What’s Your Institution’s / School’s Social Networking Policy (2009.08.17)

Though I tried commenting on that post, I got error messages twice, and then fedback to this effect, “Duplicate comment detected; it looks as though you’ve already said that!” Since I’m unsure what got through, here goes again.

I thought Heather might be interested in an encapsulated gem I found the other day, and have described like this in Diigo:

Jenna McWilliams’ post frames and follows on from Steve Taffee’s post comprising Proposed Guidelines for Use of Social Networks by School Faculty and Staff (Blogg-Ed Indetermination, Social Networking Guidelines for School Employees, 2009.02.12). Her follow-ons focus “On ‘Misrepresentation’” and “On Course Use of Social Networking.”

on social networking guidelines … (2009.06.02)

The stimulus for Jenna’s post (Taffee, 2009.02.12) points further to a Facebook source, Faculty Ethics on Facebook, a group to which Taffee belongs.

The group description in the badge should be self-explanatory. If not please feel free to ask for additional information or clarification in comments on this post. Keywords for the Diigo group include: blogging, collaboration, community, education, leadership, technology, and writing.

A graphic representation for the Diigo group, to replace the default avatar, is in the works. We’ll stew on shortening the group name to fit badge width.

1. Capture their attention;
2. Convince them to care;
3. Motivate them to change;
4. Give them choices;
5. Connect them with community;
6. Induce them to participate;
7. Enable opportunities to contribute; [and]
8. Make it an experience to remember.

That’s a tall order that I want to reflect upon further, possibly after tracking down details of Wagner’s presentation.

Bloggers Alec Couros (Open Thinking and Digital Pedagogy, Dalton Sherman…) and Kevin Jarrett (Welcome to NCS-Tech, Every… [e]ducator… [m]ust… [w]atch…), among others, highly recommend watching the following video. So do I. I’ve watched it once, and listened to it twice.

It’s of a keynote address to a back-to-school convocation for teachers in the Dallas Independent School District (Dallas ISD). Video recordings of the speech by Dalton Sherman, a fifth grade pupil, are available from both the school district and YouTube:

http://www.dallasisd.org/keynote.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAMLOnSNwzA

The text of his speech is available from the Dallas Morning News (2008.08.25).

http://tinyurl.com/DaltonSherman-IBelieve

To find out more about the Dallas ISD, please visit the official site or Wikipedia:

http://www.dallasisd.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Independent_School_District

(personal correspondence, 2008.08.27)

While Marielle recognizes strengths of networking technology that enable people with common interests to form networks, if not communities, easily and quickly; she also points out amplifications and caveats to those bent on rapid diversification of networking sites, and similar migrations from one to the next:

With the viral spread of online networks, we must take care not to dilute them so much (by rapidly migrating to new ones) that they lose their power, which derives from the quantity and quality of their membership. With the proliferation of blogs, we must take care not to get lost in a plethora of solipsistic silos, speaking without listening, reinventing rather than building upon each other’s ideas and deepening the collective dialogue.

(mpal3, So Many Nodes, Not Enough Reciprocity (Yet), 2008.07.03)

At present, lacking (or simply ignoring) great automaticity in propagating connections from one blog or network to the next, it remains a matter of choice where to establish or maintain a toehold on connected writing. For me, the choice this morning was easier done than said, or written about. Anyway, here goes – a short story long:

I’d followed Marielle’s link from Blended Learning to her blog (Authorship 2.0), previewed her post about reciprocity, and decided on the spot to bookmark it in Diigo, highlighting the passage that I’ve quoted above, sharing it with a Diigo branch of the Learning with Computers community, and sending it to a list of friends weblogging in Kumamoto. When I finished bookmarking, commenting on, and description of the post that I’d flagged, the description had grown to such an extent that it seemed almost more suited for blog commentary.

There I was, in Edublogs, ready to leave a comment for Marielle, when it dawned on me that I didn’t recall, immediately, what in a flurry of early morning activity had lead me there. Once I pasted the overflow from the Diigo bookmark description into an Edublog comment window, with no, “Hi, I found this interesting post on your blog through…” (no thanks to hot de-caf. coffee on a sweltering morning before the air-conditioning kicks in), I noticed how impersonal what I’d originally written for a bookmark description sounded as a stand-alone comment.

That inkling led to a quick poke about the Authorship blog to see who had written the post So Many Nodes… (above). However, finding little more than mpal3 on edublogs (and Bmused on del.icio.us) there-abouts; I decided that, rather than leave my names, email address, and an impersonal comment on an unknown author’s blog (if knowing an author requires knowing her name), it would be easier to dump the description I’d clipped from Diigo into a new, full-featured blog entry here, then retrace my steps backwards through multiple browsers, tabs, and drop-down histories, in order to suss out what connections I could.

In short, I got lost, and wrote my way back. The remainder of the coffee is chilling, the air-conditioning is working now; I’m heating the world, and writing solipsistically. What else is new? I’ve rediscovered, in a very personal way, what so many nodes mean. I surmise that initial connections in or via writing, whether in the head or on the web, are necessarily loose, and that virtual connectedness is just that – virtual.

The mind-map represented in the image below is a visualization in progress to reflect upon tools and venues supporting a growing community of webloggers called WinK, an acronym for Weblogging in Kumamoto, the brain-child of two colleagues with whom I group blog privately in Vox.

The Pageflakes nodes (among RSS aggregators in the image, below), inaccurate and incomplete as they may be, represent recent developments inspired by impeccable models in the Blogging for Educators workshop (wiki & Pageflakes).

For the continuing inspiration that the TESOL Electronic Village Online workshop coordinators, facilitators, and other participants provide, I’d like to take this opportunity to offer my sincere thanks: Thank you all!

This mind-map (image only) captures many if not most of the major constituent elements of WinK at this point in time (between academic years 2007-08, and 2008-09). Please note that it is neither complete in details or interconnections, nor completely accurate in some of the details it represents.

(PB [aka ltdproject], description of WinK image posted on a Vox blog,

for discussion in the private WinK Core Group, 2008.02.20).

… [M]any faculty members today have become so inundated with digital communications from students that it is not unusual for communication protocols and limitations to be specified in course syllabi. Most faculty members have home access to campus resources and use a course management system. But have faculty embraced and utilized technology to the same extent as students? Most evidence, though limited, indicates that this is not the case.

Students live in a separate reality from faculty members, who are typically not motivated or rewarded by institutional incentives to change their practice. However, as higher education institutions struggle with limited budgets to support faculty and to move courses online, technology seems to change daily. Given the demands of teaching, service, and (for most) research, faculty are now expected to embrace learning technologies along with everything else, challenging the institution to help them make sense of what works and how to work it.

(McGee & Diaz, 2007, p. 30)

Granted, students may have at their ears and fingertips a host of protocols and practices for high-speed communication. However, what research suggests that they are using it, easily, or could or would want to, for higher educational purposes? For example, while getting by acquiring and compiling information for personal use may be quick and easy, synthesizing it and putting it to problem-solving or conflict-resolving purposes in environmental or social domains remain challenges that only attitude, skill and value development, not tooling up, can address.

Nevertheless, McGee and Diaz (2007) suggest a host of challenges that educators might face in order to get on the same wave-length as learners – if ever they’d want to: for starters, the over-abundance of digital tools and paucity of models for effective applications of digital communication technology in education. Other challenges include:

• disintegration (if not incompatibility) of tools;
• diversity of learners’ abilities, expectations and needs;
• instability, overly rapid or slow evolution of ed-tech infrastructures; &
• discontinuity of financial and technological support.

In spite of those challenges, McGee and Diaz contend that Web 2.0 tools “hold the most promise because they are strictly Web-based and typically free, support collaboration and interaction, and are responsive to the user” (p. 31). Their typology of applications ranges from communicative to interactive, with stops at collaborative, documentative [sic] and generative. However, blogs, virtual communities of practice, and virtual learning worlds are the only “tools” listed in more than one category along their alphabetical way (Table 1, p. 32).

All in all, it seems that integration and sustainability of educational technology is likely to occur only within adaptive communities or across virtual worlds, rather than as consequences of institutional-level tool evaluations, adoptions, training and subsequent dependencies. Yet McGee and Diaz suggest that the onus is on “institutions and faculty members” to sort this all out and devote necessary resources to it:

Given that higher education finally has some technologies actually designed for teaching and learning, institutions and faculty members alike need to determine the value of these tools and how they can best support learning. It is vital that the institution provide services and resources while also supporting the range of faculty members’ skill, expertise, capability, interest, and motivation.

(McGee & Diaz, 2007, pp. 32-33)

As means to discover what’s at issue, they suggest surveys, focus groups, observations, document analyses, more surveys, interviews, software tracking, self-reporting and shadowing. That’s calling for a whack of resource commitments already, and the process of “matching pedagogical value with [theoretically and experientially grounded] teaching and learning behaviours” (p. 36) is just beginning – then throw in all the variables for technological adoption, spread and support! What large, cash-strapped research university diverts such considerable resources to sweeping introspection?

(Cutting to the chase, if I may, just to get this post out there in a blogosphere and walk home before dark, …. Oops, too late!)

In spite of recognizing learner and educator diversity, McGee & Diaz suggest values of facility in “using technology consistently across programs” (p. 36). Hmm, what next? Standardization across institutions surely would make tools easier and cheaper to acquire, and support services easier to provide, too, wouldn’t it?

If viewed in bright light, their article seems to wind down with a flurry of platitudes regarding technology selection and implementation: Educator, know thyself, those you teach, and what challenges you; keep the ends in the fore; gather information that serves as evidence for what you do, or want to; take on or assign only doable tasks, and support those who have to achieve them.

It might also be possible to interpret McGee and Diaz’s technology selection strategies from a technology-neutral or negatively biased position, for they conclude that tech-savvy, if not technophiliac, educators are beginning to ask appropriate questions, although perhaps not in the right order (rearranged for this blog post):

• Do emerging and innovative technologies actually result in an improved educational model [or improved educational models]?
• How do these technologies map to instructional problems?
• Which technologies actually improve learning?
• How are these technologies implemented and sustained?

(McGee & Diaz, 2007, p. 38)

Reference

McGee, Patricia; & Diaz, Monica. (2007). Educause Review (September/October), p. 30. Retrieved September 14, 2007, from www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0751.pdf

Blogged with Flock

Tags: tech-savvy, web 2.0, education, technology, adoption, support, digital, communication, CMC, research

Getting over initial fears of publishing your thoughts is part of the blogging process. This is a challenge for many if not most would-be bloggers. You can get over, around or through it simply by blogging.

Saying your say is important, whether you say it right the first time or not. Thinking aloud in beta is part of the process; just keep typing. Posting what you’ve written is essential. As Joshua suggests: “When in doubt, post.” You’re a blog owner, so you can always change your posts, continue to refine them, or remove them later. Fine-tuning posts with comments is a possibility (Porter, 2007a). However, I prefer revising the posts themselves.

Sticking to your passion(-s) will enable you to inspire not only your readers, but yourself. It will help you decide what to write about, and feel strong enough about to see it through. You should be writing from the gut or heart. So rather than worrying about grammatical correctness, you should concentrate on making your ideas easy to understand.

Creating a “greatest hits” collection, or showcase module, and featuring it on every page will remind readers of where you’ve been and what you’ve done (Porter, 2007a). It will also help you remember that people are reading what you’ve written, and that you have written something you’re proud of. This is an idea I plan to adopt and share with students as well.

Nevertheless, is important to take your time writing because each post can pay forward as well as pay back. Give each post and each concept that you embrace a meaningful, memorable name. Build on posts of interest to you and others. Continue to revise good stuff to make it better; you never know who may find it several years down the road.

Joshua suggests summarizing comments and writing your own reflections in follow-ups, linking to, but not quoting yourself. If you’ve got a hot idea that deserves reiteration, refer to it by name and paraphrase it; you most certainly can find a better, more economical way to say it again than quoting.

It is productive to own up to your mistakes. If someone points out a mistake that you’ve made, in thinking or expression, agree that you made it and carry on with what you actually meant. Take other disputes off-line promptly. If criticism becomes offensive, personal or tangential to the focus of your writing, don’t haggle about it on your blog or in counter comments. You may wish to try writing a polite email response instead.

Finally, it is important remember that blogs are conversational. Your posts should sound as if you’re speaking, and you can use your voice to help make others’ perhaps softer, less familiar voices heard by cross-linking, creating broader audiences and promoting higher expectations of readership (Porter 2007b).

References

Porter, Joshua (2007a). Nine lessons for would-be bloggers. Retrieved August 7, 2007, from http://bokardo.com/archives/9-lessons-for-would-be-bloggers/

Porter, Joshua (2007b). Nine more lessons for would-be bloggers. Retrieved August 7, 2007, from http://bokardo.com/archives/9-more-lessons-for-would-be-bloggers/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Attribute to “pab’s potpourri”.

Interesting list of brog papers to check out here. Thanks to Rick for pointing this out!

That’s: http://www.blogninja.com/

The B4B blogroll grew too long, especially in addition to a long list of experimental blog post labels that I was trying out. I tired of scrolling, and lost track of why I had picked particular blogs.

Having had another look through all of the blogs selected, I’m re-posting the blog titles and links here to show a variety of ways that workshop participants, educators from around the world, approach blogging and develop blogs for learners and themselves. Since I’ve started a couple more blogs since the B4B workshop ended, I’ve added them to the lists.

As you review the blogs listed, if you feel one belongs in a different or new category, please suggest changes in a comment.

Courses, international exchanges & learner development	Educational technology & teacher development	Uncategorized
An International Exchange	Blogging for Beginners	GlobalCitizen
Bloggers Int’l (U of T)	Edublog Insights	jacampie
Connected to the World	ELT Notes	mightymouse
Dear Students	ESL and Technology	On the Waters of Key West
Facilitating Learning	Jenny’s Blog on Blogging	pab’s potpourri
FCE Blog, The	learnandsmile	pab’s vox blog
Get Hip to Learning English	LTD Project Blog, The
Greater Expectations	Movie Reviews
In, out and away	One Teacher’s Journey
Juvenile 3 podcast[s]	Puppets in Action
Learning English @ MEI	Ways Lead On
pcsi news	Writing with computers
Reviewers, The
Samba EFL Podcast
Writing Studio Blog, The