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When Everything Looks Like a Nail

The regularity of my blogging has dropped off a bit lately, mainly because I’m in the middle of writing a book about the use of interactive whiteboard technology for teachers. Although I’ve got almost 20,000 words written so far, I am way behind deadline and really need to get the first draft finished so it can be submitted to the publishers in a few weeks. Until I get that done, every time I feel the urge to blog I have to remind myself that there is a (new) deadline looming and direct my writing efforts to the book instead of the blog. I feel bad that my blogging has been suffering lately, but I really need to get this done. So there you have the reason I’ve not been updating lately.

However, I simply had to take a few minutes to share this wonderful new tool I’ve found called Scrivener. It’s an incredible tool for anyone taking on a large writing task and I really can’t believe I’ve never tried it before. I had heard the name mentioned but assumed it was just another word processor. How wrong I was!

There is an assumption that the defining software tool for writers is Microsoft Word. While Word is a very powerful application and has many, many features that most people never even discover, Word can be a frustrating tool for anyone contemplating the writing of a very long piece of work such as a book. I use Word a lot and know it quite well… in fact I hold a Advanced level Microsoft Office Specialist certification in Word, so I feel quite at home in it. I can generally twist Word to my will and make it do pretty much whatever I need, but it’s still a pain in the neck when working on something as large and fragmented as a book.

There’s no doubt that Word is a great tool for certain types of writing. But as they say, when your only tool is a hammer, everything tends to look like a nail.

Enter Scrivener. Designed expressly for anyone working on long documents that require many edits, such as books and screenplays, Scrivener takes an entirely different approach to writing. Essentially, it treats easch writing task as a project, collecting resources for writing into a single place and then enables you to break long text into short, movable, definable chunks, letting you categorise and synopsise each chunk and assemble them into the final work. You can break text into chapters, scenes, paragraphs, sentences… whatever you like… and move them around to let your ideas flow far better than Word will ever allow. Unfortunately Scrivener is a Mac only application, but Windows users might like to check out PageFour which apparently does similar things.

Using Scrivener has been somewhat of an eye-opening paradigm shift for me. It has challenged my assumptions about the very nature of the software tools we give our students. It made me realise what a mistake it is to assume that Word – or any “industry standard” software tool – is necessarily the tool for the job as far as student use is concerned. We inflict tools like Word on our students because they are supposed to be “what everybody uses” and we insist that the best tools to teach them to use are the tools used “by industry”. The fact is, schools are not offices, and the writing needs of a business person are not necessarily the writing needs of a student. The best tool for a student is not the one that they will use when they get older, but the one that helps them do what they need to do right now.

There is nothing “wrong” with Word, but having now spent some time with Scrivener it is now painfully obvious just how much more we could offer our students if we stopped assuming the tools of the business world were what they should master in order to create written texts. Real writing is a process of collecting ideas and thoughts together, manipulating them into a cohesive form, and editing and re-editing them until they make sense to other people. I now see how tools such as Scrivener approach the task of writing from a completely different angle and enable it to take place in a far more fluid way.

Now back to work! I have a book to finish…

PS: Here’s a video that gives a great overview of what Scrivener is all about…

video overview

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Follow Me, Follow You

What’s the “right” number of followers/followees on Twitter? I’ve previously pondered what might be the ideal number to have in your network, but there is clearly no one right answer. The right number to have is whatever works for you. Some have suggested that Dunbar’s Number – around 150 – is about right, but my own Twitter network has been steadily growing to almost double that and it still seems to be worthwhile and working for me so, for now anyway, I’ll let it keep growing. Whenever someone follows me I’ve gradually developed a process to help me decide whether I follow back or not… basically I click the link to go to the new followers page, and look for a couple of key bits of information. Are they educators? Are they actively involved in ed-tech? How many do they follow? How many follow them? How often do they update? Who do they follow?  Taking everything into account, if it looks like this person can help add value to my network I’ll follow back. (I know that sounds one-sided, but they’ve already made the decision to follow me so from their point of view I can only assume they see some worth in doing so.)

For quite a while now I’ve been getting a steady stream of Twitter notifications saying “such-and-such is now following you on Twitter”, often several every day. It’s nice to think that people want to follow you because they feel you add value to their network, but what’s the deal with these people who just collect and follow anybody? Over the last few weeks, I’ve been noticing that more and more of these follow notifications come from random people who appear to simply follow anyone.

Take a look at the screen grabs above. These three all arrived tonight and when you look at the following/followers ratio it’s pretty one-sided. For example, look at the person who is following 14,972, but only being followed by 699… that’s a ratio of over 21:1. For every person that follows them, they follow over 21 others. The other person following 1,814 has 52 people following them, that’s an even less balanced ratio of 34:1. (with only 8 updates… what’s the deal with that!?)

My own follow/follower ratio is currently 287/342, or .83:1, meaning I get followed by more than I follow. Although there is no right or wrong to this, to me it seems fairer when your ratio is relatively close to 1:1 (or at least not ridiculously unbalanced like 34:1!)

Why would anyone want to follow 14,000 people? What possible good could that do? You couldn’t possibly be getting any real signal out of all that noise could you? Perhaps if you follow a large number of people you might like to leave a comment about it.

I used to feel obligated to “keep up” with Twitter, but I’ve decided that I need to think about it like a river flowing past me… I don’t need to read every single tweet. When I had 50 or so people in my network I used to be able to do that, but as it’s grown I now use Twitter differently, just to give me a sense of the zeitgeist of what’s happening out there. I don’t bother reading every single post now – I just can’t, there’s too many – but I do scan through many of them as they pop up in Twitterific or Twhirl. I feel like I only need to find that occasional gem of a url, read an occasional worthwhile insight, contribute occasionally to a conversation going on, or catch the latest snippet of online gossip to make Twitter work for me.  With nearly 300 people on my follow list I definitely use Twitter differently now compared to how I used to use it when there were only 50 or so on my follow list, but it’s still worthwhile being part of it. I have just found I need to be more relaxed about it, less concerned with “keeping up”, and I’ve learned to be content with what I do get from Twitter rather than worrying about what I might be missing.

I’m sure this is all just part of an evolutionary process of how Twitter works for you depending on how many are in your network, but I still find it hard to imagine what use you’d get from having thousands on your follow list.

 

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Real Life and Real Life Learning

Kent Peterson, Chris Betcher, Linda Johannesson and Susan SedroiIn previous posts, I’ve mentioned how nice it is to occasionally convert some of our online connections into real ones.  This week I had the opportunity to again meet up with someone I’d only ever know through the blogosphere.

Susan Sedro is a teacher at the Singapore American School where she does ICT support for years 3, 4 and 5.  The first time I “met” her was during a group Skype call back in September last year and since that time we have read each other’s blogs, chatted occasionally on Skype and, along with Kim Cofino, even recorded an episode of Virtual Staffroom together.

I’d noticed that Susan was asking some very Aussie-centric questions on Twitter a while back, wanting to know the best places to go snorkelling on the Barrier Reef, etc, so I assumed she might be planning a trip down here.  We got in contact and I said if she was in Australia to give me a yell and we’d catch up.  Well, she yelled and we caught up.

So last Wednesday night, Linda and I met Susan and her partner Kent in front of the Orient Hotel at the Rocks here in Sydney.  We had a very pleasant evening wandering around the city, starting by catching a cab down to Darling Harbour, walking across the old Pyrmont Bridge to have an al-fresco dinner and a few beers at the Pyrmont Bridge Hotel, followed by a walk through Darling Harbour, up Liverpool Street through the Spanish Quarter, left into George Street past Town Hall and St Andrews Cathedral and all the way down to Wynyard Station.  It was a nice night for a walk and we had a good chat about all sorts of things, some education-related, and some not.

I made the offer to Susan and Kent to drop into my school, PLC, at some stage if they had time.  Fortunately, their plans for the next day had them catching a train that went right through Croydon so they took me up on the offer and popped in on their way.  We did a quick tour of some of the school, and even dropped into one of the computer rooms where Year 4 was having a lesson and had a chat with some of the kids.

My school runs a program called Transition Class, which caters for special needs students with fairly significant learning disabilities.  These students, about 20 of them, attend regular classes but also focus on learning a lot of life skills.  To help facilitate this, PLC bought a house next door to the school which they call Transition House and the kids regularly spend time there, learning very practical skills to teach them to look after themselves. One of the wonderful things these kids do every term is called Transition Cafe, where they host and manage a cafe luncheon for PLC staff… the menu is prepared, orders are taken and the food is cooked and served by the transition students and it’s a wonderful example of real life, relevant learning in action. Kent and Susan’s visit just happened to coincide with this term’s Transition Cafe event so of course they were invited to join us for lunch at the table reserved for the IT Services team.  We all had a very pleasant time sitting in the sunshine, chatting and being served by our wonderful transition kids.

I had to sneak off from lunch a little early as I had an IWB workshop I’d promised to run for our Creative Arts staff.  I left Susan and Kent in the capable hands of our IT Director, Chris Waterman, who escorted them over to meet me just as the IWB session was winding up, and we took another quick tour through The Croydon, an old pub that was bought by the school a few years ago and converted to our centre for technology and the arts, before eventually bidding them farewell as they continued on with their day.

Meeting IRL is a good thing… If you ever get the chance to meet up with colleagues you’ve only ever known through the network, I’d encourage you to do it.  It was terrific to meet Susan and Kent, and I’m hoping to be able to take them up on their offer to catch up in Singapore one day.

I think it would be rather nice to sit and share a beer or two at Raffles Hotel.  🙂