I wrote this as an email, but I thought the community should have this too.
To those of you that have stayed active, thank you for continuing to take part. To those of you who have been less active, thank you for taking the space and time that you need. I am pretty aware that this project is not the only one each of us is a part of, but as it has sustained me throughout 2013, I think that it is only fair to launch into 2014 with a few new ideas in mind.
First, as Youtube has switched over to Google+ comments and accounts, we now have an OpenSpokes page that will make it easier to post content and collaborate from. I have invited that each of you become managers of this page: https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/108865278345564619578/108865278345564619578/posts
Once you are managers, you can actually go to youtube.com and just switch over to it so that you can upload videos without having to remember our collective password. I hope that makes it easier for you (and hopefully it will let Erin login from Japan more easily without alerting everyone to a possible “login fraud”).
Second, I am a huge fan of uploading any reflective vlog you might feel like, whenever you might feel like it. I love the spur of the moment questions that you want to ask to our community, and I would love to see us continue this kind of collaboration. In fact, I just uploaded one of those today: http://youtu.be/gqLSqwLuxkg
Third, I have started something called Project Roundtable, which will meet every other week in a Hangout on Air where experts and novices come together and discuss an important Educational topic. I am hopeful that these 26 sessions might provide us with an outline for what topics might be relevant to us as Open Spokers. More than that, I would love to use this group to help define better topics than the ones I put in there originally as a brainstorm. You can go and add topic ideas and start to collaborate here for this project: http://bit.ly/projectroundtable.
Also, as a part of this project, one of the options to “get credit” (we are setting up something locally for this, but we might want to think more internationally for our Canadian counterparts) for these sessions is to do a video reflection about what you learned, so I am hoping that this will cause new folks to want to post those video reflections using our channel and expand the scope of our Fellowship. Our first roundtable of the year is on Friday, and I would love to have as many Open Spokers there as possible: http://goo.gl/FDh1W3
Happy new year everyone, and thanks again for being one of the favorite parts of my PLN. Talk to you all soon.
