To Boldly Go Where No Shirl Has Gone Before

"Number One, report to the bridge."










"On my way. Riker out."


And you thought Twitter was the original selected-community, brief-message communication breakthrough? Not. Gene Roddenberry had that one figured out 25 years ago. Here is the original Twitter device..it's even hands-free!

Check out the vid!










First Contact: My First Twitter Encounter

It is a hot mid-summer June Sunday evening and I am sitting next to my youngest daughter, Tess. I am so excited to be here, but I have to act cool. I have been invited to come to the young adults’ evening worship service in Edmonton. All the cool people go here, but the kicker is that the brochure says this particular gathering is geared for those 18-30 years old. So I have to play nonchalant cause I don’t want to get busted for being two decades outside of the demographic.

Tess’ friend couldn’t come so she searched her “B List”, and I was on it! Yeah! Rad! Hip! ..whoops that’s not cool. Ahem,..Dope! Sick!

I try to look bored, but this place is awesome! The house lights are down, the huge stage is lit up like a club, there’s space for like a thousand people, but we are up in the almost empty balcony, and as university student-types trickle in, the slide shows are flashing pictures on two screens along with announcements. The seven-piece band is fantastically loud and incredibly tight, the female singers sound like they could be on Idol. The lyrics flash on the big screens and we all can sing or listen or look or sit or stand or text each other, as a lot seem to be doing. There’s even an art installation along the edge of the stage. Wow!

I love this! I do like my music loud and the clapping and singing feeds my ADD! But I also love the quiet of silent, collective, introspective worship, yet there is something about a rockin' good band that gets me on my feet and makes me want to….! I toss my eyes over to Tess but see that she is giving me the folded arms and puckered forehead …The Look.

Okay, so no dancing. Not wanting to get uncool-busted, I tone I down and quietly sing along to a song that band is now playing. Hey…this song's on my iPod ..and this is my very best get-through-the-last-10 km-running song!

But The Look prevails and I try to use my inside voice while my outside voice is dancing like crazy!

So now that we are warmed up and getting focused, Pastor Phil takes the mike. Wow! He is so thirty–something...very cool…looks like he shops at Henry, works out, designer jeans, skater shoes, perfectly scooped up hair and Occhiali Eyewear just-in-this-season glasses.

Okay Phil, you totally have my attention. I just want to stare for the next 10 minutes. But Phil skillfully weaves his message over the next 15 minutes, deftly using his Web 2.0 tools, waving his remote wand, punctuating his talk with edited movie clips, thought provoking visuals, made –in –house video, son-screen scripture verses and audio clips. I am totally mesmerized and every sense is stimulated! (How is it that traditionally presented sermons have made the assumption that we are all auditory learners?)

I love this! The message is “What would you say to God if you could ask him any question?” The next video, a mashup of street corner interviews and music and visuals, is particularly inspiring. People’s honest and open responses run the full gamut of humility to hurt to adoration to anger.

Just when I am thinking, wow how can we bring even a smidge of this great style to my students at school, ..the other shoe drops. Just when
I think that this can’t get any more relevant and provocative, Pastor Phil tells everybody to take out their cell phones. The darkened house floor lights up like the 1976 Eagles concert's flicked bics, as phones are flipped. On the screen, looms the question: What would you ask God? Then Phil invites us to Twitter our own questions to a phone number that appears on the screen.

Like here? Like now? I gasp trying to get my head around the concept. The Digital Divide suddenly opens up under my feet and I feel myself tumbling down like Alice through the rabbit hole. I gawk as the people around me start texting! Any semblance of my being cool is rapidly dissolving as I watch, mouth agape, at the thirsty response to the invitation. As the band brings us to our feet for the almost closing song, the Tweets begin to appear on the big screen! Wow! I stand frozen, mouthing the questions: When will I find another job? How can I be a better husband for my wife? Why did my brother have to kill himself? Will my boyfriend ever become a Christian? Am I getting addicted to porn? Will I ever find someone to love and cherish me? How can we stop our wrecking our planet? On and on the questions roll.


As the service ends I bypass the coffee bar in the lobby even though I would love a latté with extra espresso, I am jazzed up enough to keep me spinning for the rest of the night. I feel every day of my two-decade difference. So I have truly snuck across the border to the land of the digital natives and witnessed first hand-social networking applied to the heart. This is the adaptation of the Tool to both the collective and the individual conscious. And here I though I was cool downloading missed sermons from my church on my IPod!

I need to think on this.

Seven weeks ago, this was my introduction to Twitter. Since I know of no one in MY circles who uses it, I have been conducting action research as to its popularity, even asking my doctor this morning, “So, do you use Twitter?” But even the cool university students and the geeks I surveyed, all came up with a big “No!” So I went to the Best of Edmonton, 2009, site and found out that Edmonton as of May, 2009, has mixed feelings about Twitter:

Best New Trends
(1) Going green
(2) Twitter
(3) Coffeehouses

Worst Trends
(1) Twitter
(2) Skinny jeans
(3) Big sunglasses

Not so great there either. Then I discovered that a Nielsen poll found that 60% of all US Twitters are abandoned with in one month of set up.

So I brought out the big guns and started searching. There seems to be a definite backlash against Twitter, the biggest criticism lies in its overuse by narcissistic philanders about whom nobody seems to give a s—t! Okay. The other reason for dissing Twitter seems to be that it will have its brief flash of fame, only to be replaced by the next big thing.

But somebody must find value in this tool. Okay I get it. Teachers apparently like it, so maybe that’s why the targeted demographic doesn’t?

So let’s start here. If you want to know what Twitter is and how it can be set up and used, go to Tony Vincent’s blog. You don’t need me regurgitating his fine summary.


Exploring Strange New Worlds…

Applications for using Twitter outside of education include:

• Business: targeted marketing
• Politics: aggregate tweets about candidates or issues
• News: updates
• Networking, announcements, events, feedback, polls and lots and lots of bulletin board type items.

To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before…

I will have to take other bloggers’ experiences on this one as I have none. Let’s see what Laura Walker has to say about the merits of Twitter as applied to education:

1. More heads together
Twitter can be like a virtual staffroom and within seconds I can access a stream of links, ideas, opinion and resources from a handpicked selection of global professionals.

2. Near & Far
It’s now possible to actively compare what’s happening in schools in my county with those on different continents. GPS-enabled devices like iPhones and the advanced web search facility allow searches that tell you what people are tweeting within a certain distance of a location

3. Self-awareness and reflective practice
Teachers on Twitter share their reflections as both a support and a challenge each other.

4. Vetting ideas
Twitter is a great medium for sharing ideas and getting instant feedback. Its speed and instantaneity means you can gather a range of opinions and constructive criticism within minutes. It is especially good for planning an event.

5. Newsroom and innovation showcase
Twitter helps me stay up to date on news and current affairs, as well as on the latest developments in my areas of interests. Twitter users can be among the first to know when a new product is launched, an article is published or an expert opinion is voiced.

6. Professional development and critical friends
One of the best things about PD days is the break out time between sessions, when teachers can get together to talk. Twitter enables me to have that kind of powerful networking capacity with me all the time.

7. Quality-assured searching
I trust the people I follow. I hone and develop the list of people whose insights I value with the assurance that it is a respected member of my network providing the information.

8. Communicate
Expressing yourself in 140 characters is a great writing discipline

9. Getting with the times has never been so easy
We need to be able to speak the same language and inhabit the same communities (both real and virtual) as our students in order to motivate them and relate to them.

For all of Twitters potential however, Laura adds these caveats:
• Remember, your experience on Twitter is only as high quality as the people who you follow and the information you share.

• Your biggest challenge is likely to be getting the twitter.com unblocked on your school network if your main usage will be at school. Personally I find that having Twitter on my iPhone is enough most of the time. I then forward interesting links to my email inbox to look at in detail from my desk.

Its Continuing Mission, To Seek Out New Worlds and New Civilizations…

Could I imagine myself using Twitter in any of these ways?
Possibly.

In my outreach setting I routinely phone all of my students who are behind in their course schedules. I go through the list Tuesday evenings if it is a slow night at work and I have few tutorials booked. Most of the time I leave messages because the kids screen our calls or they are at work and have their cell phones turned off. But it would be a great help to send everybody in the same course a Tweet. It could go like this. “Hey Social 20’s. Mod 3 is due Fri. Call now for help.”

Then there’s my OPPT students who have to be phoned by my assistant the day before every class day so she can determine how many babies are coming into the nursery the next day, in order book her volunteer child minders. Wouldn’t Twittering save her a lot of time? And students could get the message straight..not the uusual....oh, I thought the toilet training workshop was NEXT Thursday!

The issue here however is getting access, as I can’t see our district providing that in the foreseeable future. I could however, access the students through my/their phones and bypass the school network altogether. Our district is not exactly visionary- they can’t even get an administrator wiki going. Trust issues. I checked out Richardson’s (2009) recommended YouthTwitter.com as an alternative to the district server but I ran away from this site. It was so full of advertising I couldn’t see the doorway!

The larger issue in this application however, is to not to confuse information with authentic communication. Or as my gifted administrator friend said to me, “remember that our most effective teaching still comes face-to-face, palm-to-palm, and in the safe and caring schools we have all worked so hard to create.”

Another application for Twitter could be in connecting Outreach teachers, particularily as most operate in a site with maybe one other teacher. There tends to be usually only one or two outreaches per school district so a reoccurring theme among teachers at our conference is always the need to connect. I think Twitter would however, be most effective when used with a blog. Our specialist council website is not very good and gets expensive to maintain, so even Twitter would be an improvement for connecting.

Laura (quoted earlier) implies that she has learned to cull her Twitter pals to where she trusts those within her network and can ask the deeper questions. I can’t see Twitter being an effective platform for initiating these relationships, but I could envision it as a place for maintaining them. Let’s start at our next conference, this October, by setting up a session on social networking and from there set up the Outreach Educators’ blog and Twitter. Initially someone would have to commit to overseeing it and nurturing it somewhat. So my application for Twitter would be a place for novices is to use it to maintain connections, and link to larger affiliates. Since writing this I am now “following” the Godfather of alternative education at AERO Alternative Education Resource Organization whose mission is to “help create an education revolution to make student-centered alternatives available to everyone. “

Notwithstanding the global connection, I still believe that relationships are built over cups of coffee and walks around the trails of Kananaskis during our conferences.


Yet another application for microblogging in our Outreach School could follow the model from the literature, where some superintendents are taking a lead role in Twittering for the quick dissemination of information.

Snow delays, traffic information, emergency announcements, ticket sale announcements, report card announcements and links to school website information are all examples of situations in which Twitter announcements could be appropriately sent - all in seconds from your handheld device. (Stock, Wheeler, Soholt, & Pitkoff, 2009)

These researchers go on to list proven uses in the administrative environment:
SPREADING THE NEWS
COMMUNICATING DURING AN EMERGENCY.
MONITORING ONGOING EVENTS.
BEING AN ACTIVIST.
GETTING TO KNOW YOU
EDUCATING THE COMMUNITY

They also acknowledge the disadvantages of the blogosphere:
WRITTEN WORDS CAN BE MISUNDERSTOOD.
IT TAKES TIME
TROUBLE FOR THE TECHNOPHOBE.
DEALING WITH THE ANONYMITY OF BLOG COMMENTS.

This list demonstrates the strength of Twitter’s immediacy and again, when combined with a blog this could create responsive communication within the district and extend a hand of friendship for both those families of students and those families without students.

Engaging the Tractor Beam: How do I follow?

Before this course I would receive e-mails on the blogs I was following. Since this course and the birth of my blog, I have set up Twitter updates on my Goggle reader. I check those about three times a week. I could be more sophisticated and have Twitter send me updates according to my tags. Or upgrade to Tweetdeck.
But not yet. I have too much inflow as it is!

Whom do I follow?

My categories include entertainment, education and other.

I have been following singer Steve Bell’ s blog to be notified of his Edmonton concerts dates and his travels. His website is interesting, up to date and personal. Since starting this course I have added his Twitter. My husband groans, “Why do we care that he is going London, Ontario today?” I dunno, maybe if I was in London I would want to invite him for coffee? Here’s a recent Tweet:

• signpoststeve: RT @davedias: contact your favorite charity, have them sign up with this texting technology which will help them raise money, http://www ...from Twitter / signpoststeve
• signpoststeve: will redeem this cold rainy day with a sweater and great book: The Beauty of the Infinite / David Hart

And for education:

• Alberta Education: I thought it would be prudent to slip into the lion’s den and overhear what our Minister of Education, Dave Hancock is murmuring. Well that has been a bust as he has been away a lot and doesn’t say a whole lot! Just makes me jealous that he didn’t invite me to Singapore in July.

• DaveHancockMLA: As I lve S'pore I must say the trip was extremely well organized and Singapore MOE most hospitable. Have never been treated so well #abed from Twitter / DaveHancockMLA
  

And for other:

Then I signed up for a local radio station, mostly to hear abut concerts and contests. There posts are really banal! Not worth repeating (But at least they are trying)

So who’s in or not in the local Twittershpere? Let’s check logical local places where you would expect a Twitter presence:

• Learning Resources Centre (LRC) : Nada: What a good fit Twitter would be for them with the constantly changing curriculums.
• Alberta Teachers’ Association: Zip… duh?
• Alberta Ed: Few and far between: Twitter on special ed
  
• Alberta Distrubuted Education Technology Association but no Twitter? Who are these people?
  

Then I locked the tractor beam on to

Siswa: An aggregate of Tweets about education but I can’t find out much about them. These appear randomly ordered. Do we have an aggregate for Canadian Ed news?

Engage! : How do I use Twitter?
I read those Tweets that come to my reader. However, I do not yet respond and I am not swimming in Richardson’s “running river of conversation” (2009). I am still in Debbie’s “lurking” mode. When I do respond it will likely be with people I have personally met at least.

Yes, I do follow the odd link, but find while I am in this course, I have to put strict boundaries around my rabbit trails. My bookmarks are full thank you!

Opps this just in: The U.S. Marine Corps has slapped an immediate ban on the use of social networking sites on its network, warning that sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are a “proven haven for malicious hackers and content.” The ban, contained in an order issued Monday, will last for a year. While it specifically mentions Facebook, Twitter and MySpace although it applies to what is described as “Web-based services that allows communities of people to share common interests.”

More evidence of the backlash? Security issue? Workers goofing off issue? Conspiracy theory?

And speaking of backlash….

Do take a few minutes to grab a coffee and watch this satire. It’s very cleverly done and you will LOL!



Ready to Beam Aboard: What have I learned?

As with any of our Web 2.0 tools, there needs to be an intentional use for Twitter. I would have to think long and hard about my purpose and about the amount of time I would be willing to invest in its use. For social media to work for you, you must putting in real time and effort and followers will know whether you do or not. Using a tool just for the sake of using it is as indefensible as showing a video in Social Studies class just to show a video. Rocelle (2009) reminds us that microblogging,blogs and social networks are not the be all and end all nor should they ever become your sole source of communication. The blog is just one more tool, which when managed correctly can be a positive and valuable service that helps gets your message across.

But having said that, I acknowledge that the time and effort will be due on my part, as my students are already there. I can also see the gift of Twitter whether it is for students or other outreach teachers, as being the immediate connecting of users on Twitter because of the interlinking of accounts via @messages and the conversational nature of the content.

While many former users decry the uselessness of the social Twitter…

I mean, how bad is it that People Mag stalks Jessica Simpson’s Tweets to print that she got dumped by Tony Romo and that she went home to cry! (OMG I can’t believe I actually read all that in the Walmart checkout line!)

...a blogger on NYTimes.com says:

The real value of Twitter to me, lies in its ability to keep politicians connected with their constituents at all levels (and to keep constituents abreast of what their representatives are doing). Businesses can certainly benefit by posting specials or updates, but I think if we can point the power of social networking toward the greater good, we’re really on to something.
— Kristen J

This social good that Kristen J refers to appeals to me. My social studies students are often challenged in their courses to “do something” Usually they are prompted in the modules to write a letter. Boring. Won’t it be great when I get them instead to Tweet a political representative or an NGO? How excited would they be to get a Tweet back instead of my penciled comments on their “letter” to the mayor or their MP.

The Prime Directive
Finally, I think Twitter’s shining and defining moment came during the Iran elections this spring. It was the Twitter and Tweets that got the message out to the world of the government suppression of the protests against the election results. My daughter told me that the Iranian government tried to follow the Tweets and trace them to the local posters to arrest them, but the Tweets were quickly sent to other students and supporters all over the world who then returned them back to Iran untraceable. The local protesters avoided detection in this carrier-pigeon fashion and escaped the police.

We need to remember that our use of the social networking tools is culturally driven and this should not limit our imaginations as to their possible uses for our students and our colleagues. That is why Tweets from other cultural contexts enlighten us with possibilities. The contrived social uses that so many users have backlashed against, should not deter us from considering extended uses.

After all, who would have thought on a warm June summer evening in Edmonton I would have been witness to a collective longing for a divine conversation;

Twitter in the chapel.







Perhaps its time to re-watch the “Redemption “ episodes #100 & #101.












References

Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, Wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. CA: Corwin Press.

Rochelle, N.. (2009, August). To Blog or Not to Blog? School Administrator, 66(7), 17-19. Retrieved August 3, 2009, from ProQuest Education Journals. (Document ID: 1810719721).

Stock, M., Wheeler, B., Soholt, S., & Pitkoff, E.. (2009, August). Superintendent BLOGGING. School Administrator, 66(7), 10-16. Retrieved August 3, 2009, from ProQuest Education Journals. (Document ID: 1810719711).