The scottmerrick Daily!

Hey all. It's in the sidebar, and will remain there, but I want to call attention to the cooltool of the day, Paper.li, where you can set yourself up with your own daily "newspaper," drawn from the (modified or otherwise) posts of the folks you follow on Twitter and your Facebook friends! I like it mainly because it transforms all that for me on a daily basis into a user-friendly compendium. In a way it's just another way to view your twitter feed along with fb, but in another way it's a way to take a solid look at just what you've gotten yourself into in your Personal Learning Network (PLN). How many times can I use the word "way" in a sentence, lol?

Here's what it looks like (today--tommorrow it'll look different!) in the widget for me bloggy. If you haven't already done so, go peruse it for yourself at this link: http://paper.li/scottmerrick!

Why Teens Don't Twitter!

Checking into email this morning, I noted a comment at megablogge Lucy Gray's new ning, "Making IT Personal" and popped over there, checking out some recent posts that took me to a discussion thread started by Gordon Shupe, called "When I say Personal Learning Network you say _____." So I of course had to comment "Second Life and Twitter." Then I saw a link in his original thread post that stated "Interesting article here worthy of discussion: http://mashable.com/2009/08/05/why-teens-dont-tweet/ ." This is good, ya'll, as Mashable.com blogger Ben Parr takes on staticstics from a recent Nielsen report that show that only 16 percent of Twitter users are under 25.

...Twitter is far less about the social graph than it is about the overall conversation surrounding an item. Retweets are about sharing items and @replies are about allowing the public to be part of a conversation you’re having with someone. If you just follow your friends on Twitter, you will barely be using it. A lot of the value comes from following interesting people and celebrities.

I'd say the whole article is worth a read, as it's replete with graphs and insight. READ MORE...

Advice about Twitter et al

There are a lot of folks who see social media--facebook, twitter, blogging, plurk, friendfeed, and more--as an opportunity to promote their businesses. I have this advice for them:

Social media is about information. If the information is valuable and interesting it will go viral. If it's transparently commercial and self-serving, it will not. In fact, it may have the opposite effect. I mentioned that in a conversation with my lovely wife and she said, "Write that down. Now."

I did.

10 Ways Your Job Will Change

This is an example of why Twitter might be a good tool to add to your professional arsenal: This morning, while I worked out on my step machine and listened to Steve Earle's new Townes Van Zandt album  on my computer (thank you, Jim and Amy!), one of my network, a Dell executive who goes by the name "ShiftParadigm," tweeted, simply:

ShiftParadigmReading the Way We Will Work: Ten Ways Your Job Will Change (from Time magazine). Think mine has already changed. http://bit.ly/7hGjn

I spent the next 45 minutes reading the article, and, yes, that's a long read, but it is truly interesting. Here's a quote:

Rob Carter, chief information officer at FedEx, thinks the best training for anyone who wants to succeed in 10 years is the online game World of Warcraft. Carter says WoW, as its 10 million devotees worldwide call it, offers a peek into the workplace of the future. Each team faces a fast-paced, complicated series of obstacles called quests, and each player, via his online avatar, must contribute to resolving them or else lose his place on the team. The player who contributes most gets to lead the team — until someone else contributes more.

Read the whole 11 screen article.

Ah, technology. Just do it.
-- 

Balance, Anyone?

April 14, 2009, In the wee hours of the morning, while running Twhirl on my laptop, answering email, and working out on a Sharper Image step-machine in my home office, a question occured to me. I twittered it:

Gmorning Peeps? How do YOU perceive "Balance" in your own life, and what are YOU doing in pursuit of it? Just askin'...
about 3 hours ago from twhirl

You can visit the wiki it became and add to the responses I got from twitter!

I am more and more interested in this topic. If you have anything to offer, especially if you are an educator (but ALL comments are welcome), please take a minute to share!

Plurk, Today'sMeet, and Twitter!

Clif Mims in Mahmphis plurked a sweet little application a while ago. True to the micro-blog creed, it's a short one: Useful Microblog-like platform for classrooms and presentations . I'll be using this lean little backchat tool, called "Today'sMeet," perhaps with my 4th graders tomorrow, the last full day of classes b4 winter holidays :)

Sign up for Plurk here! You'll love it! It's Twitter with discussion threads!

Here's a screen grab from my plurk interface. Click for a larger version!

Understand the Shift in 21st Century Learning?

Twitter friend Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach dropped a url to her tweets just a few minutes ago, and I took it as a sign that I needed a break from my repetitive data entry for our school's new SIS database and went to view her blogpost at 21st Century Learning. Yes, YouTube has valuable video, and her observations about this one's relationship to the profound changes we're going through as teachers and learners are, as the Brits say, "spot-on."

Any teacher can tell you that when teaching something is the best way to master knowledge about it and the requisite skills involved in its application. Sheryl shares out three impressive exhibits to support her closing charge:

Let's quit talking about it and roll up our sleeves and change our classrooms and schools into meaningful learning nodes in our students' network of learning choices.

Whatever you're doing, take your own break and go watch, listen, and reflect...

"High Schools at the Tipping Point"

From ASCD, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, comes a detailed and thought provoking challenge to our institutional models for teaching and learning. It's well worth a read and so very insightful that I cannot but share it.

Though it has its share of gloomy statistics, Bog Wise's timely article is far from doomsaying. He proposes three positive initiatives to begin change:

*Align what schools expect of students with the demands of college and the workforce

*Offer a rigorous, option-rich curriculum; personalize learning; and provide necessary supports

and
*Improve instruction by mining data and using digital technologies

Bob Wise is former Governor of West Virginia and the President of the Alliance for Excellent Education. The article's lead-line should give you a bit more motivation to pursue reading it:

The United States faces a choice: Do nothing to fix a broken high school system and watch our competitiveness further decline, or summon the political will to demand change.

Thanks to my twitter group, AngelaMaiers in particular, for pointing me to this must-share.

Howard Rheingold's New Collaboration Message

I follow Howard Rheingold nearly every day, each time I get a minute to log into Twitter, the 140-character-per-message personal networking tool that lets us "follow" social and professional "tweets" to collaborate by means of those short messages, learning from one another and sometimes just trading jibes or comments. Howard, a busy man, doesn't follow me, so our relationship is not mutual, at least not yet, but I do get to check his ongoing thoughts whenever he gets his own minute to twitter. At present I have 75 followers--many of them very prominent technology thinkers and innovators--and I follow 46, so there's some of that non-reciprocal tweeting going on with me, too. I'm a busy man in my own small ways.

Occasionally I check my followers and add a few of them to my "following" list and thereby enrich the conversation (perhaps our boy Howard will do the same with my contributions one day). If someone's thoughts don't enrich, I simply stop following them. The result is a constant montage of thinking and human activity.

All this is a long way of saying that twitter itself is a clear example of what Rheingold's talking about in the talk hosted at TED Talks, another place I learn.

Everybody knows I am a Web 2.0 junkie. Howard's talk helps explain why. It's about cooperation. The new collaborative technologies, I believe, will enable an age of human development and cooperation that we are only just beginning to envision. I'll join in with @hrheingold to ask you to help get the "Cooperation Project" going. Watch: