Faculty Academy 2008

We had a fruitful faculty brown bag lunch conversation today. The topic was Building Connections and Communities through the Web. Ten folks present locally, and since Jeff Nugent was using UStream, another crowd actively joined via the internet.

I used these slides to guide the conversation:

My framing questions revolved around (1) “What is a community?”, (2) “Does building community enhance student learning?’, and (3) “What web tools can now be used to build connections and community?”. I used three vignettes to illustrate my thoughts on social media and connections. First, my many connections with Gabriela Grosseck through College 2.0, delicious, Google Reader, our blogs, Slideshare, and Facebook, all of which have informed my own teaching and learning. Second, the viral reach of Slideshare for one of my presentations from last year. And finally, a Twitter shoutout by Will Richardson earlier this week and the resultant comments tweeted by others. These all illustrated connections, but I asked the participants to reflect on how one gets from connections to community (and the image below evolved out of a sketch Jeff made on the back of a notepad):

One participant said that social media to her was like visiting the SPCA. She could not go in and choose one dog. All dogs were lovable, all dogs needed to be adopted, and she would leave crying and unfulfilled. When I suggested that maybe she needed to just rent a dog this week and a different dog next week, she said, that would be like timesharing dogs - an unworkable solution!

The conversation that resulted was rich and nuanced. It flowed from professional versus personal digital identities, issues of privacy, student misunderstandings on their own digital identity, and time management regarding the tools. Jeff made an excellent point of differentiating users of social media between broadcasters and instructional. Broadcasters have to be present in multiple applications and visibly engaged in multiple applications. Instructional uses suggest more nuanced approaches with clear boundaries. Bud Deihl illustrated how “conversations” could start in one application and spill over into other applications, such as his networking with his fellow graduate students through LinkedIn.

There was some concern about how we as educators advise our younger students when we are just trying to figure out the - as Michael Wesch calls it - mediascape ourselves. Conversations like we had today are one way - and commenting via blogs is another. I would be interested in the thoughts of my readers on how you visualize using the Read/Write web to build connections and community, both professionally for yourself and instructionally for your students.

Of course, one benefit from today’s session was that I did pick up several new “friends” in Facebook!

ps - One unrelated and yet relevant event today. I posted the above powerpoint in Slideshare last night so that I could embed it in our wiki and here in this blog. Overnight, I got an email from Slideshare noting that the editorial team had selected it to be showcased on their Education page. I also got tweeted by Gabriela saying that she had seen it there, Another example of connections and community.

I've come to believe that at least once a month, everyone's plan for the day should be as follows. 1. Check OUseful.info 2. Spend rest of day following up on what they read in the most recent post. The world would be a better place.

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There was an interesting point raised by one of my VIF students in our online class taught by Jon Becker and myself this weekend. Half of our online class are Visiting International Faculty studying for their Masters in Education here at VCU, and half are Virginia teachers studying in our Ed Leadership graduate program.

When I first arrived from Mexico to teach here, it was very noticeable for me to see that students here are more used to that kind of fast, graphic and entertaining way of displaying information or teaching and it took me some time to adapt to those “new students’ needs”. Here I have been in the process of becoming a digital resident.

I think that in developing countries, this change is happening but at a much slower pace because of the differences in access to the internet, just by looking at your ‘ClustrMap’ (in your Blog) and the red dots representing the access numbers from different countries, I could realize the way many countries are so far behind in terms of Web 2.0 tools usage.

I have been looking at the ClustrMap and seeing the connections spanning the continents. He looked at the same map and saw the missing opportunities being illustrated by the sparseness of some of the dots.

This is one of the reasons I enjoy working with international faculty. They help ground me in some fundamental truths. Friedman, Shirky, and Weinberger have all pointed to the democratization afforded by the web. All true, but evolving slowly and not there yet.

In my recent Talking With Talis podcast about Dave Pattern's release of library data, I floated out the term "Giant EduGraph" to describe some of the kinds of aggregations of data we were talking about. The term has actually been bouncing around my head for a while, enough that I've included it in a few conference proposals.

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