21st Century Skills

I’ve been thinking a lot about “21st Century Skills” lately.  Mostly because the publisher of our high school biology program wants my coauthor and I to add a section to the front-end of the textbook on the topic.  Seems a bit ironic to put such content into a print medium, but that’s ok.  People will at least read about it and, maybe, they will want to dig further.

Since that’s a phrase I’ve heard a lot lately, but wasn’t sure I completely understood, I asked our editor what exactly they meant by “21st Century Skills”?  She sent me to a web site called Partnership for 21st Century Skills, citing it as the definitive resource on precisely what these 21st century skills are all about.   The Partnership for 21st Century Skills is an advocacy group with the intention of rallying federal resources (Department of Education), businesses (publishers, network providers, hardware/software manufacturers), administrators, and educators around the idea of bringing 21st century skills to schools.  Here’s a quote from their mission statement:

There is a profound gap between the knowledge and skills most students learn in school and the knowledge and skills they need in typical 21st century communities and workplaces.

To successfully face rigorous higher education coursework, career challenges and a globally competitive workforce, U.S. schools must align classroom environments with real world environments by infusing 21st century skills.

Sounds good.  And when you read their materials there’s not much there to disagree with…creativity and innovation, problem solving, critical thinking, flexibility, self-direction, social awareness.  Those all sounds good.  But I thought that this “21st century skills” thang was about technology skills, social networking, and participatory media?

Well, there are technology skills listed on the web site too –  information literacy, using technology tools to access, manage, and evaluate information – but they feel awfully general and, to my eye, they get lost in a sea of impossibly wide-ranging, “achieving-world-peace” kind of goals.  It sort of reminds me of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegone where “all the  children are above average”.   How can a school administrator or a classroom teacher be expected to apply this?  So many (many!) hoped-for skills here and not a lot of specifics. I worry about the mandatory media skills for future survival getting lost in the ocean of other goals that one might want to have for our students – a sort of unfortunate dilution effect.

So what to put in this front section of our book?  What would I want to put forward as fundamentally important media literacy skills, from my perspective?  Let’s make it real by making it personal.  My kids. When I think about the media literacy skills that I would like for my children (and I attempt to be precise and reasonable about it). Here’s what comes to the top:

How to distinguish between dependable and undependable information.  In a networked world where everyone is participating, the commentators number in the hundreds of thousands, and its all happening at lightening speed, I want my kids to be able to readily distinguish good information from less good.  

How to read (really read) in linked environments.  Reading linked text calls for a different set of skills.  There are new neural pathways to be laid down in order to keep track, make sense, remember, and connect.  I want my kids to be able to read with focus and attention but also to be able to skim, parse, suss, and then dig in when they need to.

How to search, tag, and organize.  My kids will need to know how to find information on line, yes – but beyond that, they will need to understand folksonomy and learn how to tag their information for later retrieval and sharing.  They will need to know how to use tools to organize, store, and manipulate information.  

How to find teachers and mentors.  For any problem with which you might be struggling, there is an expert out there somewhere who will be able and willing to help you.  Our networked world is a perfect way to map solution to need.  But getting the word out there about your need (framing the question), finding the right coach/mentor/teacher, and then making the most of the connection (in whatever form it takes) all require unique and nuanced skills.

How to edit in shared knowledge environments.  Whether its Google Docs, a classroom wiki, an Elluminate session or wikipedia, citizens of the world will need to be able to edit, contribute, constructively critique, and collaborate in these shared environments.

How to create a digital footprint.  I want my kids to understand how indelible the web is and that photos and videos uploaded, stories told, or blog entries posted will not only be around forever but might be shared, linked to, mashed up, amplified, and viewed by many.  But my hope here is not just to avoid the pitfalls and dangers.  I want them to be safe – yes – but I want them to go beyond that and learn how to build a lasting digital profile of which they are proud.  One where a future employer will type their name into the search engine of tomorrow and say, “nice.”

To understand the network effect.  I want my kids to fundamentally grasp what a network effect is – how to create it, leverage it, and ride it.  To understand, down in their bones, how much more valuable something is the more people know about it and use it.

I didn’t find any of these specifics on the Partnership web site.  Maybe they are there, in some form or in one of the many downloadable pdfs, but I gave up after swimming in a sea of generalities. Or maybe it’s the name given to this idea  – 21st Century Skills — it just seems so, well, HUGE.  And in its hugeness, ineffective.   I’m sure my list is not complete (and would love to hear your suggestions on what to add) but it’s a start – and its specific.  I think I know what I want to include in that textbook section. I think I know what I need to talk to my kids about this afternoon.

Digital Media Student Projects

I’m always looking for good student media project examples from clever teachers and, lucky me, I hit the jackpot this week when I met Larry Schmidt.  Larry is a high school English teacher in Minnesota who teaches online courses for EdVisions High School.  EdVisions sounds like a pretty interesting idea….to quote their web site, it’s a “learning community offering students througout Minnesota personalized, project-based learning experiences”.  According to Larry, he tries to find out what his students are passionate about, and then works with them as a coach/mentor/interlocutor to guide them to tools and resources that would be most useful.  He’s done some pretty amazing things with them —  poetry, writing songs, making movies, graphic novels — and I’m going to share two of them with you in this post.

The first was a grammar project.  Grammar….eeeewww, you’re probably thinking.  But that was part of Larry’s plan.  He thought he’d take the most compelling new tools and apply them to the most boring topic to show students how it could come to life.  So he started by asking students to review each others essays and color-code them for typical grammatical issues… things like subject/verb agreement, correct use of plurals, dangling participles…that sort of thing.  By reviewing each other’s work, his students came up with a set of the most commonly encountered grammatical problems in their class.  And then Larry challenged them to work in teams and create a movie that would fix each of the problem.  Sounds easy?  Not really.  The movie had to, first, correctly identify and explain the problem and then offer a solution.  The students had to plan it, script it, figure out lighting, music, and editing.  I’ve seen two of these student-created productions and they’re terrific.  Here’s one that helps to identify and correct  run on sentences. And here’s one on that common bugaboo of when to use woman/women. Priceless.

But wait, there’s more.  Another project that Larry got his students interested in is making their own graphic novels about an historical event or a concept.  He first had them read Persepolis (by Marjane Satrapi) and Maus (by Art Spiegelman), engaging them in a discussion about what worked and didn’t work in those two books, what they liked and how this genre works.  Then he showed them how to use toondoo and set them loose.  The students created their own stories, with themselves at the center.  Here are a few of them for you to savor: one student’s perspective on the Islamic revolution in Iran, a little time travel through the Italian Renaissance, and a walk-through of  Women’s Rights in Iran.

What I love about all of these examples (and about Larry’s approach, in general) is that he’s making it possible for students to be producers, to be in charge of their own learning. I can only imagine how much “Ravy” learned about Iran from putting together her online graphic novel.  And while she was at it, she learned about page layout, photo research, permissions/creative commons, maps, and how to construct a clear narrative flow.  

It’s when we hear from educators like Larry Schmidt that we realize what this new world of participatory media is all about.

Transformations

Have you heard about the transforming building?  I just love this story.  This building in the photograph above, was designed by the Dutch architect, Rem Koolhaas, to shift its shape to fit the desired use.  Each of the four sides within the structure’s tetrahedron contain a different shape, better suited to a specific venue.  When the structure rested on the hexagon, it was optimal for a fashion show.  Then it was flipped (using cranes) to rest on the rectangle – just right for a cinema. Later, yet another flip will make it suitable for an art exhibition. The Prada Transformer launched in Seoul, South Korea in April 2009.  It will be there for five months and then dismantled and shipped to Milan, where, I suppose, it can be shape-shifted again for yet another purpose.  Hmmm…a nice reminder about the value of resilience.  Here’s a self-running montage, made of stills, so that you can see the structure it in its various morphs.

Twenty of My Favorite Things

From The Sound of Music

Recently, a colleague asked me what ideas I might have for interesting student projects that would take advantage of these new, participatory media tools.  I thought about it and started to make a list.  I came up with about 30 ideas but some of them were a little weak…. so I whittled the list down to 20 of my favorites.  And here they are.  With linked examples, where I had one. I hope you like…(and a yellow jelly bean to anyone who can name the song from the photo).

1.  5-Photo Story
Plan and storyboard a five- (or ten?) image story. Take the photos with a digital camera and post them to a Flickr group. Ask all members of the group to comment on each others photos. Design a rubric to guide the comments (in order to avoid platitudes or uniformed praise)

2.  Annotated Reading
Start a conversation around an article. Bookmark the article’s online location (using Diigo) and insert comments/questions. Provide the group with your bookmarked version (url) and then they add their comments/questions. Example.

3.  Wiki Process Journal
Create a wiki space for a group to use over the course of a project or an experiment. Team members keep their notes and observations about the process.  The group’s final product will be in some other form; the wiki is there to document the process. The process journal could be organized chronologically or by team member (with each team member owning a page).  The team could document their process with video, photos, or text.

4.  Project Timeline
Use a web-based time line creation tool (xtimeline, timetoast) to document a product/process or to plan a future project.  Comments are embedded in the timeline, document/photos are attached, and links embedded. The timeline is stored online so that others can view it, edit it, and add to it.

5.  Self-Published Book
A book is identified as the outcome of a particular process or project. The team works together to write the book and then self-publishes, using one of any number of online publishing sites (LuLu, Myebook).

6.  Animated Movie
Make an animated movie to tell a story, present a case, or explain a principle. (Goanimate makes animation easy, xtranormal is a unique movie generation service that converts a text description to a movie)

7.  Introduce Yourself
Make a media piece that tells your personal story (or your school’s story) to use for group introductions (back to school night?).  Animoto, IAMUNIQUE, Eyejot, or Wordle are all good tools for this sort of high-impact, at-a-glance”capture”.  Perhaps post all individual “introductions” to a wiki page?  Example.

8.  Create a Bell-Ringer
To wrap up a chapter, a unit, or slam home a complex topic, have students create a “bell-ringer” (using Animoto) to summarize the main points or the experience. Example.  Another example.

9.  Put it in the Funny Papers
Use a comic generator (Pixton) to create a comic strip to explain a concpet, describe an assignment, or model appropriate team behavior.  First build the story with a mistaken conclusion or a wrong answer and then build it with the right answer. Have a discussion around the two scenarios.

10.  Build a Collaboration
Use VoiceThread to create a conversation around a series of images, a concept or a scenario.  Use the audio recording to narrate a series of still pictures/photos. Once complete, provide the link and all members of the team can comment on the story (leaving their own voice recordings embedded or commented through text).  With time, the recorded observations, insights, and suggestions from all team members are captured within the case’s VoiceThread file. Maybe even invite an outside expert to add comments to a class VoiceThread. A VoiceThread allows a group conversation to be collected from anywhere and then shared in one simple place. Here’s a terrific example of a Voicethread created by Tod Duncan (UC Denver) for his cancer biology course. And another example built by Kelly Hogan  (UNC Chapel Hill) for her non-science majors’ biology course.

11.  Presentations To-Go with Prezi
Traditional Powerpoint presentations can be boring and they don’t travel well without the presenter.  Create your presentation in Prezi which allows you to narrate, annotate, and focus the students’ eye on the points you consider most important.  Post your Prezi on your web site or put it on a CD. Students can create prezis too.  Here is an excellent example prezi presentation created by one of Cheryl Holinger’s (Central York High School) students.

12. Broadcast Yourself
With an internet connection and a webcam, you can create a live, broadcast show online with any of the interactive web streaming platforms (Livestream, Blogamp, or UStream). Broadcast an event, a talk-show, an interview, a field trip, a debate or deliver a live conversation with participants in different locations. Viewers can pose questions or comment in the chat window. The show can be recorded and archived for later viewing and reflection.

13.  Tell a Digital Story
Use digital tools to tell your story (a project, a personal story, a success story, a retrospective on a failure).  The Center for Digital Storytelling has a number of helpful tools and articles.  Example Stories.

14.  Produce a Film
Using small, easy-to-use low-cost video cameras (like the Flip camera), it’s relatively easy to create simple videos.  Video is an effective way to model behavior, demonstrate a successful encounter/experiment, document an event or a field trip, record an interview with a subject-matter expert.  Post your video online and use either veotag or bubbleply to annotate your video and direct students to particular segments.

15. Podcast It
Ask students to create a podcast (or a series of podcasts).  Short (3 -5 minute) descriptions or explanations, based on a script they write.  The podcasts can be simply audio or they can enhance them with video or still graphics (using Garageband or Audacity).  Podcasts can be posted and distributed online through iTunes or Odeo.

16.  Crossword
Use Crossword compiler to create an online crossword for others to complete.

17.  Analyze What You’ve Written
Challenge students to use Wordle to take a critical look at a report, an essay, or an assessment. Paste the entire document or block of text into Wordle and analyze the resulting map.  Are the most prominent words what you expected?  Does the document reflect the major points you wanted to make? If not, why not?  Make changes to the document and then paste the new version into Wordle.  Compare the before and after results.

18.  Locate Yourself
GoogleEarth works well for creating location-based stories (Darwin’s HMS Beagle Voyage, WWII battles, the expansion of the Roman Empire). Use it to visualize all of the member locations in a particular group or provide location context for research or world events.  Take someone on a tour of a city or a neighborhood by pre-locating place pins and recording your commentary with built-in audio recording.  GoogleEarth 5 also now includes historical imagery from around the globe and ocean images.

19.  Join the Blogosphere
Start an individual blog (your letter to the world) or do a group/class blog with rotating posting responsibility.  Blogs can be text-based or video blogs (vlogs). The best blogs have a strong voice, something worthwhile to say, and invite commentary.  Example, Howard Reingold’s excellent vlog.

20.  A Little Online Brainstorming
Online, shareable white boards (like Skribl or Scriblink) and mind mapping applications (like text2mindmap) can make a group brainstorming activity more interesting. Upload images, doodle, share the pen, chat and when you’re done, print, save, email the results.

Send me other favorite things, and we’ll get the list up to 40.  Or more!

Teaching and Learning with Wikipedia

Every once and awhile we see a new flurry of educational outrage over the idea of students using Wikipedia as a resource for their essays or projects.  Each time the kerfuffle flares up, I’m amazed all over again that teachers have this reaction.  If I understand the concerns correctly, they are 1) that Wikipedia is not a primary source, 2) that it is not a reliable source (the information there is somehow suspect), and 3) that students will begin and end their research right there.

OK.  Let’s take those one at a time.  The first point is the only one I buy.  Yup, Wikipedia is not a primary source.  But that’s alright.  Students have to start somewhere and it seems perfectly reasonable to start your quest with a secondary source that will give you the big picture in clear, easy to read prose.  Students can go from there to more specialized and (hopefully) primary sources (depending on the assignment).  In fact, most of Wikipedia’s 2,847,000 entries (in English, that is) have an impressive list of references and external links at the end.

The second concern, that Wikipedia is not a reliable source, is where I really have problems.  When you talk with teachers who get incensed about this, it usually becomes apparent that they haven’t spent much time on Wikipedia themselves.  The whole point and power of Wikipedia is that it’s self correcting – amazingly self correcting.  You may not have noticed it but on every Wikipedia entry there is a history tab (up at the top).  Try clicking that tab on a particularly meaty or controversial entry (like “Stem Cells” or  “Barack Obama”) and get a load of what you see there – a chronology of  corrections, insertions, deletions,  explanations, fixes, and debates. Experts, librarians, and amateurs are weighing in, discussing, challenging each other in order to get to the truth.  Some articles (stem cells, for instance) also have a discussion tab up at the top. This is an additional space set aside to document the ongoing collaboration to improve the article’s veracity.  Hmmm….seems like looking at these history and discussion pages could be a good classroom tool. Isn’t this precisely what we’re trying to get our students to do?  To think critically about information, to question, to dig deep?  Wikipedia could be an object lesson in precisely the kind of thinking we want our students to be doing.

Consider an article that appeared in about 100 different newspapers, radio broadcasts, and on ABC news this last week:  Irish Student Hoaxes World’s Media with Fake Quote.  What happened is that Shane Fitzgerald, a University of Dublin student, inserted a made-up quote into the Maurice Jarre entry on Wikipedia, a few hours after the composer’s death on March 28th.  The made-up quote ended up in dozes of blogs, newspaper sites, and newspapers all over the world.  And here’s the interesting part.  The self-correcting Wikipedia community caught the quote’s lack of attribution and removed it promptly.  But the news media?  Not so much.  Finally Fitzgerald contacted several media outlets in an email and a slow process of corrections and retractions began.

The third objection – that students will begin and end their research with just Wikipedia – seems like a bogus point to me.  That’s a teaching and learning challenge – not a weakness of Wikipedia.  That sort of reasoning is often applied to technology.  That is, people blame technology for a problem that is really a much larger, human problem. We ban cell phones from school because students will misuse them and get distracted in class.  We blame Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sites for bullying attacks on vulnerable teens.  We blame Craig’s list for the violence perpetrated by Phillip Markoff.  We blame the internet for pornography. If you are worried about your students not consulting sufficient sources in their research, fix that problem and don’t ban them from using Wikipedia.

Reflections on Growth and Change

I just finished reading the article “Models of growth – towards fundamental change in learning environments” by David Cavallo (BT Technology Journal * Vol 22 No4)  – with thanks to Gardner Campbell for bringing it to my attention.  A very good read with many intriguing ideas.  In order to process the ideas for myself, I thought I’d blog about it here.

David Cavallo is a really interesting guy.  He’s the co-head of the the MIT Media Lab’s Future of Learning group which focuses on the design and implementation of new learning environments.  He collaborated with Seymour Papert at the MIT Media Lab and is the VP Learning for the One Laptop Per Child organization.  He also led the design and implementation of medical informatics at Harvard University Health Services prior to his work at the Lab.

Based on Cavallo’s experience implementing new learning environments in Brazil, he proposes new models for growth and change in education.  You’ll have to read the article for the juicy details on his Brazil project.  What I hope to chew on here, are his take-home lessons for our own use in thinking about transformational process in schools and colleges.

First off, Cavallo talks about existing models for growth and change in schools.  As he puts it, we either try to replicate change – that is, enforce the execution a predetermined, formulated design in every location according to prescribed steps.   Or we try to take it to scale – that is, test the reform in a small, controlled setting and then attempt to spread it through the system.  Both models, according to Cavallo, are flawed and he laments the lack of alternative models.  And then, of course, goes on to propose new ways of thinking about it.

The way Cavallo sees change is as a kind of learning.  He very articulately makes the parallel between the process when a school system undergoes change and the changes that happen in an individual learner when they encounter new concepts. Just as we know that simple information transfer doesn’t work for the individual learner, so it goes for a school system.  In addition to that, just as with an individual learner, we have to consider the sociological, cultural, and environmental context in which the learning (the change) takes place.  And when they’re working, they need to work on problems that are significant to them.  This way of reframing systemic change, gives us all sorts of insights based on experience with students.

Cavallo explains that copying best practices doesn’t work (he uses the auto industry in post-war Japan as a example to illustrate this).  Substantive change requires the learner to study the underlying principles of the information so that they can apply and fit the new ideas to their local culture and specific situation.  And so it goes with educational change.  It is the mindset around the change, rather than the sum of the steps or practices, that need to be developed.

And that leads to his description of what constitutes a “fertile environment for growth”.  Here’s a list of what Cavallo sees as felicitous conditions for educational change:

Volition: teachers have got to want it

Appropriation and experimentation: teachers need to be able to try it out in their own setting

Concrete exemplars: real-life examples that are meaningful to the teachers

Community and communication: peer-to-peer interchange of ideas, questions, doubts, and considerations

Feedback: teachers need to see everyone’s results and get feedback on their own results

Debugging: make mistakes and discuss them

Materials: you need the things to work with

Language: either re-appropriating old terms for new meanings or inventing new terms to describe what’s going on

Bottom-up and emergent: many little contributions (not top down)

Time: major changes do not happen over night

Hope and expectation: teachers must come to believe that improvement is desirable and possible

Sounds like a pretty good list, doesn’t it?  I’m thinking this could be used as a check list – as in, before we get started, are these conditions in place?  If not, why not?  And what could we do about it?

The article goes on to describe the specifics of a summer institute they designed (alternating between talks, project work, and discussion groups) and the resulting implementation in the various schools. He explains that the central focus of the workshops was to reflect on the learning process itself and how they spark an ongoing process of reflection and improvement.  And how often does that happen?  How often are we able to take the time to reflect on our teaching?  On our own learning?  And on better ways to learn?

In the end, Cavallo concludes that large-scale educational change emerges from a number of small-scale changes and that the most lasting improvements come from modeling, testing, debugging and adapting to local conditions.  Throughout their experiences in Brazil, they seemed to create deliberate variation – each classroom, each school turned out differently and there were always unexpected results. I really appreciated his welcome attitude toward the diversity of solutions. It’s a good reminder that your implementation will probably look nothing like my solution – and that’s not only ok, it’s a good thing.  As Cavallo puts it, “meaningful changes must proceed form local concerns, and no one knows the right answers in advance.”

I have to say that one of my most valuable take-aways from reading this article is to remind myself that patience is required.  “This is not the work of a day, or a week, or a workshop…this is a process where the chance to experience a new practice of learning leads to a fundamental re-thinking of what might be possible.”  Patience.

Video Tools

Video is a powerful medium.  No doubt about it.  Not only does it have an emotional quality to it (that amplifies its impact) but it packs information efficiently.  The only catch is that when we show a video to students, we like to sort of narrate it, explain it, or at least provide context.  We like to point out important things, ask questions, or make sure that the students get all the connections. Those requirements usually mean that valuable in-class time is required to show video.

There are a couple of new online tools that could help with this dilemma. The first one I found is called Veotag.  With this application you can basically make a table of contents to a video (with chapter or topic headings).  The video plays side by side with your constructed table of contents. Students can jump to the various parts of the video by clicking on your pre-created links.  You can also add notes, tags, and comments to further explain or amplify what’s going on in the video. Your notes and the table of contents display next to the viewing window. As an additional benefit, if you are working with one of your own videos or a student-created video, these “veotags” are apparently automatically picked up by search engines so you’ll get more search engine traffic to your site by posting veotagged videos.

The other one you might want to try is Bubbleply.  With this tool you can add a data layer to run on top of any existing, online video. You can put text comments, images, or links in that data layer.  When you’re done, Bubbleply generates a new link. You then send your students to that new link and they’ll see your annotated version of the video. So, with this tool, they will see the video and your comments simultaneously in the same window.

At first I was thinking that these tools could be used to create teacher-annotated content videos so that students could watch them outside of class even when you’re not there to narrate them. But it occurs to me that they could also be used by students to create their own narrated videos.

Any other ideas?

Vlogging

You may have already started a blog but here’s another idea to consider – a vlog.  As you can guess from the squished-together way these new technology terms are formed, a “vlog” is a “video blog”.  That is, a form of blogging in which the medium is video.

As a teacher, you might set up a blog site in which your students could post videos on a daily or weekly basis.  Video is a very rich, creative media for students and the possibilities (formats, special effects, lighting techniques, subject matter, stop-action) are endless.

One of the best ways to get ideas for your vlog is to visit other, successful vlogs and see what they are doing.  To that end here are a few of my favorites:

Alive in Baghdad
Excellent vlog with Iraqi journalists posting weekly videos (every Monday), detailing life in Baghdad.  Illustrates the conflict through the voice of Iraqi citizens.

Crooks and Liars
Good political satire.  Pretty well done.

CSPAN
I know, I know…but I think these guys are way ahead of the technology curve with live feeds, editorial coverage, featured guests, and regularly scheduled programming.  An impressive vlog site.

MN Stories
I like this one.  It’s a community vlog featuring all kinds of quirky and interesting human interest stories all about people living in Minnesota.  Note that this site has channels so that you can sort through the vlog by area of interest to you (food, music, art, etc).  For a classroom vlog, you could do the same – that is, set up channels for different content areas or elements of the course.

Sustainable Route
Two young women set out on a 13,000 mile road trip to find sustainable solutions to our environmental problems.  Sort of a Thelma and Louise go green.

So, those are my favorites – what are yours?  Oh, and here is a pretty good tutorial that covers the basics of shooting your video, compression, uploading, posting, and RSS feeds.  Whoosh.

Visual Story Telling

 

Here’s an interesting idea. Gardner Campbell (Baylor University) asked his new media studies students to tell a story in five frames (uploaded to a group on Flickr).  The resulting student projects are really quite clever and intriguing.

What biology story could your students tell in five frames?  Or ten?  What could we learn about what they know (and how they feel about what they know) from their visual stories – and also from the storyboards they create to plan those stories?  Might be a fun project to try…

Twittering Away

I think I’m finally beginning to understand Twitter.  It’s taken me over a year….I admit, I’m a slow learner.  But, confound it, when I first started using it, I just didn’t get why this application would be necessary.  Why would I want to hear that “Kadee” is “finally going to bed at midnight.”  or that “Lawer” is “having lunch – ham on rye”?   The last thing I need is more useless information and another feed to follow.  Besides which, couldn’t this effect be obtained using email?

Since many of the thought leaders I respect seemed entranced by it, I persevered.  It was really only after I had honed the list of people I was following that the value of Twitter started to sink in.  You see, with Twitter, you choose people to “follow”.  Everytime someone you’re following posts an update to Twitter (referred to as a “tweet”), you receive it in your Twitter stream.  If you’re following 15 people, you receive “tweets” from them in a stream, as they post them (reverse-chronologically, with the most recent at the top).  Similarly, other people (or maybe some of the same people) follow you.  As often as you like, you can post short, text-only messages (140 characters or less is the rule) and the people who are following you receive them.  It’s as simple as that.

What I’m beginning to understand about Twitter is something that Gardner Campbell refers to as the network effect. That is, as I fine-tune the network of people I’m following, the information coming into me is increasingly worthwhile and exponentially useful.  

Example #1.   I was looking for a good article on people’s attitudes toward their avatars in virtual worlds.  I Googled the phrases “avatar personalization” and “avatar embodiment” and got back about 500,000 hits.  Oy.  Then I put the question out to my Twitter network and got back three, extremely useful and targeted replies within 15 minutes.  Because the people I follow on Twitter are very carefully selected (thought leaders in the field of applying new media technology to education), they are extremely useful to me.  Because I nurture and feed my twitter stream, some of them are now following me.  When I put out a request like that, they know exactly what I’m looking for and we can speak a kind of “short hand” with each other.  None of the responses I received were off the mark (say about gaming and avatars); they were all right on the money and just what I needed.  So, would I rather sift through 500k Google hits to find an article or look at the three, highly qualified suggestions I received from my Twitter network?  It’s like a fine-meshed sieve.

Example #2.  I follow Will Richardson on Twitter.  Will is a prolific author and blogger on the topic of new media and education.  Last week he tweeted about a blog entry he’d just written on transparency and leadership.  He included the link to his blog in the tweet because he wanted to alert his followers to an interesting conversation forming around the blog post.  I followed the link and read through the 30-some odd comments – it was a very interesting conversation.  The comments led me to two other thoughtful bloggers I’d never heard of before (and am now following) and sparked a phone call with another friend of mind who has been grappling with the same issues.  Becuase I indicated that I wanted to receive updates on that conversation, I continued to follow it all week (it’s now up to 71 coments).  As result of what I read there, I’ve revised a professional development talk I’m scheduled to give next month and I purchased a copy of Howard Gardner’s, Five Minds for the Future (which was quoted in the blog post).  That’s a lot of cream from one, short tweet.

Example #3.  To venture from the topic of my own professional development, here’s a more whimsical, food-related Twitter example.  Maureen Evans has honed the fine art of communicating recipes via Twitter (twecipes?).  Lovely, precise, miniature instructions for creating delicious dishes.  Here’s a NYTimes article about her, along with some of her tweeted recipes.  Wonderful!

So – all of this to say, I think this application is worth your time.  My specific examples might not be relevant to your world but insert your own specifics there and imagine the resulting network effect.  

Here are a few tips to get you started.  Sign up at Twitter (signing up and building your profile will take about five minutes).  I suggest choosing a Twitter ID that is pretty similar to your own name.  I made the mistake of picking something silly the first time (amoj) and regret it as people don’t have a clue who I am.  Once you’re up and running, you might want to consider a few of specialty extension sites for augmenting your twitter experience. The first tool you’ll need is a url-shortening site.  If you’re going to share a web link in a tweet, you’ll use up most of your allotted 140 characters if you don’t shorten those big, hanging urls.  I use tinyurl but there are others.  TweetDeck is a sort of browser for Twitter – you can post from there, manage who you are following, arrange groupings of people, and access tinyurl right from there.  TwitterKarma allows you to see, on one handy page, who you are following and who is following you.  Twittervision is a real-time display of tweets around the world, as they are happening.  Addictive.  Many Eyes has a fabulous visualization of tweets that begin with the phrase “I need to…” intriguing way to take the pulse of the twittering world.  Quitter is a tool that allows you to see who has dropped you (stopped following you) – ouch. Tweetscan is an efficient way to search the twitter universe for subjects of interest to you.  Since the twitter search engine doesn’t work very reliably you can use Search.Twitter to find people or topics. Twitterbuzz lists, in descending order, the sites that people link to most often in Twitter – a sort of index to what’s hot in the twitterverse. Twitpic allows you to share photos on Twitter. And here’s a very handy link to a printable sheet of twitter commands that will make your tweeting life easier.

Whew.  So there you have it in a nutshell.  A rather big nutshell. Certainly longer than a 140-character nutshell, but then, as Mark Twain would have said, I would have needed more time to write you a shorter blog post.

I would love to hear what you think of Twitter – does it work for you?  What are your examples? How are you using it?