Flexknowlogy

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

In my previous post, Defining “Creepy Treehouse” I proposed definitions for a term that flavorfully describes how students may react to the imposition of (new) learning environments from the top-down. While I admit my post was one-part tongue-in-cheek, I’ve recognized that the creepy treehouse effect is an actual, if still vague, phenomena, and I hope to continue to investigate it as one of many possibilities why students may not enthusiastically engage with the new technologies that are pushed down upon them.

In the comments of my last post several thoughtful readers pointed to other impedances to student usage of instructor-designated educational or social technologies. I myself tried to consciously limit the scope of my definition to target:

• compulsory student-instructor social engagement
• compulsory student-student social engagement
• compulsory use of education technologies in general
• the artificiality of educational technologies the mimic existing technologies already adopted by the community

We’re essentially talking about so-called Web 2.0 tools that emphasize connectivity, social interaction, and collaboration. Teachers and ed-tech’ers who support the use of such tools recognize their potential as facilitating not only teacher-student interaction, also student-student interaction, which Wentzel and Watkins summarize as having positive effects on learning outcomes, especially from a Vygotsky-influenced perspective. Yet when one’s efforts to force students into these socially-connected environs is met with resistance or even repulsion, one may be experiencing a result of the creepy treehouse phenomenon.

I see a perhaps unintended relationship between social learning approaches and the shift in some Western cultures from “traditional” teacher-student relationships (which were generally akin to a master-apprentice relationship), toward relationships that at least pretend to be co-equal. Regardless of your opinion on this shift, I see this as a consequence of an over-projected form of egalitarianism that has been grasped at from both ends. For instance, I know many college professors who allow and even ask their students to call them by their first names, creating an illusion of peer-peer relationship. This goes hand-in-hand with the metaphor of teachers as “guide on the side”-again, a abolition of hierarchy presumedly to foster more authentic learning and collaboration discovery.

And yet we may find that students see, as Eric pointed out in comments on my last post, compulsory socializing in the context of education as “a violation of the work/not work boundary, and one of the reasons I think students respond so viscerally to that violation is that it impinges on the separation of identity constructs for students by asking them (implicitly) to merge their professional with their casual selves.”

I think this is as true for instructor-student socializing/social learning as it is for compulsory student-student socializing/social learning. This certainly corresponds to my own experience as a student, and suggests that while some instructors are re-articulating their identity constructs based on their own repulsion to their negative perception of the hierarchical relationships of the System, students themselves may continue to desire to hold own distinct casual self apart from their professional/academic self.

A report out of The Guardian late last year suggests that though student’s private and academic “online spaces are blurring” and despite efforts to engage students at an academic utilizing technology, students who are otherwise competent IT users but are either technically or willfully ignorant of educational applications of “Web 2.0? or other social networking tools. While the article makes it clear that the students surveyed don’t know what they want (they “‘appear to want to keep their online persona private but when you ask them whether they’d like instant communication with tutors or feedback on essays (via Skype or Facebook) the answer is always yes.’”), it also implies that educators who embrace social networking software may end up alienating students who choose not to engage academically along the same channels that they engage socially.

On the surface, it makes sense to me that the very social networking technology which many students are immersed in (”That’s not technology. That’s what I do.”, one of them poignantly states), in the hands of academics, becomes “the thin end of the wedge” as the Guardian suggests. It is, despite educators’ best efforts, nothing more than a Cog in the Machine, a tool of the Man, which will invariably push the Youth away from the Establishment. OK, this is clearly hyperbolic of me, but it has a scent of truth, and I daresay this mentality is precisely the reason some educators are so fervently in favor of utilizing Web 2.0: to connect with students, to show that We Are Not the Enemy, and even to abashedly but with persistent vicariousness try to reclaim something of our youth. Oh, I don’t mean you of course…

The reality remains that students as colleagues is a myth. Professors need not treat students as peers, though they must be treated as potential peers. It may be a gap that is never fully filled, but it does narrow as the novice gains experience, expands his knowledge base, and develops his skills.

Perhaps the more appropriate question we should be asking is neither how do we merge technologies into academic exercises nor how do we utilize the technologies that learners are already immersed in to leverage our pedagogical outcomes, but rather one that is more abstract and essential: does their ultimately need to be a distinction between our social lives, our academic lives, and our professional lives? I think any active practitioner in the field of educational technology would instantly recognize that the answer is, “No”. Many edtech’ers seem perfectly at ease not merely crossing over from one sphere to another, but embracing these sphere simultaneously, almost as if they were one and the same. Is this just because we are all friendless geeks who have no other outlets for our social inadequacies? Is it because we are forced to be perpetual learners in order to excel professionally? It could be, but I think more importantly we recognize a clear meaningfulness in the socially-connected professional relationships that we maintain. We learn as we socialize, we socialize as we learn; it’s an ever-evolving mesh network, and if we’re lucky we’re better professionals because of it.

This epistemological observation implies to me that rather than utilizing Web 2.0 technologies to induce students to enter our academic and professional worlds, or forcing our educational practices to fit into the social technologies, we might instead focus simply on training students on how they can leverage social technology for their own individual educational and professional benefits. As my wise American lit professor Mr. Jan Bakker often said, “I can’t teach students anything; all I can do is open the doors.” To that end, let us open doors to effective learning tools, educate them on why the ability to meaningfully connect the social, academic, and professional spheres can lead to a meaningful career that integrates life-long learning with rewarding social connections in their adult life, and model effective and efficient online learning environments that support our own professional endeavors.

If teachers want to dissolve or reduce the traditional teacher/student hierarchy, understand that students may not want to. For teachers who desire social learning engagement with students, we can expect that as students grow and develop stronger academic skills and begin to enter the professional world we may naturally connect with them. I found this to be increasingly true as a student finishing up my Bachelor’s and then entering and completing grad school. It’s natural that as their academic professionalism and educational intensity grows our common interests and experiences bring us together.

We as educators need to be available to our students. We need to share our expertise, our professional networks, but not our personal lives. We must be careful not to confuse personal, subjective enthusiasm for Web 2.0 tools with broad, objective effectiveness and relevance of these tools re. specific learning objectives. We need to facilitate, not build, learner-owned networks that provide long-term opportunities for individual learning, engagement, and professional development. As student Tyrel Kelsey said in Students should build their own tree house. I think a better approach to education is right in line with the idea of fostering students to develop their own Personal Learning Environment (PLE). Students’ existing or developing online literacies simply need to integrate academics, academics don’t need to integrate their social networking. The question, then, is how do we best support their development?

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

I’m always on the look-out for new conference ideas that can be implemented to make Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange (TTIX) more and more useful. While most of the “un-conference” ideas mentioned here require a large crowd (larger than we can expect at TTIX 2008) this article does illustrate the growing tedium with the conference-as-usual approach, and highlights key problems that TTIX can seek to avoid or inhibit in the future.

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.

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.

Steve Hargadon posted up reflections on his Classroom 2.0 workshops, and the ideas he has generated are great for generating new ways of showing, sharing, learning, and doing at the 2008 Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange.

A couple of ideas for TTIX 2008 specificially:

In addition to the option of Twitter, why not a simple web-based chat room for back channeling? It’s old-fashioned now, but most setups require no user name, and rooms are easily created. Skype is cool too, however.

To that end, we’ll have a presenter-editable web page for each presentation which will host a shoutbox, presentation materials, link to video archive, link to relevant blogs, etc!

We are going to try starting TTIX with a 45-minute pre-conference session for everyone on Twitter and blogging. Just a means of getting people in and familiar with these two powerful social software tools. We’re going to ask for volunteers to each guest review 1 session during the day on our TTIX blog, and so we’ll divvy out users/passes at that time.

More ideas coming soon. Again, I can’t thank Steve enough for his work on Classroom 2.0–even though I haven’t attended this, his passion to making it a better workshop (or an “un-conference”) is inspiring and motivating.

One of the things I’m most proud of in my professional life is our annual Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange, which is now nearing it’s 4th year. While we’ve held it as a pretty traditional (small) ed tech conference during the first three years, John Krutsch and I began TTIX in 2004 with two key objectives:

1. TTIX will always be free - no registration fee (and therefore no conference tote bag, low-capacity usb drive, pen, keychain, etc.)
2. TTIX will emphasize 2-part sessions: part 1 is information, part 2 is hands-on application

We’ve added a few other facets, like
presenters are encouraged to make their materials available under a Creative Commons license, videos of presentations should be available for download after the event,
organized social events can help folks make professional connections
And, this year, conference proposals can be rated by the public almost immediately after submission. Admittedly the 5-star rating system is overly simplistic, but we see this as a great way to (1) advertise the possible sessions, (2) give prospective presenters some preliminary feedback, and (3) give the community a chance to make their interests heard to the proposal review committee. Ultimately we hope to go to a fully community-driven conference proposal review system.

Today I was lucky enough to stumble upon Alan Levine (aka CogDog)’s reflections on the EDUCAUSE ELI conference, “On Conferencing”. In this he examined the big questions I always ask myself when I go to conferences: Why do we go? and, Is it worth it? Mr. Levine lays out several complaints and ideas for conferences in general, and this inspired me to think about how we might push TTIX to the next level of meaningfulness and value for our participants. Let me highlight and springboard off of some of Mr Levine’s thoughts (and some of my own) here with respect to TTIX:

1. Online session evaluations. Addition: with immediate results viewable to everyone. With kiosks at the back of the room. Or with “clickers” (as much as I hate ‘em)
2. Learning Circle. Like Cracker Barrels at DT&L in Madison, Wisconsin. I like these a lot, actually, because you get to meet people and talk about related interests, and share experiences. The way I see this working best is someone deemed as expert moderates at small tables, others attend. On cue we all switch tables. I love Mr. Levine’s note that at ELI they used wikis and Google Docs for note-taking; TTIX will have to have this set up in advance for it to work.
3. Post session archives in 24 hours (a/v). We post video archives, but haven’t been able to do it in 24 hours. We probably could if we cut the quality. Addition: make presenter information uploadable during the conference, so presenters can upload their latest slides or materials. On the presentation video and materials download page make participant commentary open, a la a blog. This could be attached to or on the same page as the conference evals for each session! Ooh, but then we couldn’t use a presentation sharing service like Slideshare…
4. Twitter used throughout. ELI had a Twitter account just for the conference, which I definitely want to follow suit with, and many of its participants used Twitter voraciously–I know, I read ‘em! What if we started the first day of TTIX with a Twitter primer/workshop for participants? How to use Twitter, is it good for professional development, is it good for education? I mean, if participants are glued to their laptops for half the conference any way, can’t we encourage them to participate through their laptops? (What other sandboxes can we set up for them?)
5. Do something with the backchannel. No real new ideas here. Chris Lott has suggested “some lamps or orbs which change color and/or intensity according to the back-channel assessment”. Maybe blog up a “best IRC or Twitter quote” per session?
6. Conference blogging. It’s really nice when participants blog up the sessions or even just the conference in general. What if TTIX had it’s own blog that the TTIX committee updated during the conference, or a wiki that everyone could edit on the fly to summarize sessions with. Or, if we aim for something more reflective as Mr. Levine suggests, what if we set up a blog and invited participants to volunteer to author a reflective blog post on one session that they attend? We could have someone in charge of providing those volunteers with an author account on our TTIX blog, and then give them a reward if they post before the conference officially ends.
7. A conference with just keynotes. Last year we ran 4, even 5 sessiosn at a time. Bad move. The sessions were too poorly attended, and we knew some of the sessions were not cream of the crop in the first place. We took notice for 2008 and are trying to limit ourselves to just 3 at a time. But John attended one conference last year that was only keynotes. He loved it. I personally like the variety of being able to choose. But we need to emphasize differentness next year. We need to continue to pushe for, focus on, and applaud the second-day sessions, which is our twist of lime on ed tech conferences. What if we ask 2-day presenters to create an assignment day 1?
8. More hands-on. This is my own suggestion/complaint. Perhaps instead of a conference entirely of keynotes we composed a conference entirely of mini-workshops. That’s the idea behind the 2-part session, after all, but taken to the extreme. Or maybe the regular sessions are all workshops framed in by keynotes (2 per day)? Or a keynote and a learning circle/cracker barrel?
9. More Something Else. At DT&L and many other conferences you have the choice of going to an info session, a panel session, a poster session, etc–all of which are running at the same time. Now I cling to the idea of variety (I’m a session-jumper, remember?), but what if we did 3 sessions at a time, but had an info session hour, a panel session hour, a poster session hour, a workshop hour, etc to force the variety into the day?

These ideas have revved me up. I’m convinced we need to “stir up the stew” as Mr. Levine puts it. The next question is: If TTIX were to implement any 2 of these, which two would you find most valuable? Which would make the conference-going experience more important, more memorable, more applicable to your professional life when you return home?

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.