Videos of Teachers using Facebook

Exploring fb for education - a wiki dedicated to this topic, with a page of videos of teachers talking about their fb projects. One popular use is having students create a fan page about a historical character, and take on that character's identity on fb.

There is also a group on fb for educators using fb.

Photo Sharing

I'm preparing for a discussion at the Project IDEAL conference tomorrow about social media tools. All I need to do at this point is add a few examples and links, but it's impossible to do this fast! Every link leads to many possible bunny trails, following one link to another, learning interesting things that may or may not have anything to do with the task at hand. Is this ADD, or multitasking?

I'm reviewing some of the projects created in July and August for the discussion of Social Media in Adult Education, and I'm still surprised at the richness of the discussion. I didn't participate in the photo sharing group, but now I'm looking at their projects linked from the wiki. They created a group on Flickr and had quite a bit of discussion within that group, apart from the list. There are lots of ideas about how to use photo sharing in instruction, especially for ESOL. Illustrations of the alphabet, of everyday interactions (not the happy shopper paying the happy clerk, as one person said), of cooking and canning, of prepositions, of favorite shoes, favorite clothes. The list goes on, and the photos could be collected by teachers or by students. A teacher could create a closed group, where only students in one class could add photos and posts, or the group could be public. Maybe I shouldn't still be amazed at the possibilities of social media, and at the endless creativity of teachers, but I am.

So while I'm at it, I'm going to brag on the blogging group. We had a blog to explore blogging, which has links  to the blogs created by the participants. I had 23 people sign up for this group. About 10 actually responded to messages, and 6 created blogs. When I came back a few weeks later, three blogs were going strong and have posted something new in the last day or two. These are good projects, and they're putting me to shame. I better get busy! This may not sound like a good percentage of success, but it's summer, no one is getting paid (group leaders or participants), so this is all a labor of love.

And there were a couple of wonderful posts from Jayme Adelson-Goldstein about being a lurker. She explained how she followed the discussion, did her own projects, but didn't have time to respond on the list. She illustrated the fact that "lurkers" are not always passive observers. Many are using the materials to suit their own needs and professional development, but not posting about it. There are 1400 people on the adult ed professional development list, so if 6 people actively participated in each of 10 groups, and another maybe 150 to 200 participated in some non-public way, that makes it worth the effort!

NIFL Social Media Discussion

The discussion of social media for teaching a professional development in adult education is going strong this week! (Thank you, Jackie Taylor and Nell Eckersly!) Despite being on vacation this week and taking care of two toddlers, I've managed to somewhat keep up with the conversation, and have already learned a lot! You can see everything I've bookmarked so far on my Delicious account. Here are some quick examples:

- If you only have time for one link, check out this one. It's a set of slides by Paul Adams who does user research for Google, and reports on what they've found out about how people really relate to their friends, and how they would like to relate to their online friends and acquaintances, and how companies like Google and Facebook could make it easier than they do now. Really interesting! For example, he says that most people have between 4 and 6 groups of friends that are not connected to each other, like friends from college, friends from early in career, friends from kids school, family, etc. Most groups have between 2 and 10 people in them. We don't just have one big group of 183 friends! Social networking sites need to allow us more flexibility, and more control over privacy.

- This article from Education Week describes the burgeoning use of a variety of social media in K12 education, including Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Second Life, and others.

- The POST method of choosing the right tech tool for the teaching objective - People (i.e. audience), Objectives, Strategy, Technology. In other words, choose the right tool for the job, not just the coolest tool.

- Emerging Technologies Matrix for Adult Education - Nell put together this list of social media tools that teachers might want to check out.

If you want to see a synopsis of the discussion, Jackie is doing an outstanding job of summarizing it on the ALE Wiki.

Better yet, join the discussion.

Goodbye Butts in Chairs

Can't resist this one - to the tune of Candle in the Wind. Thank you, Gina Lobacarro, for posting this on the New Digital World Ning site.

Social Networking for Professional Development

I'm at the CATESOL conference, and it's been a mixture of wonderful conversations and depressing realizations; wonderful because of the opportunity to see so many colleagues that I don't get to see all the time, and depressing because adult education in California, at least the K12 adult schools, is being cut and curtailed by state budget cuts. The adult level meeting, which is usually full to overflowing, was this time full of empty chairs, and when someone asked how many were from continuing education in the community colleges, more than half the room raised their hands. That means that teachers and coordinators from the K12 adult schools aren't here this year. There was no money for travel. There was also no one from the Adult Education Office of the California Department of Education because they also are not currently allowed to travel.

One of the wonderful parts of being here in Pasadena has been sharing a hotel room with my friend Jan Jarrell from San Diego City College. She used to teach ESL with me at Centre City Adult Education Center in San Diego, and we used to walk at the bay every Thursday and strategize about how to solve the various challenges we perceived in our classes, our program, and the district, not to mention our personal lives. I've missed that since I moved to Sacramento in 2001, and had forgotten how deeply satisfying it is to talk to someone who knows you and your history, and who shares many of your values and beliefs. We don't have to start at the beginning of a conversation, we can start in the middle and still know where we are.

In a year when the opportunities for face-to-face networking are fewer than in previous years, I found myself giving a workshop on Social Networking for Professional Development to a very small audience at the end of a long day. (The slides are posted, and the links on the wiki are just the ones that aren't in the slides.) The audience was small partly because the topic doesn't appear directly related to teaching English to speakers of other languages. But the people who were there, the 3 or 4 intrepid souls who sat up front and really talked with me, were sincerely curious about social networking, and I had the opportunity to share my passion for the subject.

Today I listened to a bunch of episodes from NPR's This I Believe, so let me borrow from their format to articulate here some things I believe:
* I believe we human beings are social animals
* I believe that learning is an innate human drive like sex or the need to find food and shelter - we can't go on for too long without it
* I believe we learn through relationships as much as if not more than through solitary reading and studying
* I believe that we learn through a web of connections between reading, conversations and experiences that interact with each other in some chemical way inside our brains
* I believe that passion is one of the keys to a productive life

In my presentation I talked about Twitter to people who had never seen it, about how many things I've learned from links people have posted there. I talked about Delicious and what an excellent improvement it is to be able to save and tag bookmarks online, and to share them with others and have others share their bookmarks as well. I talked about listservs, and Facebook and LinkedIn, and I realized that I'm still excited and passionate about these things.

I talked about people I've "met" through these networks, like Stephen Downes for instance, someone I will probably never meet in real life, but whose thinking affects my thinking, and my ability to share those thoughts with others. He talks a lot about how ideas are socially generated, and I recently read a biography of Einstein that made me acutely aware of the same thing - ideas are developed socially, feeding off each other, pushing each other, disagreeing with each other. Not to negate the importance of the exceptional brilliance of some minds. I often, in this stage of my life (I'm 61), run smack into the limitations of my own intellect. But Einstein, by putting his ideas out to his field, developed relationships with the other people who were thinking about the same things he was, and through those relationships developed his ideas further. He did that through the social networks that were available to him, but now every one of us has wide social networks available to us. This, to me, is like magic.

CUE 2008

There were a number of things at the CUE conference that I wanted to blog, but between attending sessions, checking out vendors, and trying to keep up with my work email, I was fried by the end of each day. So much for my blogging ambition! I did check out a session on edublogging by Mark Wagner where I got a few good ideas about making connections through blogging. He posted his slides and all his links, if you want to see what he talked about.

A nice feature of the conference was having a Ning community where presenters uploaded their slides or links, and people could comment on presentations and discuss with each other and the presenter. Wave of the future. Ning and the whole issue of social networking had a much higher profile in the conference than it did a year ago, thanks in large part to Steve Hargadon, I'm guessing.

The best aspect to me was that there were 3 times as many adult educators there as there were two years ago. OK, the total was about 12, but that's still progress. There were several adult education workshops and hands-on sessions. It paid off lobbying to get Susan Gaer included in the Google Teacher Academy. I was disappointed to hear that the Google Teacher Academy is being turned over to CUE and will cost $50K for an organization to host. At that price, and in this budget climate, I wouldn't expect too many takers.

One thing I was surprised about - I didn't see much twittering of this conference. I searched Twitter using Terraminds and didn't find many using the tags of cue08 or cue2008.

Twitter, Again

My favorite quote so far describing Twitter:
Kevin Honeycutt: “ Twitter is my Cracker Jacks: caramel corn, caramel corn...then a PEANUT..then when you least expect it..a secret toy surprise! You have to put some ingredients in too or you’re just snacking on everyone else’s cracker jacks.”

Intermittent reinforcement is the best for establishing a behavior. So you keep reading the boring stuff because you know eventually there will be another PEANUT!

A guy on the video on that same page uses the metaphor of bees "pollinating all over the place" to talk about Twitter. I feel a metaphor lesson coming on!

One More View from Second Life

Just had to post one more example from Claudia Linden. This dragon is a sculpture, not an avatar, created by a teenage girl on teen Second Life. It's really complex and beautiful. Click on the image and look at it full size.

Web 2.0 for Administrators

My workshop for administrators was interesting. It reminded me that most people don't have time to surf around and look for cool new things. That's part of OTAN's role (my favorite part!), to review the possibilities and present a few that might be helpful for busy teachers and administrators. Links are all on my wiki.

So here's what they wanted to hear about:
1. Google Calendar, and how to share a calendar online
2. Wikis - what's a wiki and what to you use it for?
3. RSS Feeds - but I had to talk about blogging first, and the OTAN News, so they would have a concept of what feeds they might want to get.
4. Social bookmarking - I didn't have time to go into detail on this, but I think this might be one of the most useful things for them

Things we didn't get to:
1. Google Docs
2. Video sharing
3. Unitedstreaming
4. Moodle
5. Open source software

This could really be a 3 hr workshop instead of just a show and tell. Maybe I should propose this for COABE.

More on Social Networking and Ning

I'm at the ACSA Conference, and working on my Web 2.0 for Administrators workshop that will happen on Friday. I just have to make another plug for Classroom 2.0 on Ning. A few days ago, while I was thinking about and planning this workshop, I posted a forum topic on Classroom 2.0 asking about Web 2.0 tools for educational administrators. I have a couple of replies so far, not a lot, but they are very useful. People have lots of knowledge and are willing to share. Gotta love it!

I also used the same site to check out a discussion of which free wiki host is the best for education, in order to respond to a question on an email list. While I was there, I noticed that a colleague had joined the community and left a message, so I went to her home page and sent her a friend invitation. So that's a lot of use out of a site for one day!

I also wrote an article about Ning for the CATESOL News, which will come out in November, I hope. One thing I realize about Classroom 2.0 is that its founder does a lot of work to keep it organized, keep discussions going, respond to communnity needs, and generally promote the community. In exploring other Ning sites I see there are a lot of junk sites, and sites that never got off the ground. The tools are there, but it takes a person, or people, with enthusiasm, commitment and hard work to make a community happen.

Classroom 2.0, Social Networking, and Diigo

I'm really enjoying being a member of Classroom 2.0, a community set up by Steve Hargadon, an ed tech person, using Ning. This is a community of teachers interested in using technology, and they are from all over the world. When I first signed up, my first friend request came from a teacher in Germany. There are lots of interesting topics being discussed there. I drop in when I have a chance, and read a few posts.

For example, tonight I went to the homepage and looked at the new discussions. Steve started several to get people to talk about what kinds of sites they use and like for various things. I checked in to the social bookmarking discussion, and read a really interesting post by Dave Ehrhart. I thought everyone would be talking about Delicious, but no. Dave is using a site called Diigo with his students. Not only can they bookmark sites, but they can highlight pages that they read and write notes on them. Dave, their high school history teacher, can look at their highlighting and notes and add comments of his own to help direct their inquiry or sharpen their insights.

Dave posted a screencast that explains exactly how he uses this tool with his students. After I watched it I understood Diigo and started thinking about how it could be used with adult education students. So I clicked on Dave's icon and went to his home page, left a comment there, and sent a request to add him as a friend. I want to see what else he has discovered!

That's social networking. Steve Hargadon has also created another community on Ning to help teachers set up and use communities. Today I proposed a workshop for CATESOL on Social Networking for Professional Development. I swore I wasn't going to do more than one workshop next year, but this topic I couldn't resist. I have the privilege of having time to surf around and see what's new, and I see part of my job as sharing what I learn, so there you go. Leave me a comment if you like or use Diigo, of if you have other social bookmarking sites to share.