TWEET TWEET! SPRING IS HERE!

Spring Break! Historically, this is the week that I expect all the winter snow to disappear. The roads will be awful but the freshness that surrounds the new season wraps me in optimism. When I lived in Fort McMurray, Spring Break was always the week I chipped away at the ice on the driveway and became excited about the season that is unflolding. Birds singing, sunshine, warm late summer nights.

The new season. In Edmonton, the driveway has usually been clear alread. The snow in the yard is, this year, almost gone. Windows open today, (March 28th) I awoke in the bedroom today with the call of the birds. I love hearing that sound as I awake; it makes my morning feel alive. The upright juniper outside my window is often the home to small birds, and this morning I finally heard them! Wait… it was a bit sporadic, a bit canned… I finally realized I'd left my computer open and Tweetdeck was announcing incoming tweets! A sigh, and then the overwhelming temptation to find out what are my twitter friends talking about.

Twitter twitter down the stairs,

Whose loud tweets have led me there?

Is it Teacher List with a new site

Or is it that that Singapore Guy posting at night?

Is Buffy mentioning a restaurant again?

Or is Justin talking about PC pain?

Is Brandi sharing about student teachers

Or someone chatting about movie features?

Am I going to learn about a new web site

To share with my staff, to spread the light

Or will I laugh at a friend whose child disobeyed

Or read about blocks that have been arrayed?

Whatever the case, I have to admit,

That 'Tweet' on the laptop has led to me to sit

Many hours in front of my LCD screen

With hopes that ideas and knowledge I'll glean.

Learning to Snack: Reflections on the Process of Learning about Twitter

I've known about twitter for a few years but didn't sign up until late fall. For several months I sporadically looked at it, but as my list that I followed was limited, I didn't get much out of the tool. In fact, what Michael Martine says, (retrieved March 28, 2010) resonates with me. The first time was very slightly informative but not completely engaging, but the more I experienced it and learned how to use it, the better it became. It was the course that led me to increase my following. Originally, I was disappointed that more people were not following me, but as my lists grew, I realized that what was important for me was not who was following me, but who I was following. What at first I conceived as social voyeurism became a personal learning network.

What we have to do is deliver to people the best and freshest most relevant information possible. We think of Twitter as it's not a social network, but it's an information network. It tells people what they care about as it is happening in the world.—Evan Williams

The name itself, Twitter, led me to see it as a superficial tool, much like I've used Facebook status. I have no friends who Twitter, and the few politicians I first followed used it more as a short commentary. The 140 word limit is not sufficient to communicate any in-depth ideas, short of "I attended…". Twitter is like having a small snack; you get a taste of an idea and if it works well, it makes you hungry for more. It wasn't until I started following educators tweets that I understood that there were links with strange shortened web addresses. Hashtags confused me until just recently, and the language itself ('hash'… is this a snack? what the heck did that associate with?) was over my head. What was tweetdeck?


…we came across the word "twitter," and it was just perfect. The definition was "a short burst of inconsequential information," and "chirps from birds." And that's exactly what the product was. Jack Dorsey

No one could really explain to me why Twitter worked or why it was valuable. I can't explain it to my colleagues, both in the education field or in the political field, although they are somewhat more receptive, given that there is a huge need to use social networking communication.

Twitter is like sex. You can read all the stuff (or look at it) about sex all you want, but if you've never had it, you simply have no idea what it's like. And once you've had sex, you know you could never hope to really explain it to someone else. You will sound like a complete idiot if you try."

For the first time, I am disappointed with Lee LeFever's video on Twitter.

His simplistic overview of ideas has always been informative and enlightening, but his treatment of Twitter feels superficial to me. The interpretation of Twitter as a way to understand what friends are doing in between blog posts and emails feels more like Facebook Status Updates than productive usage. I am placing a value judgment here but the video did not resonate with the possibilities I see for Twitter. Charlyen Kingston in her excellent ebook, Twitter for Beginners, proved a far more valuable introduction to Twitter. Commonly considered 'microblogging' (in 140 characters or less), Nick Wesselman calls Twitter a global conversation where one can listen to every conversation they wish and reply to any whenever they want. Great! My voyeurism will be fulfilled!

Wikipedia informs me that when I search in Twitter it accesses EVERY public tweet, making Twitter the most timely way to see what is happening right now. News becomes instantaneous and accessible to everyone with access to the internet. In Edmonton, the number of people sharing information and Tweets is steadily on the rise according to MasterMaq's blog. Sadly, it has not yet impacted my colleagues and the information that I find so easily accessible is not as easily shared with my local contacts who remain skeptical about the value of twitter.

As I learned that the articles were for me the essence, (I know, that is what my dad said about Playboy) I began devouring the links. New ideas, new thoughts about the topics I was interested in. I began looking at who other people were re-tweeting and who were their followers, and slowly built a network. Every new connection was a new opportunity to learn. Making the most on Twitter by Charles Arthur in the Guardian (retrieved March 28, 2010) introduced me to Whoshouldifollow.com and I discovered a wealth of library twitterers that I now follow. I learned What people Tweet from Twitter for Beginners : by Charlyne Kingston

1. Observations about life. Interesting things to read.
2. New blog posts
3. A humorous take on life events
4. Inspiring thoughts.
5. Professional news
6. Workaday life details.
7. Business issues and challenges
8. Family life details.
   

I'm still at the stage of keeping my personal life to myself, and follow only those who are similar. Although I enjoy and respect the tweets of many of the people I follow, I do get frustrated with my professional contacts who share their airplane schedules and their restaurants and their shoe collections. My interest remains in professional issues and current news, and wish to keep workplace details and family life details separate. Perhaps it is those people who purely see twitter in terms of a chatter or brief SMS who critique the tool as a devolution of communication. They do not see the huge opening it has to knowledge when used as a tool to open up the web.

Phil Bradley, in Twitter in Libraries speaks more to the uses that I am using: Social networking, updating information, trending information, searching for information, and asking questions. He suggests that librarians are posting to twitter but not following others and that it , that is like standing in a crowded room and talking but not listening. It is important that the communication be two way.

I recognize that Twitter can grab you. Tweetdeck in the background wakes me up on a beautiful spring morning and calls me to my laptop. As I am working on other materials, a tweet will appear on my screen and I will be distracted from the work I am doing. In the online book, How to Get Focused, Scott Scheper writes about how to keep focus while using Twitter. Twitter as We Knew it is Dead: The 7 New Dependable Ways to Use Twitter tells the reader to not use twitter fluff, avoid using clients like Tweetdeck and and Seesmic, to market yourself outside of Twitters with links to Twitter, use Tweet schedulers such as Sharefeed and Hootsuite and Twaiter, to always respond to people that @yourname, to follow only those who provide valuable information, and to limit the times you check twitter each day.

Despite this, I did learn that Tweets fade away, and the use of Tweetdeck has kept my tweets more organized with columns for the groupings (hashtags) and direct tweets and mentions. Tweet! Tweet! I've grown to colse to 200 interesting, articulate professionals that I follow, and I've learned that the people I follow are more important to me that the number who follow me. It is MY personal learning network, and if I am helping others great but it is not about my building a popularity contest.

I had fun learning to change my Twitter background to look more like a Blog, and even more fun turning my blog background to look like a Twitter background. There is one reliable truth in all this Web 2.0 learning… I Can spend huge amounts of time fiddling around and accomplishing little if I don't stay focused! (but it is fun!) I've found that the larger my focused network grows, the more I am learning. I get excited when I get a tweet, I get even more excited when 'famous' people actually send me a personal tweet! Wow, I have made some serious connections.

For a snack, Twitter sure can take up a lot of my time!

SNACKING VERSUS MEALS: REFLECTIONS ON TWITTER IN TERMS OF MY OWN PERSONAL LEARNING

Twitter has clearly become my own personal learning network (PLN). I enjoy seeing what others snack on and even share some snacks of my own, but my real love is in the main course.

The isolation of a teacher librarian is unique. Seldom do we have professional opportunities to share in the day to day activities of our job. We all value the times we get to meet with our colleagues in other schools, but for myself, they are few and far between. I like to get ideas and apply them so I prefer my learning in small chunks. My twitters have become for more valuable to me than many other sources of personal learning. Certainly, my Twitter learning follows me out of school; I do not have my Twitters go to my cell phone as other educators do. Twitter could eat up a great deal of time. I do check out my Tweetdeck (apologies to Scott Scheper) at home, and find that as a result I am thinking about work regularly outside of the job, which from an employers point of view, is a good thing.

In the Future Buzz, Adam Singer suggests that Twitter should be your outpost and your blog your home base. Certainly, it is the links that I learn from and I recognize that any conversation must be two way. If I expect to learn from the links (and not just 140 character tweets, then I too need to keep my blog as my home base. If I miss out on a blog posting, I can still find it later and utilize the information. If I miss a tweet, it is in 'archive purgatory' and will likely never be seen again. It is like missing your between meal snack, but I will crave the main course, the contenet of the link, be it a blog, a picture or a web page. Twitter has become, for me, a way to navigate the web and to find out snack-sized bits of information so that I can then find the main course. Just like television news, you only see a tiny bit, and I hunger for the more detailed information I would find in a deepr news source.

I wonder if I should use one of the sites mentioned by Scheper to spread out my tweets? I have noticed that I tweet in clusters, which makes me visible only to those who are checking out Twitter around that time. Should I send similar tweets out over a sread out time period (as I've noticed others doing) so that my tweets and ideas get more exposure. At this point in time, I'm not sure that the tweets I'm sharing are that important, but if I build my network, and feel that I am sharing valuable information, I will have to consider this dynamic.

There are clearly dynamic ways that I could be using Twitter to keep my personal connections in the forefront, if only I could convince family and friends that Twitter could be valuable. Colleagues, as well, both teachers and teacher librarians, are not yet ready to take the plunge. I have work to do still in this area!

REFLECTIONS ON TWITTER FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING

I wish all my students had smart phones. I wish we could be using Twitter or Edmoto to enhance class conversations. Imagine the engagement students would have if they could twitter a response to a question instead of waiting in line with their hands up? Like an elluminate session, questions can be asked as they come to mind without interrupting the teacher's dialogue. Imagine the power of students who, when faced with a difficult idea, could ask the question from home? Professor David Parry observed that class chatter went beyond the classroom when students began to use twitter for class purposes. Even if the teacher does not respond, the student feels they are making progress on their work. Imagine the power of a classmate stepping in to help? We develop learning networks and active engagement. Alberta, like many other jurisdictions, have taken on student engagement as a focus along with 21^st Century literacies. Imagine the learning network if Alberta students worked together using Twitter to share, build, learn and develop multicurricular local and global ideas.

This is, for my class, still a dream for the future. In an elementary school, smart phones are limited to a handful of students. Truthfully, phones are banned, a barrier that could be overcome. When there is only one student who has a cell phone, then the idea is still out of reach. Despite my dreams 20 years ago that there would be a computer on every child's desk, I now believe this step will be skipped. Student owned smart phones, mobile computing devices, ipads and netbooks will likely supersede any resource allocation be school districts.

I am pleased that, to date, Twitter has not been blocked on my district's computers. There is potential for us to develop communication in our staff groups at a professional level to disseminate information, to share ideas and to learn from professional practice before we integrate use with students. Until professionals acknowledge to potential in this media, it will remain off limits in our classrooms. Broward County Public School uses Twitter to disseminate information to parents, students and staff. This is a start, and as we open these avenues, eventually we will discover, as I am convinced, if there is a safe, beneficial learning and teaching application. Perhaps it will end up in a modified environment such as Edmodo (a private micro-blogging service that provides privacy controls in virtual classrooms where one does not need an email, and can work in broad ways to facilitate Twitter-like communication).

Laura Walker in Tech & Learning suggests nine reasons to use Twitter in school:

1. Together we're better
2. Global or local, you choose
3. Self awareness and reflective practic
4. Ideas workshop and sounding board
5. Newsroom and innovative showcase
6. Professional development and critical friends
7. Quality assured searching
8. Communicate communicate communicate
9. Getting with the times has never been so easy!

I ran across an amazing school project as I worked on Twitter. A teacher, fron the appearnances of the pictures, in Middle School, was planning a service trip for her class to Nicarauga to help in schools and libraries. She used a wiki for the student groups to record information about their work (including contacts with governement and business in Nicarauga and in their community, fundraising objectives, and over-the-summer projects in preparation for the trip the following November. Over the summers, students were required to tweet their progress, report on the Wiki, and fulfill requirements to prepare using 21st Century literacies. She did this on a challenge from her principal. She posted Vlogs and students had to respond in the same manner. Unfortunately, in the process of this last week, I've lost the link to this site. She demonstrated a meaningful, engaging learning environment using multiple tools. Students were highly engaged and fulfilled difficulut, responsible learning tasks at highler levels of thinking. The technology engaged them and gave them a responsibility to use tools wisely.

If we deny access to tools like Twitter to all students, there is a digital divide between those students who have access at home and those who do not. As we as educators ponder the pros and cons of modern technologies, many of our students are so far beyond the ideas we are discussing that it is a moot point. However, we become responsible when there are divisions of access and when we are not teaching appropriate use. Twitter is a powerful educational tool, but left in the hands of the self-taught adolescent, it easily becomes purely a brief status update tool, another form of SMS. The power of the technology is lost. If we need to teach for the future, we need to embrace it now.

@nancyacavanaugh

Unlinked Resources Used:

Black, Elizabeth. Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 : What Librarians need to Know. Courtney, Nancy (ed), (2007) Library 2.0 and Beyond. Westport, CN: Libraries Unlimited.

Brooks-Young, Susan. (2010). Teaching With the Tools Kids Really Use. Thousand Oaks, CA : Corwin Press.

Davies, J. & Merchant, G. (2009). Web 2.0 for schools: Learning and social participation. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

DeGroot, Joanne. Podcasting Trailfires.

November, Alan. (2010) Empowering Students with Technology. Thousand Oaks, CA : Corwin.

Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.