PODetc Joins Twitter and Facebook

PODetc now has a twitter account and a Facebook group (PODetc). We hope you will consider joining!

Conversation, Community and Connection

This weekend I came across two interesting pieces on Twitter.

The first was an article in the Financial Times entitled Sweet to Tweet.

I found the six secrets to online success interesting:

Immediacy- Real-time flow of comments and adaptability to mobile handsets makes it more immediate than blogging.

Brevity- Limiting messages to 140 characters makes them easier to produce and easier to digest.


‘Pull’, not ‘push’-The ability of users to choose whose tweets they follow makes it less random than e-mail.

Searchability- Messages can be searched, making the content more accessible than the comments on a social network.

Mixing public and personal- A user’s personal contacts are on an equal footing with public figures.

‘Retweeting’- By copying and retransmitting messages, users can turn the network into a giant echo chamber.

I also listened to a piece on NPR called Welcome to the Twitterverse in which Andy Carvin was trying to convince Daniel Schorr to sign up for Twitter.

My key take-away was "Twitter is the new “water cooler” ... where you read the things you have to know but wouldn’t find out otherwise".

I totally agree. Why do you use twitter?

How is Twitter Useful?

This weekend I came across two interesting blog entries that pertain to this class this weekend in my Twitter network.

The first blog entry was written by Carol Cooper-Taylor entitled 50 Ideas for Using Twitter in Education. This is a great article for people who are new to using Twitter. It helps you get your head around why you might want to use Twitter as a knowledge network and some tips on what types of things to post to get started.

The second blog entry was in the blog Kumegirl entitled Why Twitter is good for Qualitative Researchers. It sort of outlines the psychological stages people go through as the evolve their use of Twitter.

She outlines five stages of acceptance people go through when using Twitter. What stage of acceptance are you at?

Subscribe to CoSN Twitter

CoSN now has its own Twitter account. To follow Twitter updates go to CoSN Twitter Feed on the Left Side of my blog and click "follow me on Twitter".

Stephens Group Words for 2008

I recently added a cloud tag to my blog. It was interesting to reflect on which words I tagged most often in 2008.

21st Century Skills-- This year we added a new belief statements to our mission statement, "We believe all students need to graduate with 21st Century Skills". All of our professional development efforts have been aligned to support this belief statement.

MDMC2008- - MDMC stands for the Milwaukee Digital Media Conference. This year's conference was a huge success. We had 120 educators collaboratively work with us on real world digital media projects at the Milwaukee County Zoo. You can read more about the conference in an article published by The Milwaukee Journal.

One-to-One Computing- - This year The Stephens Group started a new division of our company on One-to-One Computing with four consultants who have experience working with one-to-one computing programs. We started a free social networking site around this topic and currently has 37 members from all over the country. One-to-one computing was also the topic of my comps paper and will be my dissertation topic too- so I'm sure it will be tagged a lot more in 2009.

PODetc-
PODetc is also a new division of our company. It stands for Professional Online Development for the Educational Technology Community. The online relationships that have been developed are truly amazing. We have had teachers and administrators from all over the world in K-12 and higher ed take our courses. On Monday we start our fourth session of graduate courses for educators. We currently have five courses aligned to the new ISTE NETS Standards for teachers.

Social Networking & Twitter- - As Tammy Lind, our director of professional development stated recently, "I have learned more from people on Twitter this past year than all of my professional development including my master's degree combined". Consultants need to be constantly learning. Social networking tools such as Twitter and CollectiveX have helped us reach out to our clients, share information with one another, get just-in-time support and brought us closer together. I'm sure we will be leveraging these tools even more in 2009 as we broaden our personal learning networks.

Ultraportable Devices- This year through an internship with CoSN I had the opportunity to work on a report on ultraportable devices. I have become really interested in this topic as it also related to my dissertation. In my consulting work, I have been surprised that school districts have been somewhat reluctant to go this route with their hardware purchases. If we are really serious about providing student centered learning experiences, I think these devices have huge potential for changing the teaching and learning process.

San Jose Digital Media Course- This year we held a course at the San Jose Museum of Art to create vodcasts (or video-podcasts) using a method of inquiry that can be used in any discipline. We will be holding the course again June 22nd-29th. More information is available on our course wiki.

Wiki- 2008 was definitely the year of the wiki for The Stephens Group. The Stephens Group has seven wikis. Some are internal for consultants to share information and collaborate. Others such as our Information Technology Planning Wiki are to share information with clients. We use this one a lot with our clients as a means of sharing research and best practices when developing strategic information technology plans. Our biggest wiki, however is the wiki we created for this year's digital media conference. Educators worked in teams to create multimedia wikis around exhibits at the zoo. We are very proud of their work! You can view their wikis at http://mdmc2008.wikispaces.com/Directory.

It comes as no surprise that the most tagged word in 2008 was Web 2.0. Many of the technologies we are using as a company have not changed from 2007. However, what is changing is how we use them. Our company has consultants and clients in multiple states. Web 2.0 tools has really allowed us to work more efficiently and seamlessly across multiple timezones.

I'm looking forward to seeing what new words get tagged in 2009!

Twitter a Teaching and Learning Tool

Came across this great blog entry by Tom Barrett http://tbarrett.edublogs.org/2008/03/29/twitter-a-teaching-and-learning-tool/

Lessons from The Youth Vote

Just listening to a NPR story on the youth vote for Obama. In the interviews the youth talked about how twitter, YouTube, and text messaging made them feel more connected to the campaign. We should be thinking about how to leverage this in education.

Social Networking and the Election

I have been really interested in the role of social networking in the election. One great site devoted to this is techpresident.com.

In particular, there is a lot about twitter. On a personal note I have really had a lot more fun this election being connected via twitter. It has been fun to see my twitter friends from across the country announce when their going to the polls, what's happening in their state, and what coverage we are all watching on TV and how we rate it. It has really made me feel much more connected to people to twitter in real time about an event that has such deep importance to all of us.

Convergence

Today I added twitter to my Facebook account. I love it when things converge. I can see how these two aps can really be powerful.

Twitter

On Saturday, I team taught an advanced podcasting workshop with Joan Roehre. Participants in the workshop were really interested in Twitter. Twitter is like a real time blogging tool. Joan shared a Common Craft Video to explain what Twitter is.

I had a Twitter account, but hadn't really done a lot with it. Next, we all got a twitter account and started exploring and twittering with one another. Soon we had other people not at the workshop following us and interested in what we were learning about.

Tammy Lind who was teaching in the other room twittered to us. She asked, "Why do I care?" Joan said this is a valid question and that in order to make Twitter meaningful, you need to build your network. She also said that she thinks of it as "a help desk of your peers".

Toward the end of the workshop someone asked us what the difference was between XML and RSS. We weren't sure, so we posted it to our twitter accounts and sure enough not long after we received an answer. Not long after that someone Twittered the question of was there a program like Garage Band for the Mac for PCs. I was able to Twitter back that Audacity is like Garage Band and can work on a PC or a Mac.

I'm going to play with Twitter some more. If you are interested in following me, my twitter name is tstephens.