’s portal web page prior to the conference https://calico.org/page.php?id=452;. The book is on CALL in limited technological contexts and my chapter  “Shifting sands, shifting paradigms:  Challenges to developing 21st century learning skills in the United Arab Emirates” discusses not limited technology per se, but limited experience with the latest uses of technology causing educators to not exploit its full potential and benefits.  I point out in my chapter what some of the hurdles are preventing teachers from embracing the new technologies and I set forth a strategy for overcoming them.  In a nutshell the strategy explains how we can be change agents by getting our colleagues to interact with us using 21st century Web 2.0 technology tools and writing use of these tools into the curriculum where they are taught by teachers whom we help to familiarize with some of the uses and affordances of these tools.

I posted the slide show outlining the chapter at Slideshare.net, direct link  http://tinyurl.com/vance2010amherst. I put the full text of my final draft of the book chapter itself at Google Docs and create a tiny url for it at http://tinyurl.com/vance2010calico.  The text is hyperlinked from the slide show, and I linked to the slides from the Google Doc. I hope to make a slidecast for the slide show and podcast that at http://vancestevens.podomatic.com/ if I can find a spare moment.  This would further model my ideas for teacher training, and for helping students acquire the multimedia skills essential to communication in the 21st century.

The paper articulates what is needed for several projects I’ve got going at the moment.  The slides would probably get me through several talks I’m giving in Brazil and Argentina in July and August this summer.  For example, in my presentations at BrazTESOL I’ll be talking about some of the affordances of teaching and learning through a PLN (personal learning network) and the social networking, tagging, RSS, and paradigm shifting associated with that concept.

I know I need to couch all these topics, unfamiliar to many, in terms that teachers can easily understand, to help them see the benefits and importance to them. It won’t be the first time I have addressed such audiences; for example, explaining tagging to Ministry of Education English teachers at their most recent Nile TESOL Conference, where they were in Cairo and I presented online from Abu Dhabi  http://justcurious.posterous.com/powerful-ideas-and-tools-for-getting-the-most-0.

I wrote the book chapter in 2009 after having proposed a set of technological innovations to a previous director of the department where I work, but I have since got my teeth into some other projects, which I hope will help teachers learn more about the technologies they might be using with students as they prepare to teach from materials I am writing in conjunction with one of these projects.

Curriculum for students

In curriculum development, I am helping to develop a computing support course to students in an intensive English program at the Petroleum Institute.  My part of this project is to create curriculum introducing tools such as Google Docs and Delicious to support an English dept. focus on collaboration, team building, and Internet search.  The problem for teachers is that in order for them to effectively teach these skills to students they have to themselves be experienced users of the tools.  As this is not yet the case, I will need to find ways for the English teachers to use the tools in the run-up to these components being taught.

My plan is to create documents for them in Google Docs, create a project tag, and show the teachers how we can track latest versions of shared documents pertaining to our own collaboration and find them online via Delicious and other tools that will track tags.

Community building and professional development for teachers

I’ve been speaking and writing at length for much of the time I’ve been at the Petroleum Institute on these tools and on my many experiments with how they can be used with students as well as teachers in their professional development, but it is only recently that there has been wide enough interest among colleagues with whom I work face-to-face to allow me to take my ideas mainstream.

One manifestation of this interest is where colleagues and I in TESOL Arabia are rejuvenating the TESOL Arabia EdTech-SIG with emphasis on online potentials for promoting the “three C’s” of collaboration, communication, and creativity.  Jim Buckingham and I kicked off this latest phase in a joint presentation recently at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi where we connected with Phil Cozens presenting on-site that same morning in far-away Ras Al Khaima http://justcurious.posterous.com/modeling-and-demonstrating-professional-devel.  We used the Adobe Connect platform that PI recently purchased and where I have been granted permission to set up and conduct online meetings.

Since that success, those interested in taking the lead on promoting use of such tools in the UAE have met online to discuss leveraging them to help bring teachers up to speed with technology throughout the UAE.  To this end we might have regular online training sessions this coming year, and the English teachers at the PI might want to get involved, in part as a preparation for teaching the intensive English course in the Fall.  So these developments could play into one another.

A further opportunity for teacher training will arise when I teach my PPOT (Principles and Practices of Online Teaching course on Multiliteracies online again for TESOL from September 3 to October 6, 2010 http://www.tesol.org/s_tesol/sec_document.asp?CID=664&DID=2642. I am planning to run the course in conjunction with a face-to-face continuing education course for colleagues at the PI where the live audience can benefit from interaction with the distributed one and visa versa. If English teachers at the PI take advantage of that then this will serve to ground them in some of the tools and competencies they’ll need to most effectively teach the materials I’m creating for our students.  One of the English teachers completed my previous rendition of that course http://tinyurl.com/21centuryskills4pdo, so we’ve made a start here already.

Tagging

To organize and promote such courses and show how the many parts of the overall endeavor are loosely joined, I am starting to conceive of a cookbook for 21st century project management.  Here is its first item, a recipe for getting a project off the ground using open education resources.

1.       The first thing you should do is agree on a tag for your project.  For example, the one we agreed on for the TESOL Arabia EdTech SIG was taedtechsig.  Some of us had already been using uaedu which seemed like a nice choice until we tested it in Twitter and with Spezify and found it was already in use and that some of the hits were not especially educational: http://twitter.com/#search?q=eduae and http://spezify.com/#/eduae.  Similarly, we found that edtechsig produced hits from NileTESOL in Cairo http://spezify.com/#/edtechsig. Now this brings up another point.  If we wish to aggregate content only for us then we need to create our own unique tag (taedtechsig produces no competing hits, thereby fitting this bill).  However, if we wish to call attention to colleagues in Egypt to what we are doing then we could use their tag, and our content will appear when they attempt to aggregate their own.

So two affordances of tags can be immediately seen.  First, they can help you aggregate content on your topic.  That is, if we want to see content placed on the Web related to this topic, we can use certain tools to locate and pull into one place content where its creators have used that tag, and second, if we want to create content and bring it to the attention of colleagues in a common endeavor,  we can tag it, and hope they will be able to find it.

For TESOL Arabia EdTech SIG I will use the two tags that will cause content I view or create to aggregate with other content tagged taedtechsig, and also I’ll tag the same content edtechsig in an effort to get the attention of our colleagues in Egypt.

2.       The second way to loosely join the disparate parts of a 21st century project is to tag them.  Tagging can be done initially by creators of content. However, consumers of content can also tag content they find online using Delicious or Diigo, or other such tools.

Delicious for example can be used to illustrate to both teachers and students how quickly a web site tagged by one user can become known to another.  Delicious is a great way for anyone collaborating on a project involving Internet research to see what has been found by team members, or a way of aggregating content on a tag; see for example, http://delicious.com/tag/writingmatrix.

As another example, both creators and consumers of content on Flickr can tag there. In other words, if I post a photo on Flickr I can give that photo (or set of photos) a tag. However, I can also tag photos I find interesting on Flickr (assuming I’m logged on to Flickr, and that the photo has been granted a creative commons license allowing others to tag it).  Many are familiar with this same concept from Facebook, where we can tag photos of friends there, and the site provides a means for seeing on one page all the photos tagged for a particular user.

So to summarize this as a recipe in the cookbook, once your group has settled on a tag, then all members should tag as many sites used by the group as possible. This can be done by both creators and consumers of that content. Group members who create content (post photos or create blog posts, for example) should apply the agreed on tag to that content.  Those who view that content online should tag it using their preferred social bookmark system.  Then search tools such as Spezify and Delicious and Diigo can be used to find content as it aggregates around that tag.

Another important use of tags is as ‘hash tags’ or #tags in Twitter.  Using #tags has affordances beyond a simple search.  You can search in Twitter and find #tags (and other content matching your search) but if you use #tags then you can click on them to bring up all content using that #tag.

The 3 C’s

Use of these techniques puts the “3 C’s” of 21st Century Learning into your online projects and those of your students.  The three C’s are communication, collaboration, and creativity.  Here are a few ways that these are addressed through the cookbook for 21st century project management.  These lists are simply starters; they could be added to endlessly.

COMMUNICATION
(how you can communicate with others in your group using these techniques)

• Create a tag for your project
• Create a portal and link all of your stuff here
• Create a #tag
• Tag all sites and associated sites in Delicious and Diigo
• Tag other artifacts as needed
• Set up Tag Games to see what others are tagging

COLLABORATION
(how you can work with others online)

• Wiki for content (like this one!)
• Etherpad clone
• Ning Alternatives (see http://tinyurl.com/ningthing)
• Cloudworks
• Spruz
• Mixxt
• Grou.ps
• Etc. etc.

CREATIVITY
(some ways you can be creative and innovative using Web 2.0 tools)

• Wordle
• Wallwisher
• Tag Gallaxy (works only with Flickr)

In an attempt to crowdsource additions to this list, I've created a wiki here:

http://21centuryskills4pdo.pbworks.com/FrontPage

If you'd like to add more tools, visit that link and add them, and I'll synch the lists from time to time
(must be a better way :-( Vance :-))

Thanks to these tweeters in my PLN :-))

Modeling your PLN: Backchanneling with Students

When many of us think about PLN, or Personal Learning Network, what we envisage involves colleagues sharing information in a social network or community of practice (see http://delicious.com/vancestevens/PLN and http://delicious.com/vancestevens/PLE for numerous examples; and I've always liked Scott Leslie's nice collection of PLE diagrams: http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/PLE+Diagrams.

We less often think about setting up PLN's with students, but at http://tinyurl.com/vance-socialnet09 I list one of the ten paradigm shifts that I think educators must make as they move into facilitating learning in the 21st century as being "transfer [or] using technology and social media in one walk of life and then transferring those heuristics for learning into the classroom and other teaching situations. For example, people who frequently use Facebook or Twitter might tend not to use social networking or backchanneling in the classroom, because they don't see how to transfer what they do in one part of their life to how they manage their more formal teaching and learning environment, because it's not in the curriculum, etc."

Educators backchannel through their PLNs but in fact we should all be doing this with students (see "Where 3 R's meet 3 C's" about what we should be teaching as 21st century life skills: creativity, communication, collaboration - http://www.britannica.com/bps/additionalcontent/18/34037342/The-Three-Rs-Meet-the-Three-Cs). We should be modeling how we network in order to show students how they can do the same in order to become productive knowledge workers in those jobs in the future that haven't been invented yet, as articulated in http://webheadlink.wordpress.com/2007/01/08/jobs-that-havent-been-invented-yet/.

The problem is where networks might collide, as when we mix our social networks on Facebook or Twitter with the very different worlds of our students, and risk distracting clutter in our professional networks if students are allowed into them, or suspicion of impropriety at worst.

Twitter itself has introduced a solution: LISTS. Now you can create a list for your students or separate classes of students and add them to the appropriate list without having to "follow" them. In this way, they don't appear in your Twitter stream, but you can open a LIST and catch up with what they are up to that way.

There are other means of backchanneling in classrooms. Edmodo is one which I have used with students. It works well if people in the class monitor it, but the problem is, it isn't 'real'. We go to Twitter every day in the course of our normal workflow. You check Edmodo only when it occurs to you. Your students do the same. It lacks traction. But many teachers use it as a backchannel tool similar to Twitter, and because you need a code to join a group, it's safe for students.

Another good backchannel tool is Etherpad. This tool was so good that Google bought it to use its technology in Wave. Consequently the tool at http://etherpad.com is shutting down this month (http://etherpad.com/ep/blog/posts/transition-update). However its code has been released as opensource (http://code.google.com/p/etherpad/) so it has already been resurrected in other implementations, and its code will live on as part of Google Wave, which could serve as a model for backchanneling with students or on any kind of project in their productive lives in the future (though a tool that would be effective with students needs to be a lot simpler to use than Wave is right now).

You can use Delicious or Twitter or Google to find other sites that have used the Etherpad code already; e.g. http://twitter.com/#search?q=etherpad and http://delicious.com/tag/etherpad. Readers of this post could help one another by leaving links in comments below to sites that use the Etherpad code; for example: http://piratepad.net/ and http://typewith.me/.

As to why we'd want to backchannel with students, I've found a couple of articles that explain the rationale and suggest some tools:

• This one is something of a classic: http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/twitter-for-academia/
• Here's an article that talks about 9 ways Twitter can be used in the classroom: http://derekbruff.com/teachingwithcrs/?p=472. These include note-taking, sharing resources, commenting, amplifying, asking, questions, helping one another, offering suggestions, building community, and opening the classroom
• For backchannel tools: http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2010/01/five-platforms-for-classroom-back.html. The tools introduced are Chatzy, Todaysmeet, Edmodo, Present.ly, and Google Wave
• I've got almost 200 bookmarks for Twitter here: http://delicious.com/vancestevens/twitter, many of them mentioning ways Twitter can be used with students.

This posting derives directly from my PLN.  It was originally a response to Lori Teng's comment on my post in one of my other blogs here: http://justcurious.posterous.com/how-to-start-your-pln-on-twitter.  If Lori hadn't commented on that post, and triggered in my brain all the synapses there I'd been storing up related to backchanneling with students, this article would never have been written.

This post therefore is yet another example of how a PLN works to cause us to model and demonstrate for one another, to reflect on and practice what we are learning, and to percolate how we develop our knowledge back into our communities and networks in an ongoing process of lifelong learning.

NOTES:
This post figured into a presentation I gave for a TESOL Arabia chapter event April 10, 2010.  The blog posting for that event, including a link to its recording, is here:
http://justcurious.posterous.com/modeling-and-demonstrating-professional-devel

Here are some Twitter reactions to this post:
http://screencast.com/t/NjI5YWY0M

Nurturing your PLN for everyone’s ongoing professional development

This is the blog post I intended to fire off after the last TESOL Arabia conference March 11-13 at Zayed University in Dubai.  I made a presentation there that I did not complete.  The part I gave was recorded here: http://tinyurl.com/100312vance-dubai.  The slides of all I had intended to say are here: http://www.slideshare.net/vances/nurturing-your-pln-for-everyones-ongoing-professional-development. Since they were posted online they have been favorited by a number of people :-)

 

http://twitter.com/VanceS/status/10410955223 shows the above Twitpic of Gavin Dudeney presenting at TESOL Arabia, Dubai, March 13, 2010.  I took the pic on my iPhone during his presentation, Twitpic'd it, and Gavin showed it to his audience when he checked his Twitter feed 5 minutes later in his presentation.

TESOL Arabia conferences in the UAE have not historically been well connected.  Often they are held in hotels where there may be wireless only in the lobby, or perhaps even in some of the presentation rooms, but in all venues presenters could expect connectivity to be patchy to non-existent.  Certainly you wouldn't plan to rely on an internet connection under such conditions, and so I arrived at TESOL Arabia this year with a PowerPoint presentation safely stored on my laptop and backed up to a flash drive, having made no preparation for delivering it to anyone beyond the brick and mortar campus at ZU apart from a mere mention on my PLN that I might try to webcast from there.

The part of the presentation that I didn't give because I ran out of time was to be a complaint against conferences which forced participants to remove themselves from their networks (fortunately, not an issue at this happily interconnected conference in Dubai - the only issue was that hardly anyone was using the connectivity; but that's the next step beyond the scope of this post, and something I hope to address in a TESOL Arabia chapter presentation from Abu Dhabi April 10, 2010; preliminary info at: http://bit.ly/Apr10_prez_TA_Auh).

As I ran out of time, I was leading to the question of what TESOL Arabia, or any viable configuration of practitioners interested in futhering their professional development, is or should be.  To arrive at what I was leading up to I had presented a distinction between groups, communities, and networks, and was showing how knowledge resides in networks and is passed around the network through modeling and demonstrating practical applications of knowledge applied to practice. In this model of how knowledge is disseminated in the 21st century, I suggest that it is never appropriate to cut anyone, at any time, students in class, participants at a conference, or knowledge workers attending meetings, off from their networks.

As a result of this trend, professional development less and less happens mainly at conferences. For many professionals, development happens every day in the course of using Skype, Twitter, or Facebook, reading blogs and wikis, or viewing and sharing tutorials and presentations on YouTube, TeacherTube, Drop.io, uStream, TED Talks, etc. etc.  This means that for many professionals, face-to-face conferences are of decreasing importance.

As most of us agree that learning is mainly social, such conferences seem most appreciated for their networking potentials rather than for the papers presented there, which more and more often can be read or their recordings viewed online, as archives of such materials become more and more widely distributed. Travel to distant cities to participate on site in conferences has become inefficient and less necessary than before, and is less crucial for gaining knowledge than opportunities available in cyberspaces dedicated to education.  Accordingly, one can argue that face-to-face meetings (in the workplace) risk a similar obsolescence, or that the notion of forcing students to attend classes is becoming archaic when podcasts of lectures are available, and indeed interaction around their subject matter can be made more rewarding using a combination of synchronous and asynchronous online resources.

In other words, to face-to-face gatherings, add a networked dimension.  Hold the meeting, or conference, or class in a brick and mortar edifice as usual, but configure the space so that it lets in the network. Now you have the best of all worlds that blended learning has to offer.  Participants in the physical spaces are able to look each other in the eye and benefit from each other's company, but they can share what they are doing with the wider world, or draw in people and resources from their PLNs or personal learning networks. In this way consumers of content at a face-to-face gathering can generate content online, and as this content is reflected on, remixed, and recycled, and filtered back to participants either physically at or virtually enjoying the live event, everyone involved would be learning more than they possibly could if the event were cut off from the networks of those who participated.

There is opposition to this notion. Wide Web of diversions gets laptops evicted from lecture halls is an interesting article, recently discussed on the Webheads list, about how PLN's can be distracting, but I think this will continue to be a problem only in the short term.  This article calls attention to how inappropriate use of PLNs in contexts where greater focus is called for can be detrimental to the individuals who engage in such behaviors.  With greater experience and sophistication, such behavior is likely to dissipate, as people come to distinguish the affordances of network enhancements to how they learn in face-to-face situations from uses of networks that are decidedly unprofessional in such contexts.

I had meant to suggest in my presentation (as I did in the slides) that in future, successful conferences and professional organizations will have to combine opportunities for face-to-face interpersonal connection with the connectivity to allow seamless interaction with distributed personal learning networks. Those that do not will become decreasingly relevant I am aware that not all agree that this should be the case. As the article indicates, not everyone sees networks intrusion as a positive force in the dynamics of face-to-face interaction.  So I was hoping to raise the question, if conferences are networked, who benefits? who loses?

I argued this point February 20, 2009 at the AACE's Spaces of Interaction online conversation on improving traditional conferences, http://aace.org/globalu/. The last slide posted at http://www.slideshare.net/vances/success-in-modeling-blended-learning-in-theory-and-practice-at-f2f-and-online-conferences has the dinosaur image, and the talk itself was recorded and is available here: http://aace.na4.acrobat.com/p92907860/

At that event, George Siemens agreed that conferences that do not provide and encourage networking are "unacceptable" but this is what one expects at annual TESOL conferences, for example, which are always held in corporate convention centers, and where getting computers inside and setting them up and networking them is done by unionized labor, and any bandwidth provided is done at a surcharge that prices it beyond the range of most individual educators.  Even to get a data show to make a presentation there, the presenter has to pay an inflated fee to the convention center to cover the costs of union wages and to line the pockets of the shareholders investing in the convention center, a mindset quite at odds with that of most educators who pay so much of their limited resources to attend those conferences.

The CALL-IS (interest section) in TESOL has done a remarkable job of gaming this system so that a room full of Internet ready computers has been available for presentations at all TESOL conferences since the mid-80's, and I've made a number of presentations at TESOL-sponsored events where thanks to TESOL subsidy for its own sponsored events, Internet was provided.  

One of the most memorable of these was at an academic session CALL-IS put on in Salt Lake City in 2002 http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/academic.htm.  Each interest section has the right to place its academic session in the program and as the event is TESOL-sponsored it is possible to request an Internet connection.  Thus the panelists at this event were asked if they NEEDED an internet connection. Bearing in mind that this would be expensive, and even when Internet is expected, experienced presenters always prepare a backup slideshow that can be delivered unplugged if needed, and so as not to waste precious resources, every panelist but me said, no, they didn't need it.

What would I need it for?  I wasn't exactly sure, but I had the notion to stream the session live. The year before I had been asked to give a plenary address at an IATEFL conference in Nicosia, and we had streamed that along with several other of the talks at that event http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/cyprus2001/index.html.  This had come about because on a mailing list, Neteach or TESLCAL, someone had mentioned they wanted to do a voice hookup for educational purposes and Eric Baber had replied that he had an underutilized streaming server which he was using to deliver live voice and video language courses from NetLearn Languages that he would be willing to offer as a solution to what the lady wanted to do.  

I twigged immediately to the potential of what Eric was offering the community.  I wrote him and asked if I could use it to stream from Cyprus.  I don't remember how it came about, but Sophie Ioannou-Georgiou, who was in charge of the conference, was so keen on the idea that eventually all conference presenters were asked if they would consent to be streamed, and for all those who replied affirmative, Eric set up web pages where each presentation could be accessed live, and where the recording could later be replayed.  He did this all for free, and the conference was a great success especially due to this remarkable commitment and innovation.

Curious footnotes:

• I was the first presenter at the conference, the first to be streamed, and the first to be recorded.  When the second plenary was streamed and recorded, the person managing the stream at our end, unfamiliar with the process, over-wrote my file with the recording of the second presentation, and my talk was forever lost to posterity.
• Michael Coghlan, another visionary as ahead of his time as I, was the only presenter at the conference who had offered to be streamed IN.  That is, whereas a dozen presentations were streamed worldwide FROM the conference, only Michael had realized he could take advantage of the option of making a talk at the conference from a remote location, in his case Adelaide, Australia.  Michael's session was a concurrent one.  All the presentations took place in good sized auditoriums, in which Michael's talk only had a few attendees.  I was managing the stream in from the podium, Michael asked me more than once how many people were in the audience, and more than once I evaded the question, not having the heart to tell him only three or four people.  Not only that but one lady in the audience was a fan of Michael's and had come to the presentation specifically to meet him.  When it became obvious that he wasn't actually there, she complained loudly how cheated she felt when in fact she was witnessing a pioneering event illustrating how we were on the verge of realizing grand potentials for global collaboration in independent learning and ongoing professional development.

This audience reaction to our early online adventures was nothing unusual.  Later in our collaborations together, Michael and Buthaina Alothman both flew in to Abu Dhabi to present with me live and in person from the main auditorium at the Petroleum Institute as a part of a virtual event: one of John Hibbs's last epic 24-hour Global Learn Days http://bfranklin.edu/gld/.  I had announced the event to my colleagues at the PI but unbeknownst to me there was an important rugby match on at the time and I was later told that that event was well attended.  Michael and Buth and I presented from the stage of a 100 seat auditorium, which was packed during our presentation with three or at the most maybe 4 people, but, get this, we counted at least 60 in the synchronous online chat.  Buthaina archived the event here:  http://alothman-b.tripod.com/wia-buth-gld.htm.

Although the concept has been slow to take off, it's getting these days more common for there to be strong online components at on-site conferences.  I can think of numerous examples: Shanghai 2.0, NECC, Educon 2.0 etc etc.  IATEFL has been expanding its online events; for example at Harrogate this year: http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2010/, and CALL-IS has made a major effort to announce a series of streamed events from the Eletronic Village, Boston TESOL 2010, http://academics.smcvt.edu/cbauer-ramazani/TESOL/2010/Webcasts/Sessions-Schedule.htm.

But getting back to the UAE, the TESOL Arabia conference this year was at Zayed University in Dubai, a remarkably beautiful campus with ubiquitous Internet. I got to the conference in time for the plenary at 9:00 on Thursday. I saw Gavin Dudeney with a spare seat beside him, sat down and said hello, and he remarked that the wireless was working quite well there.  I pulled out my iPhone and sure enough it was.  I tweeted to my network that this was a good sign.  I might be able to present live at 11:00, as I had "mentioned" earlier on the Webheads list.

After the plenary session, I went to the room where my own session would be and half listened to the presenter at 10:00 there while firing up my laptop and connecting flawlessly to the wireless.  Elluminate came up perfectly.  I uploaded my presentation to the whiteboard in Elluminate. Elluminate is available to Webheads thanks to a grant from Learning Times, whom I can never thank enough for this remarkable service, one of many pieces loosely joined in a network of globally connected educators.  Speaking of networks, I then tweeted to my PLN that I was preparing to go live online, and I sent an email to the webheads list with the same information. When it was my turn to set up at the front of the room I had already been joined by one or two people in Elluminate.

I was easily able to record my presentation, both voice and webcam.  I turned the cam occasionally to give a sense of the surroundings, not just present a talking head.  Cristina Costa joined in and although circumstances compelled me to present somewhat didactically, I managed to engage her for a moment in reminiscence of a chat we had had the summer before with Etienne Wenger, where she had remarked that she knew she was a member of a community of practice when her practice changed. The audience, sometimes sceptical at such events, warmed to the occasion and became noticably relaxed and engaged as we went along.  Their satisfaction plus that of the online audience, plus getting everything to work and connect, all presented more than one ball to juggle.  The last ball to pull out of the air is closing the Elluminate session, then retrieving the URL of the recording minutes later, then posting the URL onto various spaces including Twitter, the webheads list, and blogs.  Later someone asked me to put it on Facebook, they could get it there.  The Twitter posting makes a particularly good link for the slides and session recording.



The point I'm making here is that this is the way conferences should be.  We shouldn't all have to leave our networks at the door, or at home, or wherever the last hotspot was.  Face-to-face conferences are augmented by connectivity and backchanneling among participants, as are our classrooms.

This is another important point: how we connect at conferences is how we connect in real life.  And that should carry over to how we connect with students and they with us and how we all connect with peers both face-to-face and online.  Conferences are places we go to network and to learn.  As I pointed out in my presentation, echoing Stephen Downes, teaching is modeling and demonstrating.  This is what we should be doing at our conferences, modeling the tools we can use with each other and YES with students.  None of this connectivity should be blocked or suppressed.  The Washington Post article referenced earlier may indicate an attention deficite disorder inherent in multitasking but it also reveals a phase through which we all must pass.

As a teenager I used to show off to peers by driving fast and irresponsibly, in an era where seatbelts were not the norm.  Now in the UAE I see much evidence of this same lack of sophistication. But we all grow out of it.  We educate one another how to maximize the potentials of the technologies we harness while avoiding the pitfalls that many of us toy with when the technlogy is new to us.  In other words, if people are checking cell phone messages in class or meetings, diverting attention from the meeting itself, they are hopefully going through a temporary phase.  In time it will become understood that there is a time and place for that.

It used to be that in my classes students would sneak onto MSN messenger.  Now they almost never do that. These days they might switch in and out of Facebook, but Facebook is less intrusive.  Use of mobiles is more of a problem now, but in time we will have learned how to use them appropriately to effectively leverage our learning by widening our networks and accessing data needed for class or workplace intelligence. (Actually I found today two of my students on MSN, but it turned out they were in communication with each other, back-channeling in the classroom. I thought that this was an appropriate use of the tool).

I remember one time Gavin mentioned in a recorded presentation his discomfort with people interacting with their media while he was presenting, but now I'm glad to see that he has his iPhone and laptop with him and happily uses them in enjoyment of always-on connectivity. The back channel at the conference was all aTwitter.  At one point Gavin asked his Twitter network for advice on what to do evenings in Dubai, and I rose to the occasion with the definitive 140-character travel guide for Dubai: "@dudeneyge in Dubai, go to the creek, cross it in an abra, walk through the souks at either end of the abra ride, Deira & Bur Dubai, & dhows" <http://twitter.com/VanceS/status/10368130620>.  I don't know if Gavin ever got the chance to actually follow my itinerary, but at least he and hundreds of my followers were 140 characters wiser for what Gavin was missing.

That's how knowledge spreads throughout a network, and what we should see a lot more of at face-to-face conferences, wherever they are held, although where they are actually held is getting to be increasingly irrelevant in our increasingly networked world.

PS: I just stumbled on Terry Freedman's compilation of resources at http://www.ictineducation.org/free-stuff/ and found there an article on "What I look for in a conference". On the wish list is "#7 I wanna be connected: The best conference will have wi-fi throughout the venue, including the hotel. There must also be a conference Twitter feed, and Flickr and Technorati tags."  Indeed.


TinyURL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/230310advanced

Who are you and what have you done lately?

The last time I was asked to write a personal assessment of my work I turned it into a blog post: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2007/11/who-are-you-and-what-do-you-do.html.  That was in November 2007 but now two years later, the time has come again to take stock of my professional self-perception, and here it is.

I feel that my work is having an impact on the field of social networking in education, and is getting some attention in the area of learner independence as well. I was invited in 2008 for example to participate in a Learner Autonomy SIG Pre-conference event at the annual IATEFL conference in Exeter, and I was asked to contribute an article to the SIG Newsletter on the topic. My take on the issue is that teachers must first become truly autonomous; and this in fact is the connection with social networking.

Stevens, Vance. (2007). The Multiliterate Autonomous Learner: Teacher Attitudes and the Inculcation of Strategies for Lifelong Learning Independence, Winter 2007 (Issue 42) . Retrieved November 9, 2007 from http://www.learnerautonomy.org/VanceStevens.pdf

• Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/vances/lets-start-with-teacher-autonomy-multiliteracies-and-lifelong-learning

• Recording: http://tinyurl.com/468qrp

There is no good comprehensive handbook on social networking of which I am aware (the best references on the topic tend to be circulated around the network). Social networking has to be done. In other words, in order to learn about it, people have to teach themselves through informal learning and collaboration with peers. The collaboration is important because in order to DO social networking, you have to have a network with which to experiment. So my work recently has been to promote and examine the formation of social networks and how they work. It is complex but intuitive at the same time; still the complexity makes it difficult to introduce the concept to those who are not engaged themselves (overtly) in social networking. This is again the link with learner autonomy. Teachers who know something about the topic introduce its many components gradually to those who want to learn, a premise which I have exercised in my several annual renditions lately of my course in Multiliteracies taught for TESOL (http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com), parts of which I have included in materials on Computer Literacy for students I teach face-to-face (http://issuu.com/vances/docs/social_networking_2009_lessons1-3), and also a short course for teachers taught for the first time in January of 2010 (http://tinyurl.com/21centuryskills4pdo).

My work with this process of introduction of both the content and process of social networking has evolved from looking at the topic from the evolution of groups to communities, to arrive at a perspective of distributed learning networks (I was invited to talk on groups, communities, and networks at the most recent TESOL conference, http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2009/04/global-and-local-visions-webheads-and.html). This has taken me through a line of inquiry examining the perspective of communities of practice, which had great traction earlier in the decade, and which I have been often asked to speak on recently. When I was asked to design and teach my TESOL course on multiliteracies a few years back this gave me further perspectives on the issue and brought my inquiries to bear on social networks, and the new theory of connectivism, which is considered to be a participatory or connection multiliteracy, depending on how that topic is viewed.

The many views on the topic are part of a paradigm shift for education, the nature of which my work has also examined (http://evomlit.wordpress.com/2010/01/09/how-can-teachers-deal-with-technology-overload/). The many aspects in perspectives that this shift impacts deeply influence my view of the role of computing in learning, and how students and teachers should be learning to prepare themselves for changes that can be expected in the way they will work and learn into the next decade. Most of us can sense that this change is impending, and I feel that my work helps educators to grasp the nature of that change and see how they can leverage it to their advantage and to the benefit of their students. I have feedback on this as I participate in communities of hundreds of teachers worldwide, and coordinate several, including a significant community called Webheads, much appreciated by its members (http://webheads.info). As I am often asked to speak on the topic, or am followed on Twitter (http://twitter.com/vances), or re-tweeted, or as comments are added to my blog posts, as people ask me to write articles, or to edit sections of professional journals, I become aware that my work is trickling out over networked communities and having some impact and is earning a modicum of respect among others interested in the topic (http://vancestevens.com/papers). I’m also encouraged my work is gaining in interest where I teach at the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi:
http://curiousvance.wordpress.com/2010/01/18/class-finale-january-19-2010-live-worldwide-webcast-from-7-to-830-a-m-gmt/ .

Another aspect of my work is change agency. I realize how difficult it is to be a change agent, and that change typically takes a long time to first penetrate and then filter up through an institution, but I’m getting some indications that the filtering has begun at the PI, and I hope to be a part of that through some aspects of social networking that might benefit colleagues where I work, and which could be taught (that is modeled, demonstrated) in turn to students (e.g. http://curiousvance.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/earthbridges-earthcast10-and-earth-day-at-pi-april-22-2010/).  After all, students are the focus of this work, but students by definition are learners, and that includes all of us.

Links updated after now-defunct Ning and Posterous blogs exported to Wordpress

Modeling social media in groups, communities, and networks

I'm filling in this placeholder with links to my presentation at the AVEALMEC/ARCALL online conference on Social Networking, November 5-8, 2009, http://avealmec.org.ve/.

• The complete schedules and PDF promotional documents for this conference are here: http://avealmec.org.ve/moodle/
• This link gives a good overview of presenters with links to their presentation recordings http://avealmec.org.ve/moodle/course/view.php?id=4

My presentation is entitled Modeling social media in groups, communities, and networks. The presentation took place November 6, 2009, at 18:30 GMT.

• The writeup is here:
  http://tinyurl.com/vance-socialnet09
• The presentation recording is here: http://tinyurl.com/vance091106wiziq
• The slides are posted here: http://www.slideshare.net/vances/modeling-social-media-in-groups-communities-and-networks-socialnetworking-2009-online-conference
  

As the presentation was on knowledge dissemination and sharing throughout networks, it naturally touched on Creative Commons, so I took care to license the presentation with the attribution 3.0 license. I selected jurisdiction to be USA but I could have left it "unported"; anyone know what ramifications that would have?


Modeling social media in groups, communities, and networks by Vance Stevens is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at advanceducation.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://vancestevens.com.

If you have any comments on the presentation, you are most welcome to make them here.

AVEALMEC Conference on Social Networking November 5-8, 2009

In the picture you can see a group of people I'll be joining in early November at a conference with infinite heart but no walls. But I'm having a heck of a time getting the slide show done for my presentation there because I'm so distracted. I'm up before dawn. I was looking for graphics till late last night searching Google Images and Flickr and Creative Commons for images I can use in my presentation. This alone could take hours wandering through other people's flights of fancy, which they have elected to SHARE; to allow me to put online if I will only acknowledge their hand in their own work, to pay forward to the community (Mireille's term on Webcast Academy). Creating a slide show for a respected audience is a journey where every step takes you halfway there; you never arrive!

I stop to reflect here, how did I KNOW about Creative Commons, and what it means? How did I know I could find CC images at Flickr and the Creative Commons website, and turn the license filter on for Google Images? Did I read that somewhere or hear it word of mouth? Yes, I did, but not in a book or in any traditional media. As we speak, Twitter is constantly bleeping my radar, and even my Gmail is flooding me with messages on the latest SCoPE seminar, The Art of Teaching (looks to be a great one). I just joined the Educator's PLN Ning ... now that's kind of a mirror within a mirror, messages are coming through for existing participants to Twitter in more (yet another layer of mirror within mirror).

I'm not sure what's going on with George Siemens's and Stephen Downes's CCK09 at the moment but I heard on EdTech Weekly that it had only a few hundred participants, not bad for a free online course, but down from its mega-status of thousands in its initial rendition. I know that Alec Couros is giving an interesting Open Course at the moment (which I had every intention of joining but never did), and Leigh Blackall is starting one as well, both of these inviting participants from anywhere, for whatever reason or benefit they hope to gain from it. I've never met either Alec or Leigh, but I've invited both to give keynote talks at WiAOC free online conferences, and both readily agreed. Why? Heike Philp has offered to try and set up a live synchronous discussion online with anyone her PLN suggests. Someone said, ok, I'd like to talk with Noam Chomsky. So she asked him, he agreed, she set up the discussion, and now anyone can replay the recording. News about all these events reaches not just me but everyone in my extended social network in ways we didn't have available last year, last month, yesterday even ... how about tomorrow, Google Wave anyone?

These events and courses have a wonderful dynamic, one that I apply instinctively to the EVO Multiliteracies course I'm about to moderate again. I don't really have time for any of these courses, nor for preparing for my ALVEALMEC presentation for that matter. My professional development cup runneth over with creative juices that spill in all directions. Matt Montaigne is one of these teachers who seems to be everywhere at once, pushing people forward in their learning with this project and that (Earth Day webcasts, for example, on the Worldbridges Network). I was surprised to hear him say on a recent EdTechTalk shows that these efforts were chaos, he gets them started and then they just surge this way and that and leave messes that no one sees and no one mops up, but enough energy reaches the target that the impression is one of sustained and directed effort. Why am I surprised? I'm like that. I imagine many creative people are, minds as cluttered as an artist's atelier. It would be interesting to sound some of the other presenters at this conference on social networking out on exactly that topic.

This is how energy is harnessed and channeled in a PLN. It's messy. And while trying to focus on meeting an arbitrary deadline to prepare slides for a presentation to be given two weeks hence (if it were two days, I would be genuinely focused; there's nothing like a real deadline!) I am moving all over the network that brought me to this point. If not for the network, I would not have been given the opportunity to make the presentation. If not for the network, I'd be able to actually put this presentation together in a timely manner. But you can't have the upside without the downside, so we need to get used to it, and revel in it!

Seth Godin has introduced the notion of "tribes" as being groups of people who congeal around an idea that some dominant figure within that tribe leads. Switching conventional notions on its head, charisma he says, is not what the leader needs to attract followers, it's what the leader gets from the act of leading others, or better said, moving to the forward position where the leader appears to be at the head of where the tribe was going in the first place. It's an interesting concept, and hopefully a tribe is something that can be subsumed in the framework of the talk I'm giving at AVEALMEC.

In this brief posting I've again taken a step leading me only halfway to my destination. But each step needs to end (even as the destination shifts like an amorphous paradigm. Wasn't it just there? Where is it now?) so I'll wrap up this thought. Where have I arrived in this step? This posting has been about the role of a network of peers and their peers which is constantly channeling us information which we can use to convert to the knowledge that makes us interesting enough that others will invite us to speak at gatherings ranging in formality from conferences (online or face to face) to ad hoc discussions (again, online or face to face).

If you follow this out to its logical end, it means that any of us in the network is potentially interesting enough, and therefore no better than, anyone who is speaking to them at a conference. I say potentially, because the information is there, but it has to be aggregated and processed into knowledge, and then be communicated effectively. Some people are better at that than others, or simply have more time. The network provides the information but the better the network the more time it consumes. Those of us who are getting used to that reality are reveling in it, and exuding an energy that makes us want to share our passion with others, like those who created and shared the graphics that I'll put in my presentation, as part of the scaffolding on the launching pad I am trying to create for the talk I plan to give at AVEALMEC.

The more I learn about this conference, the more I see of the buildup and the accumulation of artifacts on the web, the more I anticipate being a part of it. I'm looking forward to savoring the aggregation of content and hearing what the speakers have to say. This conference has a very appealing look and feel. It's being done right. Congratulations to those putting it on! For more information: http://avealmec.org.ve/

Social Networking for students and teachers who only know Facebook

Struggling with my muses on a challenging project, I confided in a Facebook update: "I'm trying to write teaching materials to explain social networking to students and teachers who know little about the topic beyond Facebook. It's difficult."

To my surprise my off-the-cuff remark brought numerous comments (my social network in support; thanks, social network :-)). I decided that these responses deserved more elaboration than would be possible in a comment on my own status update (hence, this blog post).

Basically I'm trying to update what my colleagues and I have been teaching as "computer literacy" for the past several years. Our students' sophistication with computers changes year to year, and what seemed reasonable five years ago as an introduction to computing might seem simplistic and outmoded today.

I was fortunate to have been given the opportunity to revise some of the materials we introduce to students as "computer literacy" and thus articulate some of the concepts which I think our students should be aware of in order to consider themselves technologically literate in the 21st century, where there is general agreement among educators who concern themselves with such matters that a new skill set is emerging to prepare young people to be able to adapt to “jobs that haven’t been invented yet.”

My materials include a lesson on Google Docs (a popular example of doing in the ‘cloud’ something we have till recently been doing almost exclusively on our PC’s). This lesson also gets the students into the Google system, which they’ll need for the lessons involving Google Reader.

Google Reader is one of the topics in my lessons on Social Networking. These lessons focus on three key concepts: RSS, tagging, and aggregation.

The first lesson has us taking a look at aggregation, an excellent illustration of which can be found at http://addictomatic.com/. I have our students put in ADNOC and OPEC as these are safe and also could lead to a discussion of how this works (if students explore some of the aggregators used, which reveals a lot about what aggregators there are and how they work).

In the second lesson we have a look at blogs, but as observers only. It seems unreasonable to require teachers to themselves create blogs in such a short time, though this could be a technique any teacher could use to work with students on these materials. As observers we follow blogs through their RSS feeds, so I’m suggesting some blogs I hope will intrigue our students. I also have some practical examples of RSS at work (RSS is a KEY concept, absolutely essential).

Another key concept is that of tagging. For this I use Delicious, adapting materials I've already created some time ago.

This brings me to the last lesson. I was thinking of a lesson on how to develop a network of worthy peers. Social Networking is much talked about, I heard the term repeatedly on mainstream TV news just this morning, on both Al Jazeera and BBC. So I think students and teachers might be primed to learn more about it, but the hurdle for most people (the trick, or the hard part) is seeding that network in such a way that it develops into something that will feed you the kind of information that will transform your learning (which is what some people say it does).

One web application that’s having a great impact on information dissemination is Twitter. I’m thinking at the moment to create that final lesson on Twitter. Again this would iinvolve students as observers (in illustration of concepts introduced here). It wouldn't be necessary for our teachers or students to create their own Twitter accounts but they would be able to see other people’s Ttwitter streams and follow those in RSS and tag them in Delicious.

In both blogs and Twitter you can see where people who have interesting things to say are getting their information. This is in fact how you leverage your own network, since you can find others whose blogs and Twitter feeds you can explore. My post just previous to this one (http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-webheads.html) described how Twitter Mosaic could be used to plumb the networks of other respected colleagues, who could in turn plumb yours.

I published this post on August 27, 2009. Meanwhile I got this from my Twitter stream, which I can't possibly absorb in its entirety but which I pop into now and then for whatever pearls have been cast before me and frequently emerge with something spot on. This is an article published September 1 in Times Higher Education on exactly the topic I'm getting at here. As Russell Stannard explains, "The idea of Twitter is to network with other people who are working in the same area as you. You send 'tweets' of interesting articles, websites and the like, and you receive similar tweets from the people you follow. Soon your Twitter account becomes a constant flow of interesting information from people who are plugged into your area. So how do you create these networks? It’s probably here where most people stumble. The easiest way to build up your contacts is to 'piggyback'. You search for well-known people who are working in your area then click on all their followers. You can guess that most of the people who follow them will be interested in similar things to you." http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=407984&c=2

I couldn't have said it better myself! Thus your network is seeded, and it flourishes when you start interacting with it (going from passive to active would be the next step, but is outside the scope of my too brief introduction).

Icing on the cake: I see from my Twitter feed Sept 2, 2009 that colleagues in my network are actually reading this article. Thanks Cristina, and others re-tweeting!

And finally, this late-breaking addendum (Sept 10, 2009)

I've published the materials I alluded to here and I'm ready to share the URLs.

Basic Computer Literacy: http://issuu.com/vances/docs/computer_literacy_2009_lessons_1-3

Social Networking: http://issuu.com/vances/docs/social_networking_2009_lessons1-3

I'd appreciate any feedback, but keep in mind that they are pitched at my work context of EFL students just entering college. The materials are meant to be used in a classroom context where video media cannot be counted on to function, and pitched at students AND teachers who are only slowly emerging from a paper-based and teacher-centric pedagogical environment. That latter stipulation means that for the teachers themselves this is their first contact with some of the concepts here and they can't be made to feel that they are fish out of water when 'teaching' to a class of students who are in general have not embraced web 2.0 and social networking. So for people already learning through social networks, it's scaled back a bit, but I'm sharing in case you have a need for such materials, and also in case you might give me ideas for improvement.

Also I was working on a 4th lesson in social networking, "Starting your own network," when I ran out of time (I needed to get the materials into teacher and student hands AND realized teachers would run out of time in the 3 weeks allocated to the course originally). However, I plan to add that fourth unit at a later date. An inkling of what is to come can be found here: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-webheads.html

The New Webheads

The Webheads "gallery" (the one here: http://vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/webheads_evo.htm) has become well-known within certain distributed learning networks. Webheads arose in a Web 1.0 era and its webmaster-maintained artifacts have long been overtaken by Web 2.0 ones.

I stumbled on Twitter Mosaic http://sxoop.com/twitter/ via one of Hala Fawzi's blogs: http://englishonlinects.blogspot.com/.

Voila! The new Webheads gallery (happily most of those spam followers seem to have been filtered out when their accounts were suspended; I wonder if this updates live :-). Incidentally if you don't want someone appearing in your mosaic you can click on that person's avatar to delete it from the final result, simple.

This visualization has allowed me to see my personal learning network in a new light. This is the first visualization that I've become aware of where I could picture my network so clearly. Each thumbnail has a mouse-over that not only reveals a Twitter user name, but lets you click on the user name and pull up a Twitter profile. At that profile I can have a look at the follower's posts and if I think I'd like to see more posts like that, I can conveniently follow that person right then and there.

Anyone can do the same. That is, you can pull up my network in this way (you don't need my password) and I can pull up yours. So if I want to see who is in your network I can generate a mosaic like this and I can click on people and follow them if I have that much respect for your network that I would go to that trouble (and I just did that with someone in my network to test it out, respect!).

A final comment, I've discovered that at least two people in my network are no longer of this world. That's sad on one level, but on another, there's more respect again in networks where people can remain virtually after they have gone, where the work they have accomplished lives on in a sort of immortal online presence.

Get your twitter mosaic here.