Flexknowlogy

Wordle does tag clouds in a way that is almost breathtakingly aesthetic. Here’s mine based on del.icio.us tags:

This article is an attempt to objectively define the phrase “creepy treehouse” as coined by Chris Lott, and in current usage by ed tech folks such as Scott Leslie, Marc Hugentobler, John Krutsch, and others. I plan to follow up with a post on my perspective on CTH in the field of educational technology.

creepy treehouse

see also creepy treehouse effect

n. A place, physical or virtual (e.g. online), built by adults with the intention of luring in kids.

Example: “Kids … can see a [creepy treehouse] a mile away and generally do a good job in avoiding them.” John Krutsch in Are You Building a Creepy Treehouse?”

n. Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards.

Such institutional environments are often seen as more artificial in their construction and usage, and typically compete with pre-existing systems, environments, or applications. creepy treehouses also have an aspect of closed-ness, where activity within is hidden from the outside world, and may not be easily transferred from the environment by the participants.

n. Any system or environment that repulses a target user due to it’s closeness to or representation of an oppressive or overbearing institution.

n. A situation in which an authority figure or an institutional power forces those below him/her into social or quasi-social situations.

With respect to education, Utah Valley University student Tyrel Kelsey describes, “creepy treehouse is what a professor can create by requiring his students to interact with him on a medium other than the class room tools. [E.g.] requiring students to follow him/her on peer networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook.”

adj. Repulsiveness arising from institutional mimicry or emulation of pre-existing community-driven environments or systems.

Example: “Blackboard Sync is soooo creepy treehouse.” Marc Hugentobler

In the field of educational technology a creepy treehouse is an institutionally controlled technology/tool that emulates or mimics pre-existing technologies or tools that may already be in use by the learners, or by learners’ peer groups. Though such systems may be seen as innovative or problem-solving to the institution, they may repulse some users who see them as infringement on the sanctity of their peer groups, or as having the potential for institutional violations of their privacy, liberty, ownership, or creativity. Some users may simply object to the influence of the institution.

I’ve been observing this phenomena increasingly, as instructors push down hot Web 2.0 technologies, while students push back with vocal objections or passive resistance. I call this the creepy treehouse effect.

More directly, any move to integrate or aggregate new institutional tools or systems with pre-existing tools or systems already embraced by the community may be seen as creepy treehouse, in as much as it may be construed as institutional infringement upon the social or professional community of it’s participants.

For example, the Blackboard family of learning management system products are often seen as creepy treehouses, as they provide e-learning tools in a very rigid, closed environment that is institutionally controlled in an attempt to “engage” students through technological novelty or mimicry of existing Web-based tools for social engagement. Increasingly, learning management systems are incorporating what educators assess as being potentially valuable learning tools such as blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, instant messaging, etc., not recognizing that these tools may be seen as artificial, meaningless, tiresome, temporary, or simply another aspect of The Man by the institution’s target participant group: the students.

At the same time, other LMS tools that are more exclusively related to the traditional activity of teaching (e.g. gradebooks, online quizzing, material posting, etc) are not viewed as inherently creepy treehouse. Tyrel Kelsey suggests:

Students reject creepy treehouses for one reason: they are creepy. I think a better approach to education is the idea of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) … which [students] can invite the professor into when they feel comfortable doing so.

In Students should build their own tree house

Creepy treehouses are not limited to the realm of education or educational technology. In the computer software environment, for instance, Microsoft Office Live is likely to be judged as creepy treehouse relative to Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Zoho, not due entirely to it’s competitiveness or the relative similarities of the products, but more to the origination of the software: Microsoft is often seen as a controlling, soulless, self-centered institution, whereas Zoho and Google are seen as not only preceding Microsoft Live, but also open, user-centered, community-driven, or alternative.

Opinions in the community as to the creepy treehouse-ness of a given system or environment may vary greatly due to the subjectiveness of individual experiences. I expect that newly introduced tools, systems, or environments are more likely to be suspect and labeled “creepy treehouse”, though over time such systems may prove to have more salient long-term value to the community than anticipated.

There is a not-too-surprising amount of buzz surrounding John Krutsch’s TweetClouds.com script. I’m proud to be playing a relatively minor role in this project, and so here are a few links to this week’s articles on TweetClouds:

• TweetClouds.com — Twitter Buzz Words on KillerStartups.com
• What does your TweetCloud say about you? Caroline McCarthy on Webware.com and CNET News
• Visualizations - BizTechTalk, Dan Kedler

This is great press, and encourages me to come up with additional funding for a stronger server.

Update: more postings and articles:

• Tweet Clouds let you know what it is you can’t shut up about - Download Squad
• Tweet Clouds - Sheila MacNeil
• Tweet Clouds - Britt Watwood, Learning in a Flat World
• Visualizing Attention; TweetCloud.com - Matt Dickman, Techno//Marketer
• My Tweet Cloud - Dave Orchard

My first attempt at drafting a map of my personal learning environment came out better than I expected. I didn’t utilize any of the physical space metaphors I’d planned to use, instead opting for a fast mapping solution through Excel that showed strong relationships (matched edges) as well as weaker relationships (arrows).

PLE Mapping, Draft 1
Originally uploaded by Mr_Stein

You’ll note that I did not limit myself to technologies, let alone Web-based tools as some have been inclined to do. I’ve used all tools, utilities, and resources that make up my actual environment for teaching, learning and professional/creative production.

I know much of the discussion of PLE’s centered on the idea of using technology as an all-containing hub, and while I see significant usefulness in hubs (my own primary hubs are Google Reader, Twitter, and my own blogs) I am beginning to believe that a single hub is not the answer, and PLEs should not be encompassed by a single product or service. For instance, Ron Lubensky defines the primary goal for a PLE as follows:

The primary goal of a PLE for an individual is to bring all the disparate artefacts of interest for learning under a single operating roof. … PLEs are meant to simplify managing these artefacts…

I have two problems with this goal as stated:

1. It is akin to the goals of monolithic learning management systems, and seems to vie for a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Scott Wilson with the Personal Learning Environment blog says, “It’s an unfortunate tendency especially in our sector to take a concept (PLE, e-Portfolio) and attempt to reify it as a product.”
2. Because individuals with several generally distinct interests likely have multiple origination/entry points for learning, one all-encompassing, multitudinous hub may not be optimum for effectiveness (it may in fact be distracting; I’ve found this to be the case with a fully-loaded iGoogle home page)

Speaking of my several generally distinct interests, I was initially inclined to separate my teaching and creation activities from this map. Arguably not “learning” by some strict definitions, but certainly from a “learning by doing” perspective. At any rate, teaching, creating, and learning seem to me to be inextricably intertwined.

Before responding to the (apparently provocative) question posed by Chris Lott this week, “What does your PLE look like?”, I have one genuine question that precludes defining one’s PLE (playing into the indictment of the concept in what D’Arcy Norman initially showed as his PLE) is what is the utilitarian scope of a PLE? Presumptively we are primarily talking about networked utilities (e-mail, Web) but clearly also just plain digital utilities (computer, files [I think Ray mentioned desktop searching]), now how about the physical realm? My office? My phone? Pens and papers? My bookshelf? My colleague’s office? The library?

I ask this question without facetiousness, because if we’re talking about a holistic look at individuals learning environment, we certainly don’t want to restrict it to Web, and I even think just brainstorming the variety and interconnectedness of utilities and tools in our non-digital learning environment(s) may validly inform our digital ones, and can provide anecdotes through which we can better adapt (ourselves and others) to the online tools.

As far as my PLE, though I outlined a laundry list in your wiki, I’m now trying to think about it more organically. I’m currently toying with conceptualizing my digital PLE through a metaphor of physical space, with interconnected rooms and even “wormholes” that take me in and out of the “real” world. While at first I imagined this as a house with multi-doored, hexagonal rooms and intermediary halls (plus windows one can jump out of and back into the “real world”),

Walter R. Tschinkel’s cast of an ant colony, The nest architecture of the Florida harvester ant

it might end up being more simply sketched as the architecture of an ant colony. This latter metaphor is probably seems particularly apt to anyone who knows me, as my “train of thought” is more akin to a state of ants scurrying from one point to another as they forage with semi-obscured motivations and objectives, constantly adjusting based on new and immediate information.

I’ve read a number of blog posts and articles about learning management systems (LMS) and personal learning environments (PLE) as of late. LMSs, once the darling of educational technologists, have been getting a sound thwacking inspired by the recent Blackboard patent lawsuit victory. In almost a stars-aligning continuity, PLEs have been gaining more attention and support as “Web 2.0″ technologies have improved, broadened, and gained in popularity amongst communities. Several aspects of both have risen to the top of my constantly-refilled cup of questioning: LMS as a “walled garden”, PLE as perhaps pedagogically superior but strategically tenuous or immature, and the lack of full debates between the two approaches to technology-enhanced education.

George Siemens blogs up just exactly the news I’m interested in week after week, and on the 28th he posted up a reference to Peter Tittenberger’s short piece The Strength of Garden Walls found on his a touch of frost blog. This article describes the percieved value of institutionally administered learning management systems and social software tools as “walled gardens” for their ability to provide teacher control over user access to learning materials and tools, and the distribution of the participants’ input and output.

(I should restate that, for most institutionally administered social software tools are set up specifically to inhibit or even disallow public access and public viewing, often out of fear of legal repercussions for providing access to students’ personally identifiable information (e.g. in the United States, FERPA in higher education and K-12). For example, LMS’s natively restrict public access, typically don’t allow publishing of student work outside the password-protected site, and authentication access is often provided only through the institution’s student information system. So walled gardens don’t really provide teachers with control, they simply give teachers a box of handcuffs, sans keys.)

My perception is that most of the prominent folks involved in new teaching and educational technology believe that the walled garden approach is “bad”, that LMSs are “bad”, and that open, learner-centered strategies, such as personal learning environments (PLE) are “good” (or at least “better”) because they better reflect or adapt to current Internet-driven trends in networked information and social connectivity. To elaborate:

• Educators who believe in fostering authentic learning experiences have become increasingly disillusioned with the walled garden of the LMS. Increasingly popular “real world” Web-based social software has cast many LMS tools as redundant.

• Many institutionally adopted learning tools, driven by the perceived needs of the institution, directed by non-faculty IT, and limited by the pace of administration, are rarely able to maintain currency with readily available “real world” tools simply because the institution has neither a massive, global audience to demand innovations, nor the breadth of competitive capitalism to fund and incentivize them. Tools provided by education-centric companies such as Blackboard often come in packages, overproduced versions of real-world tools tightly bound to provide a one-stop-shopping experience, and therefore a supposed panacea for all educational technology needs. Few Web application companies would commit such an act hubris–Google has proven itself fairly capable of such a Heraclean act, with competitors Yahoo! and even Microsoft taking tentative stabs of their own.

• Educators personally committed to ideals and philosophies of openness–open source, open access, open publishing–are also frustrated with LMSs and other institutionally controlled software for their innate closed-ness through restriction of access for both contributors and readers.

• And while distinctions between the accuracy of definitions and theories of collective intelligence and connective intelligence are being debated, they share a common recognition that there is significant value in community-involved (influenced?) and socially-invigorated education. Educators who ascribe to such learning theories also find the walled garden approach to be too limiting and lacking provisions for social networking within the institution, let alone the world.

These common postures (I’m abusing that word this week–thanks, Scott) taken against the “walled garden” approach to educational technology are sound, but I do not want to suggest that the LMS is therefore obsolete, for I have presented (and probably insufficiently) only one side of the issue. I daresay there are as many sound arguments the use of walled gardens and even the traditional LMS. And though I have seen Scott Leslie weigh pro’s and cons of “loosely coupled” approaches and even one or two ed tech bloggers recognize the continuing significance of the LMS, I’ve not yet seen a full and complete debate involving people genuinely committed to each of the two sides. (If anyone is game for staging one, my alter-ego would be happy to suppress my doubts completely and take the pro-LMS side–in fact, my ego would probably not let me resign that side to anyone else!)

In my opinion, a really good debate on the subject would illustrate philosophical differences between the two sides, and might even invoke political stances (technology adoption in education [if not pedagogy in general] as “conservative” vs. “progressive”; information access and publishing as an issue of power, definable through capitalist or socialist anarchist ideals, etc).

Even if the outcome of such a debate was largely in favor of an authenticopenconnectedcollective strategy, there are of course still questions about how a PLE is LE really looks and acts like, if it is teachable. Just today on Twitter there were a number of provocative questions about the value of PLE, either as a term or as a “single”, methodological approach.

Add to that the problem that I personally still can not say with total conviction that the LMS is obsolete. Folks like myself have talked up the potential value of PLEs, but broad adoption of the PLE is currently impossible because key technologies and services are still being developed (e.g. good hubs of aggregation [go eduGlu]) or have not yet been widely adopted (e.g. OpenID). Compound that with faculty and administrative anxieties regarding new technologies and teaching approaches, and I can only conclude that the LMS will be around for a long time yet. So until fully viable (every need) and broadly accessible (every application) alternative strategies and methods become available, we might as well openly examine, in good-faith, the value of the LMS, the benefits of walled garden systems, and our reasonings for choosing one or the other.

Overview

There’s been a bit of buzz recently on more ed tech blogs than I think I can refer to about using blogs as a delivery host for opencourseware as PLE-inspired learning content. This branches off of that thought by demonstrating a very quick-and-dirty method of targetting chunks of content from various sources in order to remix a customized online “lesson”.

In short, this is a tutorial-in-lieu-of-a-lousy-conference-presentation for those who are unfamiliar with the tools or need orientation to an approach.

Preparation

You’ll need:

1. A Google account set up for Google Notebook and Google Docs & Spreadsheets
2. Mozilla Firefox Web browser with the Google Notebook add-on
3. A collection of topic-related Web pages or documents from which to remix
4. A basic outline of the lesson to be composed/remixed (pref. with objectives)

I expect that this process can also be done with Zoho using the Zoho Notebook Helper add-on for Firefox, however I’ve not worked through this process myself.

The importance of having the last element, an outline of the lesson, should not be underestimated. The hardest part of this task is staying focused and organized. I tend to take a kitchen-sink approach, throwing everything together and sorting it out later, but having a clear outline of what you want your lesson to include from the beginning sets up a checklist of sorts from which you can search and order information.

As for information sources themselves, there are an increasing number of Creative Commons-licensed or public domain materials available on the Web that can be remixed into an online lesson. Some of these are materials specifically authored for education (e.g. MIT OpenCourseWare, Open Yale Courses, UK Open University’s OpenLearn), others are collaboratively authored repositories (e.g. Wikipedia), and some are already in the publich domain (e.g. Project Gutenberg. Of course, copyrighted materials can be quoted and cited within reason, and Google Notebook helps you preserve source information for citations.

Quick Tutorial

Disclaimer: the sources and excerpts used in this example are merely for demonstration purposes and should not be reflective of a well-remixed or structurally complete lesson!

1. First, create a new Google Notebook for the lesson with title.
2. Using your lesson outline, seek out your information sources on the Web. Select a passage and right-click to activate the Firefox Google Notebook Add-on. Choose Note this (Google Notebook). This passage is now an excerpt copied into your Notebook. You’ll notice that the Google Notebook Add-on opens a preview window in the lower-right-hand corner of your screen. You can type your own commentary or notes here to include with the quoted passage.
3. Repeat this for all your information sources on the Web, selecting passages you wish to use as an excerpt in the lesson, right-clicking, and choosing Note this (Google Notebook).
4. Do the same for sources that you may wish to condense, rewrite, summarize, or paraphrase information from. You’ll be able to edit your Notebook in a minute. Because there’s so much information out there, it’s fine to collect more than you need. At the same time, using a lesson outline from the beginning will help you stay focused and not stray from your teaching objectives.
5. Don’t worry about noting sources out-of-order; Google Notebook will let you re-arrange your sources.
6. When you’ve completed your grab of sources, simply click Open Full Page from the Google Notebook add-on. This will open up your Google Notebook with all quotations. Each excerpts is preceded by the title of the Web page from which it came, and a hyperlink to the Web site for citation purposes.
7. You can type directly in the notebook to draft introductions, conclusions, additional information, or segways from one piece of information to another. Again, having a solid lesson outline here is very useful.
8. By mousing-over the left-side of source excerpts, you’ll find that you can left-click and drag excerpts above or below other excerpts or text sections that you’ve written. This makes it easy to rearrange the excerpts to match your lesson outline.
9. Once you’ve finished your rough edit of your lesson, you’ll need to send the saved Notebook to Google Docs for finish editing and publishing to your blog. Under Tools on the top-right, choose Export to Google Docs.
10. While Google Notebook is the best place to perform basic structural edits to your document because of the drag-n-drop feature, Google Docs have slightly more sophisticated formatting features to choose from for your finish edits. After you’ve completed editing and formatting your lesson in Google Docs, click the Publish tab to send this to your blog.
11. In the Publish tab you’ll need to click change your blog site settings and work through the few form fields to point to your own blog for publishing (e.g. blog hosting server, username, password, blog title). Click Test before finishing by clicking OK.
12. An alert will ask you to confirm publishing. Note that after you’ve published, you can in fact make edits to your Google Doc and republish to your blog, overwriting the original blog post using nearly the same process we just did.
13. After publishing, go to your blog and review your re-mixed lesson! Remember, you can edit your Google Doc and republish at any time, however if you want to add to your lesson starting from Google Notebook you are better off deleting the original blog post and Google Doc and re-exporting from step 9. Using the Firefox add in for this process preserves text, images, and hyperlinks from the source all the way to the published blog, however I’ve not had any luck preserving embedded video files.

OK, this creates an admittedly rough looking “lesson”, but it’s a fast method of remixing open content, especially if one has a good outline and is familiar with what’s available.

One idea that I haven’t played with is using Google Desktop with Notebook to grab pieces from files on my local computer. I’ve actually never used Desktop, but it’s been suggested that this would be possible.

This shirt is based on a workshop title suggestion Scott Leslie made (half?) jokingly over a Skype meeting.

I’m considering ordering up a batch of these from UberPrints.com for my crew at DE. PLE is People! That’s all you need to know.

Several folks in my Twitter circle have been discussing the pros and cons of Public vs Protected Twitter updates. The whole thing seems to have been started by Scott Leslie, who shook up our Twitter miniverse by protecting his updates(!). Chris Lott jumped in and posted an interesting perspective on his ‘blog with the provocative title, Donning the Twitter Condom, and D’Arcy Norman highlighted some of the distinctions between Twitter vs the Blog, resulting a healthy amount of back-and-forth commenting both in Twitter and on ‘blogs comment fields.

In a nutshell, Twitter allows users to set their Twitter posts to be Shared on the Public timeline so that anyone and everyone can see them, or protect them. The question is, does Protected updates limit a person? Is it counteractive to what Twitter is supposed to be? What is Twitter supposed to be?

My perspective is that Twitter needs to provide both via a flickr/vox-like public, friends, family, friends and family, and even private messaging option. As it stands now, Protect update is above all frustrating (until you get used to the fact that it usually doesn’t matter if your Tweets are public because most people don’t care) in its limitations; it certainly doesn’t allow for the sort of compromise in publishing that I envision.

The first day I used Twitter I sensed this weakness, checked the settings, and knew immediately I had to have mine protected. Much of it for the reasons D’Arcy describes: [semi]privacy in Twitter allows for more candor, spontaneity, and perhaps even an occasional ribald or off-the-cuff comment than I would indulge in on a blog–either posting or commenting.

But I’m also naturally a very private person, and there’s plenty about me and in my personality that I do not wish to share with strangers, let alone the public. Sure, like everyone I crave attention and recognition at some level, but I personally prefer to temper that craving with a strong defense of personal control. Twitter is publishing whether you like it or not; trying to distinguish it from publishing a blog article by virtue of intention is simply fooling yourself.

As for meeting new people and expanding the social network I must say I don’t feel I’ve been inhibited by my privacy. I explore lots of folks just by browsing the ‘Following’ of other friends and ‘followed’ colleagues. Additionally, I believe even with privacy Twitter has substantiated distant or loose connections I have with probably a half-dozen individuals.

I follow just over 18 active people, and that’s just about my threshold for msg intake (I still can’t read all their msgs). A little more than a dozen follow me, and that too seems to be just about my limit for a potential audience–at least as far as Tweets are concerned. As just about everyone else has observed, anything better/larger/broader than a Tweet should be published on a blog.

So what’s Twitter for? To me:

1. Simplified, spontaneous/rhythmic journaling (output; private/semi-private)
2. Micro-blogging (output; public/semi-private)
3. Idea-sharing/cognitive apprenticeship (input; public)
4. Substantiating one’s social relationships (active/passive interaction; semi-private)
5. Expanding one’s social network passive/active interaction; public/semi-private)

Of course, there are more reasons or applications than this, in different priority, and probably better phrased too, but this is how I apply Twitter: a medium that’s somewhere between a private journal and a ‘blog, something that’s like instant messaging but innately more archival and group-networked. It’s very very good, perhaps a life-changing tool (for good or ill?), but certainly not perfect.

As I was wrestling with the privacy of my own Twitter account yesterday I found that marking one’s updates as private did not prevent those whom I follow from following me.

My frustration prompted me to think about if and why I would want to follow people whom I wouldn’t necessarily want to follow me. I looked at my list of followers, which is more than double my list of following, and I had a tiny epiphany: there are some whom I follow not for social reasons, but for professional reasons. I want to know what they are talking about. I want to know what they are thinking about. I want to know what they, as experts in their field, are doing.

Based on that knowing I can reshape my behavior to emulate the practices of the experts.

Of course, in the best case scenario, one gets only infrequent updates that are related to one’s fields of interest, but when they do come it can be affirming, when it matches one’s own practice, or correcting, when it exceeds or is more complete than one’s own practice. I’ve begun to monitor my incoming updates more carefully for this small realization.

I’ve begun monitoring my own reaction to the updates of those who I am curious about or interested in, and I have reflected on some my reactions that have been positive.

Examples:

• ddraper, an edtech guy from right here in Utah, projects constant enthusiasm and energy for his work and his field. Coupled with his zealous blogging (I swear, he averages 4 blog entries a day!) ddraper keeps me alert and on my toes. If I see another blog post from him, I’ll have to conclude that he in fact just an AI script on a Mac.
• johnkrutsch, skydiamond, sleslie, diamond_mind, brlamb, and others are often posting up new or obscured technology, or commentary thereon. The big payoff for me of course is finding an application for it in edtech that I hadn’t thought about before. Or getting inspiration for new ideas that help push me forward. Or making new contacts by referral (I added this in because right after posting this entry I got an update referring me to someone I’d never heard of who is “thinking along similar lines”). Twitterers that provide this kind of relevant news or information are like mini-blog, but more without all those words and symbols surrounding the good stuff.
• While zeldman’s updates are primarily concerned with the mundane, when he comments on his involvment in Web design and development, from consulting to speaking to just working with publishers and clients, his presence exudes expertise; one can gain bits of web professional wisdom from these glimpses into his daily life.
• fncll for me reflects the on-going saga of an edtech trapped in an artist’s body (or is it an artist trapped in an edtech’s body). His updates are (probably unconsciously) balanced between those that look to the cutting edge of educational technology, and those that reflect on the world around us from behind an artist’s lens. That’s food for the soul; that’s what keeps us going.

These examples suggest that there is some real learning potential for the cognitive apprentice in following experts or even colleagues on Twitter. But if you look at my actual update history the “good stuff” illustrated in these examples is frankly few and far between. At any rate, at best my argument could only conclude by suggesting that following encourages continual practice, inspires new ideas, and fosters currency.

Yet I want it to extend further. I wondered how I might apply this idea of cognitive apprenticeshop via Twitter to my Web design students. Having taught Web design for many years I am convinced that in addition to needing all those good basics of visual design theory, accessibility, usability, and of course XHTML and CSS my students really need to embed themselves in the community of web designers. They need to watch and observe the experts as they work, and unless there’s some secret hotbed of constant chatter focused on Web design and development I think Twitter will fall short for this particular audience of learners (beginner to intermediate).

Certainly the social aspects of professional practice can be fostered through Twitter (what those exactly are and how they could be measured I can’t say), though I wouldn’t encourage them to start sending direct messages to folks they’ve never met. And it’s possible that some of the question and answer type stuff could be accomodated by Twitter. It may be that simply through Twitter-mediated contact with their peers–primarily within class or within the program–they can stay motivated and learn together. They’ll have similar questions, they’ll be able to swap war stories, they can share new information, contacts, and even jobs.

I am optimistic that the “stickiness” of Twitter (or the addictiveness, as Kathy Sierra argues) may sustain a community of peers, whereas forced, in-class, creepy-treehouse style social networking usually fails. If students carry on with Twitter as their skills develop, as they graduate from the program, and as they gain experience and greater proficiency in their professions, the community that was germinated in Twitter may end up containing the very luminaries, experts, and professional colleagues that Twitterers like myself so appreciate following daily.