Apace of Change

by Damian Bariexca, Ed.D.

Archive for the ‘Social Network’ Category

Introducing Edcamp Leadership

Most of you who read blogs by educators are at least passingly familiar with Edcamp, the participant-driven “unconference”  for educators based on the BarCamp model.  Edcamps typically do not have keynote speakers or even pre-determined workshop schedules; rather, attendees come together first thing in the morning to offer sessions based on their own knowledge, expertise, and experience.  Sessions are typically more conversation-driven than lecture-driven, and those who offer sessions act more as discussion facilitators than presenters.  In other words, the Edcamp folks have taken the most valuable parts of the professional conference – the “coffee pot conversations” held with your colleagues in between sessions and at lunch – and built the entire event around them.

Since the inaugural Edcamp in Philadelphia in 2011, the model has gone worldwide, with events in Canada, Chile, and Sweden, not to mention all across the United States.  These events have heretofore focused on grass-roots professional learning for classroom teachers.  Coming this summer, however, we are proud to announce the first Edcamp event specifically designed for K-12 administrators and teacher leaders: Edcamp Leadership!

Whether you serve in a formal or informal leadership capacity, or even if you are not a school leader but have an interest in issues pertinent to ed leadership (that means YOU, teachers & parents), please join us at NJPSA/FEA in Monroe Twp., NJ on Thursday, July 26, 2012.  Get directions here, get tickets here*, and follow us on Twitter here!

* Tickets are FREE, but space is limited, so register early!  As of this post, we are already at about 25% (Edit: 75% as of 4/2/2012!) capacity.

Re-Statement of Purpose: Why I Blog

Today marks exactly 4 1/2 years since I wrote my first blog post here at Apace of Change.  In it, I laid out my initial intentions for this blog:

…I want to engage with other educators – not just teachers, but administrators, psychologists, LDTCs, and others in the education field – as to uses for much of the technology that is available to us.

[…]

I’ve titled my blog “Apace of Change” because it so precisely sums up my life situation: trying to keep abreast of ever-changing technology while also dealing with significant changes in my personal and professional lives.

[…]

I’m really doing this for the collaborative aspect – I need to talk about these issues with people, and where else other than Edublogs am I likely to find such folks?

So what’s changed?  I’m clearly no longer hosting with Edublogs, and I’ve since expanded the scope of my writing.  At first, I wrote a wanna-be ed-tech blog.  Now, I write a wanna-be blog about the broader landscape of education.  This shift has mirrored the changes in my professional life, from classroom teacher to school psychologist and professional development facilitator to aspiring administrator.  As my professional perspective and concerns have changed, so has the focus of my writing.

I’m also more comfortable in my own digital skin.  I think at the beginning I was modeling my writing very much on the other blogs I was reading, education and otherwise.  It took me a little while to find my own voice, but having done so – along with purchasing my own domain and hosting space – gives me an even greater sense of ownership over this digital space of mine.

Speaking of which, there’s also this statement from my portfolio website:

Since 2007, I have blogged at Apace of Change about the challenges, successes, and failures I experienced in attempting to infuse technology into my instruction and assessment as a high school English teacher.  From 2009 on, I shift focus to broader issues in education, with some focus on special education and school psychology related issues, including the use of read/write Web tools as assistive technology.

Blogging has great potential as a tool of reflection, and I have found that frequent and thorough reflection has helped me to become a better educator, psychologist, husband, and father.  Whereas some may prefer to write in a journal or simply reflect in thought, blogging allows for interaction with an audience.  In some cases, this interaction provides me with affirmation; in others, my thoughts are challenged.  Either way, as long as the discourse remains constructive, growth occurs.

There’s no two ways about it – I love getting comments on my blog, and do my best to respond to each one as best I can.  I’ve found, however, that as the years have passed, I’ve been more focused on the personal reflective aspect than the conversational aspect.  I don’t comment on other blogs as much as I used to, and I’ve noticed that comments on my blog have fallen off proportionately.  I’m OK with that, though, since a) as I write I’m reflecting and refining my thoughts as well as my words, and b) I get most of my discourse via Facebook and Twitter these days – another big change from the summer of 2007.

I know, I know – it’s 2012, and blogging is dead (or is it?), but as long as I still have ideas, problems, questions, or concerns about education, this blog is staying alive.


Shifting My Sharing

Despite the periodic blog posts heralding the death of RSS, I remain a huge fan of the syndication format (not familiar with RSS?  Check the wiki).  I have been an avid user of Google Reader for nearly five years now, and I use it daily to aggregate and read, at last count, nearly 200 blogs, education-related and otherwise.

Until recently, one of my favorite features of Google Reader has been the ability to “share” (read: publish) interesting articles to my own personal RSS feed, which I cross-published to my Twitter account and on a sidebar feed on my portfolio website.  Additionally, Google Reader users could subscribe to each other’s Shared Items feeds right in Reader, which was a great way for me to read the posts my friends found insightful or useful without having to rely on Facebook or Twitter, where they would be too likely to be overlooked due to the high signal to noise ratio.

This past fall, however, Google saw fit to remove the sharing function (the generic nature of which allowed users to publish to just about any service) and replace it with a “Share to Google+” button (which forces users to use their social networking product to share stories).   This turned an incredibly powerful, relatively open publishing platform into yet another walled garden, a move I (sort of) understand from a business standpoint, but one that frustrated me immensely as a user.

Despite Google’s shortsightedness, I’ve still been able to rely on RSS to help me concoct another solution for when I want to share interesting articles from my Reader.  I have repurposed my Delicious account to be my surrogate Shared Items feed.  If you would like to read the articles I find interesting, you can now find them at Delicious.com/damian613 (or if you use RSS too, subscribe to the feed).

So what happened to the existing items in my Delicious account, the special education/school psychology related bookmarks (that I also published to my portfolio website)?  Simple – I moved them all over to Diigo (RSS feed), with tags intact.

If you’re interested in either my shared bookmarks in special ed/school psychology or the blogposts I share periodically in the areas of technology & education, please feel free to drop by my Delicious & Diigo accounts, or better yet, subscribe to the RSS feeds (while the format is still alive!).

TL;DR: Moved some of my public stuff around:

The End of Isolation

In September, I was very proud to have my first contribution to a peer-reviewed journal published.  When a friend asked if I had publicized this on my blog, I paused, then realized that in the hubbub of the start of school, I had completely forgotten.

So anyway, here goes: in “The End of Isolation”, my co-authors (Eric Brunsell and Elizabeth Alderton, both of the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh) and I explore how K-12 classroom teachers use Twitter as a means of professional networking (the research behind the article was the basis of Eric’s and my conversation at Educon 2.3 this past January).  More from the abstract:

The researchers surveyed and analyzed the public Twitter feeds of classroom teachers to determine the specific purposes for which teachers use Twitter. Study participants also completed surveys dealing with social networking. The K-12 educators in this study engaged in true dialogue, where evidence of actual conversation occurred in Twitter over 61% of the time. Additionally, over 82% of the time, the educators in this study chose to follow other educators or content experts related to their field of teaching so they were able to create a personal learning network meaningful to their professional needs. Analysis of data shows that a majority of tweets were educationally focused and were primarily in the categories of practice/philosophy, questions, and sharing of resources. Additional studies looking at how other online learning communities may be used as professional development venues would be beneficial and add to the knowledge base of online learning, professional development, and learning networks.

The article appeared in this past September’s issue of MERLOT’s Journal of Online Learning and Teaching; the full text of the article is available here for your review.  Finally, a huge THANK YOU to the participants in our survey; we truly could not have done this without you.

Reference

Alderton, E., Brunsell, E., & Bariexca, D.  (2011).  The end of isolation.  MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 7(3), 354-365.

Get Your #Chat On

It was a little over a year ago when I wrote about the weekly Twitter-based chat on special ed issues founded by Deven Black and originally moderated by me, #spedchat.

While I can take or leave the real-time chat format on Twitter (it can be maddeningly difficult to keep up with if too many people are on at once, and the 140 character limit is, well… limiting), I’ve found that hashtags are a great way to toss resources or questions out into the ether and ensure that interested parties (i.e., the people who regularly search for the hashtag) will see them.  It becomes a public archive of both discussion and links to resources, and I find that use of hashtags more valuable than the live chat in many cases.

With that in mind, I’ve started following two more education-based Twitter chats I thought I’d share with you:

  • #psychat: Moderated by high school Social Studies teacher @mrpotter, this chat focuses on issues pertinent to teaching psychology.  While I no longer teach (high school, anyway), I hope to be able to contribute from my current perspective as a school psych.  Live chat takes place Wednesdays from 8-9pm Eastern.
  • #1stchat: Moderated by @CYarzy, this chat is primarily for teachers of first grade (see their archival wiki here).  I don’t work with students this young, but I am following the chat because I’ve got a slightly more personal stake in it: my son started first grade earlier this week!  Live chat takes place Sundays from 8-9pm Eastern.  (And yes, there’s also a #2ndchat, #3rdchat, #4thchat… I stopped searching after #7thchat).

Of course, the #spedchat live chat continues to run Tuesdays from 8:30-9:30pm Eastern.  The torch has been passed to the next generation of moderators & organizers, and judging by the enthusiasm and participation of recent chats, they’re doing a fantastic job.

For more education-related hashtag chats on Twitter, see this Google Calendar by Sarah Kaiser.