Shift to the Future

I have always been a highly social person, an extravert I suppose.  Those personality ass Technorati Tags: relationships , opportunities , connected , friends essments always put me into that sort of category.  I’m a Yellow-Red for instance.  I’ve made it a priority to reach out internally and externally to people like me and different from me, within the public and private sectors, to build relationships, share ideas, dream, lament, argue or debate, etc.  I knew I was pretty well connected but this recent transition period, sabbatical of sorts, has really highlighted how my network really works. So many people reached out through LinkedIn, Twitter, and email asking to get together for coffee, lunch, and to see how I was doing.  They shared such positive and affirming comments with me which really helped with getting through this period and to help me figure out what’s next.  I had well connected friends reaching inside the organizations they work for to se...

I’ve noticed that some people are abandoning Facebook or Twitter, or at a minimum, removing the apps from their smartphones.  A colleague of mine was finding it difficult to focus in the present when with real people while his smartphone buzzed with new Facebook and Twitter posts commanding his attention.  My eldest son disabled his Facebook account – he found that he was wasting too much time there, not getting to important things.  We were chatting as a family recently about how ‘friends’ build up in Facebook and talked about deleting all those who aren’t really friends (or family) – I did and so did my second son – it reduced the noise level.  Add to the mix Twitter, Google +, Pinterest, LinkedIn, About.Me, Flickr, Diigo, Yelp, Skype, Strava Cycle, Prezi, Instagram, and it does tend to become overwhelming doesn’t it.  However, I think social media tools are super useful for sharing, learning, and staying in touch, but users of these must learn to self-regul...

I received an email a few months ago from Twitter saying that I was four years old.  I signed up for Twitter way back in March 2007.  At the time I didn’t really have a clue what to do with the prompt “What’s happening?” and mostly forgot about Twitter until sometime in 2009.  A few colleagues had started to really use and benefit from Twitter and they kept nudging me to get on board.  I did and the rest is history… There are many different tools for various modes of networking around media and medium for video, bookmarking / tagging, blogging, socializing, sharing, business connecting, presenting, etc.  People often join social networking sites like Twitter as part of a workshop or learning series only to rarely or never return.  In my experience, the sign-up numbers vs active users are quite different.  Twitter is definitely growing though as evident in this 2010 graph: I just gave a talk and hands-on session at the BC ASBO annual meeting in...

I am still amazed by how quickly things change.  I remember joining Twitter about 3 or more years ago.  @chrkennedy , @gary_kern , and I thought we’d give it a go.  I really wasn’t sure what to enter in response to “What’s happening?”.  My Twitter account remained pretty dormant until about the middle of 2009 and even then took probably six months for me to really “get it”.  I think it’s easier to see the value now since it’s become so popular.  In part one of this post series I attempted to show how you can build your professional learning network (PLN) using Twitter .  In this post I write about another popular tool for building your PLN – LinkedIn ( wikipedia article ). Here are a few introductory snippets from my LinkedIn profile : LinkedIn is sort-of like a Facebook for professional networking.  Rather than friends though, you make connections with contacts.  You and your contacts and millions of other users include as much detai...

I was in a lunch & learn session today with the management group in our District.  We were chatting about doing some professional growth planning and I suggested that the group look at the new ways.  Well, after a brief conceptual overview of building a personal / professional learning network (PLN), I got the job of sharing at the next lunch & learn to show how digital tools are used by professionals around the world for that very purpose.  This blog post (and a second one ) materialized for me while running on the treadmill at the gym after work and will serve as the outline and guide for the lunch & learn.  I hope that I write this in such a way that it is useful to teachers, principals, and other professionals wanting to embrace the new ways of building a PLN.  My definition for a PLN is: “a group of people who know stuff that I need to know and who might benefit from knowing stuff that I know” So, essentially a PLN forms through people you fi...

It’s amazing how time seems to speed up as we accumulate more personal history.  I find the seasons and yearly cycles to be coming up faster now then they did 25 years ago.  School start-up is just two weeks in the future.  September is a chaotic period in general for those in the school system and the parents of our students.  Specifically though I would like to ponder the technology agenda for the next year or so. I just read an article in FastCompany “ How TED Became the NEW HARVARD ”.  It tells the store of TED.com which is quite fascinating.  I love their mission “Ideas worth spreading”.  It is described as an educational platform.  The best minds and ideas are shared for free with the world.  TED used to be an insular conference, a closed system.  But has, through effective use of technology, transformed itself into a platform for spreading creative ideas.  I wonder how K12 can learn from this approach… In our District we...

It’s Sunday, the day after the intense 2010 World Future Society conference and it’s time to reflect.  I bumped into Ken Shepard this morning whom I met on Thursday in Holacracy class and we debriefed for about an hour.  I’ve got to admit, there’s a lot of disturbing aspects to what I heard this week in presentations and conversations.  I am an optimist but am finding the views of others about possible futures to be challenging to accept.  To start off, here’s the titles of the sessions I attended and what has struck me most about this week: Organizing at the Leading Edge: Introducing Holacracy Keynote: Navigating the Future: Moral Machines, Techno Saplens, and the Singularity Sustainable Innovation: A Strategic Road Map to the Future 2010 Humans in 2020: The Next 10 Years of Personal Biotechnology Oceans and Our Global Future Internet Evolution: Where Hyperconnectivity and Ambient Intimacy Take Use Keynote: Building the Human Mind Levers of Change in High...

I just read an article “ The web shatters focus, rewires brains ” in the latest Wired magazine (yes, the paper-based version, not on an ipad).  One writer, Nicholas Carr, makes the case that the barrage of information and interruptions in our lives “shatters our focus and rewires our brain”.  The article ( Wired June 2010 pp. 112-118 ) is adapted from his new book, “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”, to be published in June 2010.  He shares examples of research done to compare heavy to low Internet users where they fMRI’d their brain activity.  Heavy Internet users did have higher brain activity and that the brains of the low users after spending an hour a day online for a week then showed very similar brain use patterns.  Their brains were rewired!  This might sound promising whereby Internet use reroutes neural pathways but Carr argues that this is actually turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our b...

I remember when I was growing up sneakily watching TV shows or listening to music my parents didn’t approve of - good thing my mom doesn’t use the Internet, she won’t see this, I’m safe :-).  That’s about as complicated “digital tools” were back in the day.  Fast forward to today and it’s a whole different world with the Internet, devices of all shapes, sizes, and capabilities, in the hands of most kids.  The opportunity for kids to misuse digital tools is huge.  Who’s going to guide them? I wrote a post back in March, Digital Natives Need Infrastructure , where I talked about one of our schools’ (Riverside Secondary) experiences with students using digital tools and the impact on the network.  When kids are bringing their personally owned devices (PODs) and you have a philosophy of openness (no blocking), things get interesting.  My post Learning with a class set of ipod touches tries to contemplate possible learning benefits and difficulties.  Dav...

I visited Riverside Secondary School last week to spend a few hours in their Digital Immersion 9 class.  Students can sign-up online using this web form .  This class consists of about 30 students who spent first semester together as a class learning digital tools, Science, and Math with one teacher.  As of February they are with a new teacher, Elizabeth Bancroft, all morning learning English and Socials.  The expectation is that most learning and teaching will supported by digital tools.  Ms. Bancroft expressed to me her frustration with how things were working - mainly how the technology "wasn't" working...  I had read positive reviews in the local paper and viewed a positive news video.  Note that you may want to read James McConville’s post about his visit to this class.  I needed to see the class in action for myself.  I had an opportunity to share with the students some of my thoughts about blogging, writing for an audience, etc....