Twitter, Webinars, and Cheating -- Oh My! (reflection on 7/16)

I think this is the theme of Friday's class for me. But only because I couldn't find a Freaky Friday poster I liked.

Several thoughts have been racing through what Natalie Goldberg would call my "monkey mind." The blogs leading up to Friday, our class experiences, and some of the early reflection blog posts have had me in a bit of a funk and perhaps a bit pricklier than normal.

Twitter

This week, I read Molly Wizenberg's A Homemade Life, in which she tells the story of being invited to a California New Ager's home for a dinner date. He greets her with excitement -- at the farmer's market that day, he found seven -- seven! -- kinds of sprouts! She has a hard time finding this exciting. He arranges the sprouts into seven artful mounds, drizzles them with olive oil, and adds a few organic tomatoes as a garnish. He is enthralled.  She is not.

Get the metaphor? Jeff and I were the excited New Ager, excited to share the "sprouts" of Twitter with y'all.  And many of you? You were the Molly Wizenbergs, trying hard to understand why we were excited when you were non-plussed. 

Granted, we had the weird problem that your #smac504 hash tags weren't reaching the #smac504 searches, and I'm still not quite sure how they could both show up in your stream and not show up in the other.   And I get that you were none-too-thrilled with the Twittery vocabulary that has sprung up (me either, Tweeple. Sometimes, it's just Tweepy how people make up goofy words).  But mostly I was saddened because I find my Twitter stream to bring me so much useful information about education, technology, teaching, and literature trends, and I was disappointed that there was so much certainty that it would not be useful for you.  (I'm actually fine if you don't think it has usefulness in your classrooms ... it's the PLN piece that I was disappointed about. And yes, I think PLN is a bit jargonny, too, but it doesn't take many keystrokes to type.)

But I have to put my money where my mouth is ... we designed the course activities so that you would be introduced to a variety of options we thought were valuable so that you could exercise your pedagogical judgment about what you might later implement in your class.  And it didn't stop me from adding a Twitter page to our wiki with some tools I've found useful :)

And it occurs to me that what you all have right now is something that many educators do not have when they are in practice: a dedicated cohort of people who generally share the same values and aspirations that they do.  You have that with your fellow MACers.  A beginning teacher in practice, though, often does not have that cohort.  They're one of just a few new people or the only one teaching their subject area.  And that's when having that external network really matters.  Maybe Twitter is something that is only tangentially valuable because you couldn't be in more of a PLN right now if you tried.  You are inundated in readings, mentors, and peers who are invested in the same things that you are.  Right now, Twitter might be overload.  

I still say ... try it for two months ... until Labor Day or so.  If it doesn't work for you after that, table it. We'll almost-certainly ask you to try it again when you are at a conference (new setting, new usefulness), but that's a long way off.  You can use tools like Readtwit to have your Twitter stream go right into Google Reader, which we'll look at on Friday, so you don't have to log into multiple places at once.  (Google Reader will help you keep track of your colleagues' blogs and can even track changes to your wikis. It's rather amazingly nifty, I think ... famous last words!) 

Cheating
You had a lot to say about this topic that was quite elegant, both in discussions and in blogs.  And because I was the Twitter scribe, I've heard from several people that they found your ideas intriguing as well.  If I can add one thing to this topic, it would be the degree to which we as a profession are guilty of using technology as a behavior management tool.  Internet filtering is likely to be a reality in your building, due, in great part to the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA).  Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, games ... all are likely to be blocked.  Yet CIPA technically requires filtering for pornography only. Any other use of CIPA (such as filtering social networking, gaming, personal storage, etc.) isn't required by law.  It's a local decision. And that's important to be aware of.

Webinar
Sigh. OK ... first, I think it's important to sort out what the possible issues were. (Pardon me while I take an Ibuprofen first.)

1.  Bandwidth. By this, I mean the amount of data that the laptops connected to UMWireless were pulling through.  We had been assured that we could have all of you connected to the network.  And I wanted everyone to have direct access to the speakers (instead of having Jeff or I be the mediators), but at the same time, I was suspicious that 52 connections would really work.  So I thought I was playing it safe by balancing access with bandwidth by requesting one laptop per table to be online.  Video streaming takes a lot of bandwidth.  That's also why I said we'd use text chat and not microphone-based chat -- text takes very little bandwidth; audio does.  So even with my backup plans, things didn't quite turn out as expected, and I am truly sorry about that.  We are serious that we read all of your blog posts, and some of what y'all have had to say has been very hard for me to swallow.  I know some of you have suggested that we have every student online with a personal connection and a headset, and I think that would have compounded the bandwidth problem.  At the same time ... ask yourself if you saw tables that had more than one laptop running.

2.  Software.  Some of you felt that the software, Elluminate, was to blame for the problems. Now Elluminate has its pros and cons, but it is the leading paid Webinar platform because it is known for being one of the more robust and reliable products out there.  The one blameless element of our Webinar experience was Elluminate, I think.

3.  Webcam.  I'll be honest -- the black-and-white webcam totally stunned me.  I don't think I've seen a black-and-white webcam since maybe 2003? And that was on an outdated poster I tore down when I got my first library job.  I think that created two issues.  First, black-and-white images aren't very interesting.  And secondly, my hunch is that the Webcam was a pretty old model that didn't provide us with a very high-res image, which I think contributed to the pixellated quality, as well as some frozen images (that could also have been a result of bandwidth issues on our end).  So now it will be on my Webinar checklist to ask about Webcams.

4.  Teacher/Prof-as-Moderator. Something you'll find intriguing about going into classrooms this fall is how many instructional decisions, furniture placement, etc., are decided based on where the builders installed the white board, TV, data projector, etc.  So I was pretty limited to being up front where the projector connection was.  And as a result, I didn't notice what y'all did: numerous audio feeds that could have been muted.  I was sitting right under a classroom speaker, so that was all I heard.  A simple solution could have been for each table to mute its speaker and use the classroom audio -- and alas, I felt tied to the computer and didn't get up. Had I gotten up, I would have noticed what your classmates did: cacophonous audio and a bit too much off-task behavior???? :)

5.  Students-as-Participants.  A Webinar is a chance to connect students with expert thinkers.  That's why we didn't go with "just watch the screen" and gave the option of a laptop connection at each table. I hadn't realized that they were wanting to respond to your questions; Buffy did more of a tour/presentation when she spoke to my Winter class.  Whoops! Missed communication on both our parts.  But ... a Q&A opportunity is the students' chance to make a connection and to ask the questions that are on their mind. If you look back at the Webinar, you'll see that a few students did ... but most did not.  If you feel that the Webinar didn't address your interests, the question is why?

All things to keep in mind as you look ahead to later this year ... when you will have a team that presents a Webinar on a Web 2.0 tool.  It's a great chance for you to consider how you would structure things differently. How would you test things in advance? Structure situations? Promote interactivity? Keep your participants on-task?  (And no, we didn't intentionally engineer Friday to bring up the bumps in the road -- though if we had, perhaps you would think we were way more awesome at our job.) More on that when we get to the fall.

All this being said, I am excited that we will be podcasting on Friday. I love podcasting, and despite the power of video, I believe that audio-only podcasting (which is what we will be doing) actually yields more focused results and work from students.  And it's a great way to meld synthesizing activities in a right-brained way that benefits the Johnny Depps in your class.  I'm a big fan of podcasting.  Meanwhile, I am creating an altar to the God of Bandwidth and creating a few backup plans ... Just. In. Case. To whet your appetite, here are some ideas for how you might use podcasting in your classroom . More on Friday in the next housekeeping post.

Until then ...

(PS - Posters made here)