Question 43 of 365: What is the true nature of spam?

Google Buzz has brought this back for me in a big way, but I have always been concerned with just how Spam has made its grand entrance into our collective consciousness. I have considered this topic as the noise and distraction in our lives, but spam is a much bigger problem because it works against your natural instinct to talk about something that matters. You are authentic to your content. Everything that comes into your inbox that doesn’t concern your authenticity is spam. This sometimes includes family that sends you jokes. This sometimes includes e-mails from Barrack Obama. This also sometimes includes solicitations for collaboration that you don’t have time to do.

While some people think that there is a distinction between being implored to engage with colleagues and being implored to buy Viagra. I don’t think that we can make that distinction. Workflow is king. Anything that makes the workflow longer or less valuable to us, is spam. It is the extra. The stuff that you just don’t want, but are forced to accept in some way. This is not news. Spam has been around for as long as there has been e-mail or twitter or blog comments.

What is new is Google Buzz, which introduces yet another way to interact with your network. While many have called it a privacy timebomb or a simple diversionary activity, it is not spam to me. Buzz, and more importantly the concepts behind it, are about making public the things that I want to introduce to the public and keeping private the things that should remain private. True, it sometimes confuses the too. But, it does a much better job of taking conversations that have no business simply existing in people’s inboxes and putting them out in the open for others to comment on. It pulls in a thread that would normally get lost on twitter. And most importantly, it allows our network to change.

Real people are not spam, and neither are conversations with people who you have never connected with before. The true nature of spam can only be found when you have decided what your true purpose is for engaging in the first place. My purpose for engaging in status messages, sharing of ideas, and creating feeds for everything I do is so that I can become better at what I do and to explore conversations that lead me to that goal. With that in mind, it is not a flaw to accept conversations from people who cannot be heard on twitter because the threads get lost or I am not following them. I follow a very small (and not all that fluid) group of people on twitter. Roughly the same 200 have been in my list for over 2 years. Buzz has shaken that up. By defaulting everything to be both public and searchable, Google has built a way for newbies and veterans to engage with one another.

Spam is evil. It sucks us away from where we need to concentrate our time. But, learning from one another and focusing that learning on new connections is not a Spam. It is the way in which we keep our network alive. It is the way that we expand and grow. While Buzz may not be the savior of our network. There will come a day when we all realize that without an influx of new blood into our network (and that means validating people who also choose not to use twitter because of how elitist it can be sometimes) we will become the spam for one another. We will become this spam because we will continue to have the same conversations and engage in the same types of collaboration repeatedly. Repetition is spam. ReTweeting is spam (if you don’t add anything). The massive amount of updates that get no reaction from the network is also spam.

So, we must do a better job of being our own spam filters. We must seek out new voices. We must seek to engage in threads and not just use the @ symbol as our unwieldy tool. We must become better at learning to collect and co-create our authenticity. We must re-invent our network, every day.

Here are some good buzzes to get you going:

1. One
2. Two
3. Three
4. Four
5. Five

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• Spam warning for Google Buzz users (v3.co.uk)
• Google Learns Tough Lesson on Privacy (benzinga.com)
• Google clears up a few things on Google Buzz (kinlane.com)

Not knowing what I can share

For a week or more I have been conflicted about knowing what I can share from a class I co-taught this week on Best Practices for Online teaching and learning (yes, I know that I have blogged about there being no such thing as “best practices”). The reason why I am conflicted is because I do not own all of the rights to the content within the course and I have never tried to share the work of other adults amongst whom some are reluctant to have open classrooms. Because my district would like to take a look at running this course again and again internally and eventually running it for other districts as well, it would be hard for me to share the actual content of the course that I co-created (with my good friend Liz Walhof).

This saddens me because I am the type of person who has to share what is going on, has to add value to the work that is going on in changing the way education works. I really would like to share just how a hybrid course can look for professional development (we met on Monday, had asynchronous learning on Tuesday and met again on Wednesday with an extended skype session). I would like to share just how excited I am for people getting down to the business of making authentic learning objects with students and using Personal Learning Networks within an LMS. However, I respect the fact that I am not the only one who took part in the creation or learning of this class. I realize that I do not have all of the answers on this blog as well.

So, what I have decided to is to is to slowly take bits and pieces of things that I have learned from the course as well as things that were created during the course and share them on this blog. By doing this, I can satisfy my need to share as well as fulfill my obligations to show that there is valuable content within the course itself.

Here is the first set of objects, three visual representations of PLNs by members of this class:

I quite like how this activity turned out. I hope you do too.

Online Schools on Twitter

I realized that my last post lacked a little context, so I am giving it now. Yesterday, an online school (http://twitter.com/iHighVirtualSD) decided to follow me on twitter. It got me thinking. How many other online schools are already in this space (either as entities or as representatives who put their virtual school into their own profile)… I used http://tweepsearch.com/ to find these:

• http://twitter.com/EDgal
• http://twitter.com/Micki_Wingate (hasn’t posted since July 23rd)
• @virtualparent
• @Connections4U
• @MsLivFLVS
• @Carrie_Jean
• @julie_rose_
• @jennobles
• @baldy7
• @bb915
• @kurquhart
• @magzmom
• @glad2be
• @schultzem
• @crescentprephs
• @onlinehigh
• PennFoster
• LaurelSprings
• @unkwillow
• @Online_Courses
• @catalyst11

I am sure that there are more out there, but my point is this: Some of these twitter accounts are people, and some are representing an organization. While I may want to pay attention to an organization’s updates, I am not intersted in engaging them in a conversation. The schools that use twitter most effectly are going to be the ones who realize that it is a two-way medium and not something to simply broadcast whatever PR sounds good to the person holding the keys to the account at the moment.

I guess I am still looking for a good twitter profile that speaks for many, speaks to many, and listens to even more.

Laying down the gauntlet…

I am trying to create a learning environment worthy of my kids. That’s all.

I am working feverishly every day so that by the time my kids need more education than I can provide at home, an environment will exist that I would be proud to show to my son and daughter. For all of my hard work, though, I do not believe that it exists yet. I do not believe that a single school out there has gotten it right in terms of balancing pedagogy and technology or in terms of getting all of the right tools into the hands of the kids and asking them the right questions so that the tools actually get used.

I feel terrible about the fact that someone else’s kids have to settle for “the best we can do right now.” The fact that they can’t log in once and find all of their classes, all of their connections in their PLN, and all of their created works (or access these things at all) is shameful. All we can provide them with now is, at best, a set of tasks that will approximate a truly connected world, and at worst, a set of tasks that is simply helping to purpetuate an outdated form of education (disconnected learning).

In the interest of making promises and then keeping them, I am going to challenge myself and everyone else around me to create a learning environment that I would be proud to introduce my daughter to by the time she is of school age (3 and 1/2 years away from now). I guess I have been inspired by Obama’s moonshot rhetoric during his speach last night.

I’m not sure what the learning space looks like yet, but it is starting to take shape a little.

Learning Networks and PD, the movie

Learning Networks and PD [ 12:54 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1035)

Although I didn’t really want to string this piece out for two posts, I think that thinking things through is really important for me. I guess that I really needed to talk it through as well and put some links behind the theory.

A year or two ago I would have said that those who were talking about PLN’s were simply blowing smoke. For a long time, I  thought that twitter and other social networks were just something that I did. I thought that the process that I went through to create Ripe Environments was the only way to do it. But, networks are about the other individuals, not the group that I see as mine (the connections that we all make, not the connections that I have made). Networks are about asking the right questions. Networks are about aggregating and archiving what is truly important to each person.

We just have to make sure that creating them is a priority. Any thoughts on how?

Learning Networks and PD from Ben Wilkoff on Vimeo.

I learn with other learners.

For a long time, I have been kind of snobby about deciding where I can learn. I had made the decision that I could only learn when I am with people who have the same vision for education as I do, and after going to Educon 2.1, I think that this was both reinforced and destroyed. It was reinforced because I was in a room with a whole bunch of people who do share my vision for connected learning and it was wonderful to push the boundaries of my thinking. However, it was completely destroyed because I realized that in saying we have a monopoly on the future of education, we are shutting out nearly every voice that will actually make that future happen.

Today I am sitting in a training for Digital Educators in Douglas County. I started with this group when I was teaching 7th/8th grade and even then I was frustrated by the skill set of my cohort. Now though, with a lot of reflection and some understanding about how we all learn (connected, just-in-time, etc.), I realize that I have just as much to learn in this environment as I do at Educon 2.1. It is my job to hear all of the voices around me and to synthesize it into my own learning environment.

This is my learning network too.

I never understood that before. I always just made it about my online PLN. It is my job (not because it is in my job description, but because it is the way that I will be a better learner) to connect all of my learning network to one another. I need to share what I learn from Twitter with the people I see and the people that I see need to be able to reach my Twitter network. Why has it taken me this long to figure this out?

(I guess this isn’t the revelation that I am making it out to be. I have been tweeting about what I’m learning for a while now and I have been sharing links and resources with my district as well, but I don’t know that I ever made it a goal that I would try to create continuity between those two spheres. How have you connected your virtual networks and your real-life networks? How can I do it better?)

Feeds in a workflow.

For as useful as they are for aggregating information, rss feeds are not all that easy to put into one’s workflow. You have to make a point of going to a special page and maintaining your reading list. Google reader (http://reader.google.com) makes it pretty easy to do this, but you still have to make a habit of going there.
 
At one point (not that long ago), I had over 2000 unread posts in my aggregator. It seemed unlikely that I would ever be able to sift through it all and pull off any kind of conclusions. I was under the infamous guilt of falling behind. More than that, I felt like my PLN was leaving me behind.
 
Well, no longer. I have found a way to make my rss feeds more immediate, a way for my feeds to literally alert me to their presence. Enter http://snackr.net/. This Air application (good on any platform) is the only way I have figured out to put feeds onto my screen in the way that Tweetdeck or Twhirl has done for my twitter account. I no longer go to google reader for anything other than maintenance because it syncs directly with Reader. If you have enough room on your screen for one more way to connect, I would recommend Snackr highly. If only for the ability to show others that Rss is not abstract. It is real, and it is a powerful way of exploring connected and authentic learning.
 
Reflective aside: What would anyone think of a collaboratively maintained educational Google Reader account that could be used by Snackr apps in schools? Which feeds should be included and why? Is it just one more thing or would this kind of workflow influence allow for real change?
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