August challenge
Taking up Cole's challenge of a post a day for August, according to the rules outlined there. Me and Daniel and Shannon so far, as far as I've seen.
Love to say more on the matter, but I've got a meeting in a second here. One thing to share before I go: I'm reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations and also was fed a video of Shirky talking about his book by someone in my network (the section about flash mobs is especially engaging: "nothing says dictatorship like arresting people eating ice cream," for example).
And the commentary I'd like to add is that this is, to some extent, what we're doing. Someone has an idea, puts the call out there to see if anyone's interested, and people throw their hats into the ring, cooperatively arranging taxonomies (er, folksonomies, really) to tag and aggregate content, resulting in a pool of information and new ideas being created.
It's what I've seen in action growing slowly over a year, accelerated by the TLT Symposium and Twitter, sparked further by TweetMeets and BS Breakfasts and Bookclub, and burst into full flame (as far as I can tell) in Learning Design Summer Camp here at Penn State. And I'm convinced that this is the way to do it.
But it's happening this way (or similarly, at least) elsewhere: EduWeb happened recently, and people were Tweeting and videostreaming (alternate) and liveblogging sessions, and it was almost as good as being there, minus a significant amount of in-person networking and fun. But it can be done. I've been caught up in this plus Jeffrey Veen's idea of an audience ombudsman for conferences and trying to figure out how this works in purely-online communities.
And it really goes back to the idea of an alpha user, I think. But the thing is that we've got a bunch of them here at Penn State.
More to develop on this idea. But it will have to hold: I've got a meeting for our campus tour podcast project coming up.
Love to say more on the matter, but I've got a meeting in a second here. One thing to share before I go: I'm reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations and also was fed a video of Shirky talking about his book by someone in my network (the section about flash mobs is especially engaging: "nothing says dictatorship like arresting people eating ice cream," for example).
And the commentary I'd like to add is that this is, to some extent, what we're doing. Someone has an idea, puts the call out there to see if anyone's interested, and people throw their hats into the ring, cooperatively arranging taxonomies (er, folksonomies, really) to tag and aggregate content, resulting in a pool of information and new ideas being created.
It's what I've seen in action growing slowly over a year, accelerated by the TLT Symposium and Twitter, sparked further by TweetMeets and BS Breakfasts and Bookclub, and burst into full flame (as far as I can tell) in Learning Design Summer Camp here at Penn State. And I'm convinced that this is the way to do it.
But it's happening this way (or similarly, at least) elsewhere: EduWeb happened recently, and people were Tweeting and videostreaming (alternate) and liveblogging sessions, and it was almost as good as being there, minus a significant amount of in-person networking and fun. But it can be done. I've been caught up in this plus Jeffrey Veen's idea of an audience ombudsman for conferences and trying to figure out how this works in purely-online communities.
And it really goes back to the idea of an alpha user, I think. But the thing is that we've got a bunch of them here at Penn State.
More to develop on this idea. But it will have to hold: I've got a meeting for our campus tour podcast project coming up.
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Hey Anne, I'm doing the challenge as well. I like your comparison between what we're doing and flash mobs. I can definitely see that, especially when it comes to how quickly the Tweet Meets come together.
Also, you mentioned Veen's post. We're going to do something like that at the Learning Design Summer Camp and we'll see how it goes.
Welcome! This is going to be fun and very interesting on a whole bunch of levels. I love that it smacks of the instant mob being created for a cause. We'll see where we are at the end of August! Great post BTW!
I love Here Comes Everybody; it is resonating with me along with all the rest of the flash mobbery we've been experiencing here. I think you have captured it very well in this post, and I think I just might make yours the subject of my first post. Watch for the trackback!