July 2008 Archives

Cole Camplese threw the blogging gauntlet down today. In a general post on his blog, he proposed the idea of writing a blog post each day for the month of August. After a number of favorable responses, Cole fleshed out the guidelines in his post New Rules, One Post a Day and challenged his readers to join him in this experiment. I find this both intriguing and terrifying. Obviously, I don't post every day; instead, I tend to blog when the feeling moves me (as she says in Pretty Woman, "I say who, I say where, I say how much..."). So to make the commitment that I will definitely create a post each day that isn't just phoned in is a big commitment for me. What will I talk about?

Honestly, I am going to rely on my community for much of my input. I am going to make observations and engage others who have also decided to join this experiment to interact with their posts, their thoughts, their reflections. This is going to be more than I normally do; a lot of times, I simply lurk on a blog but it really doesn't allow me to engage in the discussion, now, does it? Bad form, Robin! Perhaps this is what I need to better understand and get to know my community. What they are interested in. What their background is. What motivates them. What are they passionate about. Right now I don't know where this is going.

But I bet I find out.

As part of the Learning Design Summer Camp, one of my contributions to the event is discussing Twitter and the backchannel communication. I will be doing a brief (10 minute) lightning talk to introduce Twitter, as well as helping to facilitate a more indepth discussion of the uses (and ramifications) of the backchannel. I'm very excited about participating in this event, although I tend to find it somewhat ironic that people look to me to talk about Twitter.  Yes, I get excited about social media and social networking; I think it is becoming more critical to our success AND our sanity, but I'm sure there are others out there who do it better. Nonetheless, I am happy to contribute what I can and, to that end, I've taken my portion of a copresented talk given at the Web 2008 Conference here at Penn State earlier this summer and created a very brief overview (realizing I only have half the time I had there to get it all across). Slides are shared, after the fold, in case you're interested--although, quite frankly, the interesting stuff is still in my head to go along with the slides.

Seriously, this is kind of creepy, and one of the reasons I am happy that my twitter feed is protected. Yesterday we discovered that State College Police Dept has joined the twittersphere as @StateCollegePD. Now they are stalking following everyone and anyone in the local area:



Now, I know they've been on Facebook for years, using the collective data on there, but I think I'm at a bit of a loss as to why I would a) want them to follow me, b) want to follow them, and c) even have a reason to use their tweets as a resource? Their initial explanatory tweets state:

As we continue to plan the Learning Design Summer Camp, my twitter feed is once again morphing into a community of anticipation. We did this in the TLT Symposium, and it was a good feeling to be a part of something in which everyone looks forward to participating. In community discussions on the wiki about the look and feel of the summer camp logo, I sat one evening and watched the artwork change, and expand, and form new ideas as people added their thoughts and input, whether it was comments in the wiki, new logos that had been bastardized from earlier versions to better illustrate a point, or even the discussion that carried through twitter. I can't think of another time where I've seen the community drive the discussion and truly help form an event. Sure, a good planning committee will be productive in their interactions, but this is something completely different. This is an open invitation to a group to help plan an event they can then participate in. I watch the dynamics and I'm almost in awe with the way it just unfolds before my eyes.