Question 52 of 365: How do we unfollow in the physical world?

We have embarked on exploded the word “friend” with many new online connotations as well as redefined the word “space” to mean anything we want it to. We have made completely altered the concept of characters (as in 140) and manipulated “a conversation” so much that is almost unrecognizable in some of the ways we use it. In all of this, we are taking things from the physical world and bringing them into the virtual world in order to play around with them. We are taking what is that we know and making it apply to the unknown. This process changes our ideas and expands what is possible. On the whole, I quite like it.

However, going the other way has not had as good of a track record. Trying to take the concepts of networked learning and make them applicable without the online component falls kind of flat. If you are in a room with people and you are not accessing your wider network (or even the internet), those people are the resources you have at your disposal. And to a certain extent, the people in the room will always matter more, even if you do have access to your larger network.

The people in the room are the ones who can literally grab you (and intellectually get hold of you as well) and bring you to where they want you to go. The people in the room get to dictate the protocols, the time spent, the level of awkwardness, and the amount of competition. The people in the room are the ones who will bore and engage, inform or dilute, attack or join in.

And yet, we haven’t figured out a way to unfollow the people in the room. We have created this function perfectly well in the online world: when someone says something that we don’t like or when they stop being relevant to us, we unfollow them. Why is it that I can’t unfollow someone in a meeting? Why is it that I can’t engage with only the people who will push me to think farther and better and ignore the rest of the people that just happen to occupy the same space as I do?

The ultimate unfollow would be at a conference. If we were able to permanently break up into a small group of people that were interested in figuring something out without exposing ourselves to distractions and efforts that don’t lead to further reflection or solution, I think we would be better off for the process. If we were able to unfollow in real life, we would be better equipped to engage in acts of creation and specificity.

Now, I do not mean that we should attempt to only hear the voices that agree with us or have conversations only with our friends. Rather, I would like to have a protocol where I can scoop up all of the conversations that are relevant, both for and against my viewpoint, and just filter out the ones that are clutter. It also isn’t that there is information overload, either. In face to face communication it is very hard for me to get overwhelmed with the amount of stuff being thrown at me. Instead, it is about the amount of time and effort it takes to be mentally present with every possible idea offered within a conference or meeting.

While this may not be a radical notion, I do believe it holds true for me: Some ideas are not worth being present for.

So, I am suggesting a signal of sorts when you would like to unfollow someone in real life. I suggest that we make it something as inoffensive as possible. I suggest that we try to approximate the level of loss that comes from not following someone on twitter anymore (while we may not have the benefit of their witticism anymore, we also don’t have to hear their blather). It isn’t that you need to be “saved” from the situation and you need to have someone come over and take you away from the conversation. I would just like a way to break up with the people in the meeting that are no longer providing value to your thought process.

Something like a reverse handshake, perhaps.

Something that says: “It is no longer nice to meet you.” But, a little less mean.

I believe in the power of good conversation to change practice, and so I guess I have to believe in the opposite as well. The power of bad conversations is ever present and it is how we find ourselves doing things that we aren’t passionate about. It is also how we end up with unfocused and confused workflows. It is how we end up with a lot of regret for the things we can’t get done.

And yet, this sentiment is incredibly selfish. Telling people that they are no longer interesting, engaging or purposeful in our lives is something that isn’t easily done. We will be considered elitist. We will be considered jerks. Indeed, we will be those things.

So, unfollowing is not without a sense of peril in the real world. Being rude, of course, is never the right way to go about engaging with others. The unfollow process, though, is not about being rude. It is about making sure that we are constantly assessing our ability to engage. If we feel as though we can’t be a part of the collaboration as it is currently constituted, we reserve the right to excuse ourselves.

So, the next time that the conversation takes a turn toward distraction or irrelevance, I reserve the right to unfollow you. Without too much absurdity, I will stand up, unshake your hand and leave the conversation behind. I hope that it will be implied that anyone else can come with, and I do not need to be followed to be validated.

This is hard in application, but if enough people adopt the in-person unfollow, the stigma of engaging only in conversations that matter will slowly go away. Or perhaps this idea is just as ridiculous as any other way of bringing what makes sense online and forcing it to make sense in the physical world.

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• Culling your Twitter: Three tips for unfollowing (heidi-miller.com)
• Unfollow All – Sometimes, You Just Want To Start Over (johnchow.com)
• Tweetelity – Twitter mass unfollow tool (twi5.com)

Question 51 of 365: What do we model in our networks?

Podcast on Podcstock with Kevin Honeycutt

Kevin Honeycutt Podstock Interview [ 43:18 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (496)

I had the unique opportunity to talk with Kevin Honeycutt about his amazing unconference, Podstock. Please listen and know the movement that he is working for (and that we may be all working for in our different ways).

Show notes:

1. We wanted to create an Edubloggercon for Podcasters
2. We wanted to demystify the “follow” thing
3. Most of the people who came to Podstock were all a part of the conversation already.
4. The relationship changes when you meet the people you follow in real life.
5. Most people don’t see the full potential of podcasting, they are only in one part of the conversation (consumers, producers, narrow definitions)
6. What is podcasting: Touching your toe in the water is okay. Video and Audio matter.
7. There was an empty room all day long. They were able to come in and have conversation.
8. “The first best way that a human organism learns is through experience”
9. The printed word arrived and you have to break that code in order to get at the learning. Some kids burn their energy in turning text into something they can understand. If we can let them simulate the direct experience so that we can learn in a natural way.
10. I don’t want to preclude these other ways of seeing.
11. Kevin created a 5 person team that started off with creating culture. They changed hippy phrases to be more about podstock. Welcoming them with Groovy. They actually used the word movement. They leveraged all of the learning networks available (plurk, twitter, facebook). They took pictures of something that didn’t exist yet (dressing up and showing what the aesthetic looked like)
12. They created a series of artifacts that helped to create community. Everything was made by hand.
13. We had to make sure that it paid for itself or it would never happen again.
14. Passion and belief are all we have in a hard time.
15. We should be inviting everyone. You are one of us. There is no heirarchy. We are all equals. We should be empowered to have one another. The detached retinas now are connected.
16. He would like to have Podstocks that are regional. Conversation, facilitation, not presentation.
17. We would like to inspire people and put gas back in their tanks.
18. We need to give people a place to heal, a place where it is okay to explore these new connections, new communities.
19. Experience changes lives.
20. We need to create the optimum ambiguity: Creating enough safe space for possiblities to happen.
21. Second life and real life were merged at a dance.
22. Everyone was an expert at a given time.
23. What was learned at Podstock? A small group can create a movement. If you are up to something that is honest, people will come.
24. We started in the middle of the conversation. We can go so far so fast.
25. There is a separation between people who have communicated in new ways and those who haven’t.
26. Go to http://podstock.ning.com and become a part of the community.
27. We reorganized what was important. We gave people the album and the costumes, and left the grid of sessions to be secondary. The people who came wanted to inspire kids. And that was enough.

A coalition of the willing: Online Learning in Colorado

One of the biggest things that I learned from CoLearning 2009, was that if the conversations about change in education are easier to have with people around the world than they are to have with people around the state, there is something intensely wrong about that. It also challenged me to think up new ways to connect with those immediately around me and to break down all of the barriers to those connections as possible.

One of the easiest barriers I see that needs to be broken down, is simply not knowing who the other people are who are working similar projects around my state. As much as I would like to think of myself as holding a unique position and looking for unique answers about online learning, I don’t know this to be the case at all because I have only talked with a few of the people that could possibly be a part of the process.

In an effort to rectify this, I have gone ahead and created a Google Spreadsheet of all of the Online Learning programs that were registered with CDE this year. I have populated it with all of the information that I could find on each program’s “change agent”. Now, I don’t necccesarily want to talk to the directors or chief academic officers of these organizations. What I really want are the people who would be most interested in sharing trade secrets and opening up the lines of communication within the group of people. I have highlighted red all of the people that I believe are already change agents within their organizations.

My hope is that by leaving this spreadsheet open to any editing (go ahead, edit it and add your own information), we will be able to get enough people together to have a good conversation about the best way to do Online Learning in Colorado. I have also put a second sheet in the spreadsheet to examine the timeline of all of the Colorado online programs. I don’t have everything in there, but I think it is a good start. Feel free to change the contact information, website, or even the name of a program. I have claimed no monopoly on truth here. I am simply asking for the network’s best effort. Have at it.

A Post on Remixing that bears repeating.

I am sitting in a session at Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation on Remixing in the classroom and I was drawn back to an activity that I did with my kids to teach them about remixing. I think that it allowed them to own the topic in a way that telling them the rules does not. Does this activity still work?

   Write-on: Create the following diagram on a piece of paper (or computer if your prefer… Notebook or Word would probably be quickest) to show your

      opinions of what should and should not be allowed of the following

      remixing or mashup situations:

Isn’t Illegal Is Illegal

Should be Illegal

Shouldn’t be Illegal

   1. Creating a collage using a famous piece of art and some of your own drawings.

   2. Hacking someone’s computer game and making it better then selling it.

   3. Taking someone’s direct quote from a book without citing it.

   4. Taking someone’s ideas from a book and listing them as one of your biggest influences in the bio.

   5. Using two pieces of different music to make a new one.

   6. Creating a replica of a building in Google Sketch-up.

   7. Creating a parody of the latest blockbuster film and putting it up on YouTube.

   8. Typing out a chapter of someone’s book and putting links to pictures of all of the places it mentions.

   9. Taking the beat or melody of a famous song and looping it to create

      something new to sing or rap over, without asking for permission to use

      the sample.

  10. Using a well known movie clip, and dubbing you and your friends

      making up funny, rude comments over top of it so that it looks like

      they are saying what you want them to.

Discuss each situation with your neighbors when you are finished.

    * Use the these definitions and real life situations and in order to complete your 30-minute-expert blogging session on the following debatable topic: Solved: Any idea or work that you create should be able to be remixed, modified, and repackaged for the purposes of another person.

Also, if you are interested, here is the podcast that my students did with their debate after this activity.

What’s the point?

I am sitting in Anne Smith’s classroom listening to students talk about the ways in which students believe they are seen vs. the way they see themselves (her student teacher is actually teaching the class at the moment, however). I really enjoy listening to students talk about their own identities. They are so definite and expressive, questioning and purposeful.

The part that grabs ahold of me, though, is the fact that everything that is done in this classroom is in the pursuit of the question: What’s the point? Today I am not sure that there is any question that is more important. I asked it this way about two years ago:

The essential question for 21st century learning is “How is this meaningful?” and the only way that students are going to be able to answer that is to collaborate with one another to create that meaning.

I like the rephrasing of this question as “what is the point?” It is beautiful in its simplicity.

So, with Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation staring me directly in the face tomorrow, I would like to ask that simple question during every session. I would like every speaker to ask themselves the question before they speak. And, I would like for all conversations to answer that question question passionately and with gusto.

Because I really want to know. What is the point of all that we are doing in education?

I have my idea, but what is yours?

Asking students questions

This Saturday, at Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation, we will have the privilege of hosting a student panel. During which , we will be able to ask the burning questions of intelligent and engaged students. I didn’t realize it until today, but it is so rare now that I take the chance to ask difficult and reflective questions of students.

I can’t believe that is rare. I never thought it would be when I left the classroom. But somehow, now that I am no longer in the classroom, I am starved for answers from students. Why should it be rare to ask important and big questions of students, for any educator (in the classroom or not)? For example, I want to ask some students about how facebook is changing the way that they write a research paper. I want to ask them why they aren’t using twitter. I want to ask them what they want to preserve from their school career into their working career. I want to ask them what matters in learning.

Does it makes sense to have a place to ask questions of students, to have them engaged in a larger learning network with adults (not as a selfish way of simply asking and not answering anything, I would like to give back to students in a wider network too)? I am struck that this may sound weird and kind of creepy, but I’m really interested in the idea of where the space is that adults and students interact. I know that Students 2.0 did a lot of work around this topic, but I am not sure that they/we have come up with a real learning environment that includes both adults and students.

Where does this exist?

Perhaps it starts with asking those questions of our panel on Saturday.Perhaps.

Submit the questions you would like engaged students to answer.

Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation (2009 Edition)

Well, we did it earlier this year and most folks asked us to put on a 2009 edition, so we’re doing it again.

Promote Learning 2.0
Did we mention that you should tell others? Blog about this. Link to the wiki or this blog post. Download a flyer (pdf) and print it out.Or use this nifty image.