Category: Blogging

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Putting a Face to the Mind

Sorry to be picking on Kim Cofino so much lately, but she’s blogging like a woman possessed! šŸ™‚ Kim just twittered about a post written by Struan Robertson, one of her school admin team at the school where she works in Thailand. It’s a great post Struan (who incidentally, started blogging after the Shanghai Conference on the weekend – good for you!)

Given all the talk over the last few days about connectedness and how our networks of like-thought are linking us all together globally, this paragraph really jumped out at me. For those that may not know, Kim is an American teacher who was working in Malaysia until last year and now works at an International school in Thailand. And how does a school in Thailand find talent like Kim?…

“I was also amazed at the impact of blogging. We met and hired Kim Cofino last year through blogging because we already knew how/what she thought. Are we ā€œinventingā€ a new way to run our HR Dept.? We hire people because of how they think, independently of what ā€œsmartā€ things they write on their CVs? How could that impact international school job/recruiting fairs? Kim came up to me on Saturday at the conference and excitedly told me how Will Richardson (Weblogg-ed) wanted to meet her. Why? Because he follows her blog (Always Learning) and wanted to put a face to the mind, not a ā€œname to the faceā€. How different is that? Justin and Dennis saw Jeff Utecht (The Thinking Stick) from Shanghai Amercian School and greeted him like an old friend. When I asked Justin how long they had been friends, he replied that this was the 2nd time they had met. In other words, because they read each otherā€™s blog and know how the other thinks, they are great virtual and real-life friends. Whoa!!!”

It’s pretty amazing when you think about it. I remarked to someone today that if I was after advice on a particular educational question or issue, I would be far more likely to reach out to my network of connections – people I’ve mostly never met face to face – for an answer than I would even to my local colleagues at school. I mean, I work with nice people and I like them a lot, but none of them are as connected, as switched on, as forward thinking as the people at the other end of my networks…

I was surprised a few weeks ago when I had a phone call from a leader of a school here in Sydney who asked me if I would be willing to run some technology integration sessions for his staff. He wanted me to just come along for the day and “expand their minds” with regard to new media, Web2.0 and how technology was impacting 21st century education. Naturally, I said yes, and was really excited about it… but what floored me was when I asked him how he happened to come into contact with me… where did he get my name from? “Your blog”, he replied. Wow.

I’ve actually quit the teaching profession twice now, leaving to do other things outside of education, because there have been times when I’ve really doubted my ability as a teacher. But I keep coming back to it, certainly not because of the money, but because there is no other calling that makes as much of a difference as teaching and no other time in history where I feel it’s more important to be a part of it.

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Always Learning, Always Growing

I just read a great quote from Kim Cofino’s blog, Always Learning, as she was reflecting on the Shanghai Conference from last weekend…

“I didnā€™t realize before how much blogging (reading and writing in collaboration with others) would change my life – not just enhance my professional development like reading a journal article, but change my life – the way I think, the way I interact with people, the way I work, the way I look at the world. Itā€™s impossible to understand the impact of these technologies unless you are using them yourself.”

I totally agree. Even before Web 2.0, I experienced the same thing, albiet on a slightly smaller and slower scale just through email forums and message boards. I’ve been active on mailing lists and forums since about 1994 and cannot imagine what it would be like to not be connected to others. Now, with blogs and RSS and Twitter and podcasts and all these other incredible tools, the fibres that forms those connections are just getting stronger and more intertwined. It really is life changing, because it affects more than just your day to day work. These connections and conversations change you from the inside out.

I know some incredibly dedicated and well-meaning teachers. They work hard, spending hours of their day planning and marking and preparing, and yet, I just think if they made even a small part of their day available for just connecting and conversing with other educators, reading the ideas of others, sharing their thoughts about those ideas, reflecting on what they read and write… it would totally turbocharge all the other great stuff they do. I’ve mentioned it to many people over the years, but so often hear back, “I don’t have time for that”.

I don’t have time NOT to. There is only just so much you can do when you work in a vacuum, and Kim’s right… it’s the networking and mind expanding that goes along with these technologies that can have such a huge impact on your effectiveness as an educator. Thanks for the great post Kim.

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The Blog as a Conversation Room

I put this slide together for the spot I did in Sheryl’s presentation in Shanghai this morning. My bit was entitled Learning is a Conversation, and I was trying to get across the idea that a blog is a wonderful vehicle for getting conversations started, and that a blog is much more than just a website. Unlike a website – which is a very Web 1.0 concept – a blog is dynamic and changes often (or should!), it encourages conversation and interaction through the commenting feature, and it also enables the use of external feeds and services to help bring the page to life, making it far more than just static content on the web.

You can click to enlarge the image, but the idea is that most of the sidebar features on this blog are dynamically fed by data from either the internal content management of the blog engine itself (past posts, archives, and comment management) and also from external sources such as Twitter, Flickr, Clustrmap, del.icio.us, YouTube, RSS feeds and so on. As I add content to all those external services, the results just flow onto my blog page. Once you start to automate that process from start to finish, it becomes a much more interesting tool… for example, using a Java phone app called Shozu I can take photos on my mobile phone (a Sony Ericsson K610i) and then push those digital files directly from the phone to Flickr. Once the end up in my Flickr photostream they then automatically appear in the blog sidebar without any further intervention from me.

Similarly, I can push comments to Twitter using a variety of methods – the Twitter website, Twitterbar, my mobile phone, or Twitterific – and they just magically appear on my blog page. Same with any websites I bookmark using del.icio.us. Same with RSS feeds. I save and store those things as normal, but they just appear on the page without any further work from me. This is a huge difference between a regular “webpage” and a blog.

If you take a good look at the optional plugins available you can start to do some pretty cool things. This makes it super easy for your blog page to become a central hub for your digital world as it pulls all your resources into one place, as well as being a place to start and continue conversations. Blockquoting lets you bring in snippets from other sites you read, while commenting lets those ideas bounce back from your readers, starting real conversations and making your blog into far more of a conduit through which ideas can flow. Combine all this with the built in trackbacking feature and the humble blog becomes a remarkable tool for personal communication.