Apace of Change

by Damian Bariexca, Ed.D.

Archive for the ‘Twitter’ Category

Do Break the Chain

The summer I wrote my dissertation, I posted here about a productivity strategy called Don’t Break the Chain.  Click the link for the backstory, but the gist of it is that it’s easier to maintain a habit if you keep at it – even for a little bit – every day, and monitor your progress visually (e.g., Xing off days on a calendar).

The good news is that it worked for me to help me get the last two chapters of that dissertation drafted and finalized over the months of July and August.  The bad news is that is also works in reverse – I’ve now maintained a chain of 143 days uninterrupted by blogging.  This is not a trend I’m proud of; in fact, it’s the longest break between blog posts I’ve had since I started blogging in the summer of 2007.

It’s been bothering me that I haven’t found the capacity to sit with my thoughts and write, especially since I’ve spoken time and time again about how therapeutic and valuable I find writing, I guess just not enough to actually force me to sit down and do it.

Enter Christina Torres‘ blog post in my RSS reader earlier today.  Who knows how and why circumstances come together the way they do, but she wrote just what I needed to read at the time I needed to read it.  Rather than try to sit down, gather my thoughts, and put together a coherent, “like-and-fave-worthy” statement of profound educational import, I’m taking the advice I gave students for however many years (and the message I took from Christina’s post) – just write.  And I’m not doing it sat in my office, or in my living room, or some other “writer-friendly” space – I’m banging this out standing in my kitchen, dripping wet after a run, just to get the words on the page.

It’s my hope that by breaking the chain of bloglessness (?), I can kickstart whatever reflective and creative juices have powered my writing for as many years as they have.  It’s something I’ve done here before – a quickie post, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, just to get myself back on the horse.  It’s worked in the past; let’s see if it takes this time.

Thanks, Christina.  Just goes to show you never know the impact your thoughts and ideas – whether they’re blogged, tweeted, podcasted, or simply shared face-to-face between colleagues and friends – can have on another person, and it’s yet another reason why I’m not ready to give up on Twitter for one aspect – albeit an important one – of my professional learning, despite the increasingly unmanageable signal to noise ratio.

Reclaiming My Time(line)

(…with apologies to Rep. Maxine Waters)

Back in August I ruminated a bit on how my experience with Twitter as a professional networking tool has changed over the past ten years.  Among other topics, I spoke briefly on how Twitter has become less conversational for me and more about broadcasting, for better or for worse.  I think a big part of that stemmed from the fact that as my network grew, the number of tweets in my timeline grew from a trickle to a stream to a full-on firehose in the face.  Throw in the functional additions of native retweets at some point in the last few years (tweets from people I don’t necessarily follow being shared with the click of an icon by people I do follow, thereby adding even more detritus to my timeline) and not even filtering apps like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck could adequately tame the mess that my Twitter timeline had become.

I recently came across two tools that appeared to hold some promise in helping trim some of the distractions of 2018 Twitter.  First is a browser extension called Refined Twitter.  Check out Lifehacker’s writeup on it here, but the tl;dr of it is that the extension (for Chrome, Opera, and Firefox) strips away the sidebar trending hashtags, suggestions of who to follow, and personal stats that I can always get on my profile page if I really need to see them (does anyone?).  The other key component is that it removes Promoted Tweets from your timeline.

Like pairing liver with fava beans and/or a nice chianti, I’ve found this extension to go very well with a third-party Twitter app called Blindfold.  Once you enable access to your Twitter account at Blindfold’s site, the service removes retweeted tweets from your timeline (not including those that were retweeted with original commentary, just the straight-up retweets).

After using these services for only a few hours, I was shocked at how much more manageable my timeline was.  Despite following nearly 1,500 people, I was once again able to scroll back a bit in my timeline and actually find where I had left off reading a little while ago.  I didn’t realize how much of my timeline was actually just retweeted content, much of which I found to be of little to no value to me.  I’ve actually found myself better able to track conversations and even participate in a few from time to time, which is what I found so wonderful about Twitter in the first place all those years ago.  Far less noise and far more signal.

As always, caveat emptor and YMMV with any third party apps or extensions, especially those that require you to authorize access to a social media account.  After less than a week of using these two services in tandem, for the first time in a long time, I feel optimistic that I’ll be able to bring that broadcasting/interacting ratio back into a reasonable balance and perhaps start to feel like I’m getting similar value out of the tool as I did back in the day.

Ten

This past week, tech journalists across the web celebrated the tenth birthday of the hashtag.  While they are ubiquitous across social networks now, the hashtag as we have come to know it originated, as have so many other major events and movements of the last decade, on Twitter:

Despite the fact that at that time I was a teacher on summer break, I consider that time period to be one of the most significant times in my career.  Having started experimenting with blogs, wikis, and many other emerging “Web 2.0” tools in my teaching in the year leading up to summer ’07, that summer was when I took my deep dive headfirst into the world of the read/write Web and social networking.  I, along with a cohort of other early adopter types, created a Twitter account, and very quickly we teachers, professors, and administrators began to find each other.

My Twitter timeline, ca. summer 2008

2007 was also the summer I started this blog; after some fits and starts throughout July, I finally pulled the trigger on both my Twitter account and my first blog post in early August.

At the risk of sounding cliche, it is truly amazing to look back and consider how much has changed.  At that time, my wife and I had both just turned 30, I was about to start my eighth (and what would be my final) year of teaching high school English, I was less than a year away from completing my graduate degree in school psychology, and I was still a relatively new father of a two-year-old, with one on the way.

In the years since, a lot has changed, both professionally and personally.  My six-year career in school psychology came and went, I started and finished a doctoral program in educational leadership, and I left the district in which I started my career for three jobs in two subsequent districts.  We turned 40 this year, and our children started 7th and 4th grade this week.  We will be the parents of a teenager this coming February.

But time marches on and change happens to us all.  What is really mindblowing to me is how my activities that summer have so permanently impacted my approach to my profession, and how the effects continue to this day.  Education can be a very isolating profession, even under the best of circumstances.  Connecting with other people through social media was novel and cool, but honestly, I had been doing that since my Bulletin Board Service (BBS) days in the early ’90s.  The concept was not new to me; actually, I think the familiarity of it was what made me so comfortable jumping in with both feet.

Where the true value was was the discussions and sharing of ideas, both through chats (Twitter) and in longer form, on our blogs, back when people still used to comment on them.  I know it can sound trite to hear, “Twitter is the best PD you’ll ever have!”, and I don’t entirely agree with that sentiment on its face, but for me, gaining access to such a vast multiplicity of perspectives, experiences, stories, and professional backgrounds through the people I met/meet there… I mean, how could that not change a person?  When I look back over a career that started in 2000, I really do see the summer of 2007 as a major demarcation.  Pre- and post-summer ’07 is my BCE and CE.

Perhaps I’m looking back through rose-tinted glasses, but it seems there was something different about it all back then.  Blogging – at least from classroom teachers and school administrators working in the trenches – has largely died off (I clearly just don’t know when to quit).  Real-time Twitter discussions that used to bring me fresh ideas and perspectives seem to me to have mostly devolved into individual or corporate self-promotion and banal, self-congratulatory chats rehashing the same topics and fluff phrases (a notable and most appreciated exception is #educolor).

I still find value in the network, I just use it differently now than I did a decade ago.  That’s as it should be, I think.  As nostalgic as I get for the “good old days”, I think it would be worse if I was doing the exact same things with social media a decade down the road.  That might be comforting and familiar, but it’s also stale.

Much of my Twitter activity now focuses on promoting happenings in my district (more broadcasting than interacting), and eyeballing my mentions, it seems that most of the interpersonal interaction I have on Twitter is between and among people I work with – sharing resources I believe will have a direct impact on their instruction and amplifying, retweeting, and otherwise promoting the great work of our staff.

Of course, people in my extended network still tweet interesting articles and resources from the web, and I love it when people tweet passages from books they’re reading.  Even an interesting title or book cover is enough to send me looking for more information; after all, I want to read what smarter people and better educators than me are reading.  It’s how I learn and grow, and the potential and promise of being more than what I currently am is what sucked me through this particular looking glass all those years ago in the first place.  Despite my misgivings and grievances, the benefits ultimately outweigh the drawbacks for me, and ten years and a quarter of my life on, I still wouldn’t give up those learning opportunities for anything.

#SAVMP 2016-2017

Moving ever onward out of my comfort zone in the name of professional growth, I signed up to participate in SAVMP for the 2016-2017 school year. SAVMP is the School Administrator Virtual Mentoring Program, and I volunteered to serve as a mentor to aspiring and novice administrators.

I know I’m only just beginning my third year, but in my experience, being in a position such as mentor or student teacher supervisor has helped me to clarify and codify my own thinking on any number of topics, situations, or challenges.  I’ve spent the last two years learning by the side of some excellent mentors in my own district, and while I’ve also tried to pay it forward to my admin colleagues who joined the district after me, I’d like to think I also have something to offer a fledgling administrator elsewhere in the Twittersphere.

Back in the heady days of 2007-2009, edu-Twitter seemed to me to be more about connecting with and learning from one another (it’s felt more like a self-promotion engine/mutual admiration society to me for the last few years, but that’s another post for another day).  The teachers we interviewed for The End of Isolation called out the networking and professional collaboration aspect of Twitter specifically as a primary benefit of the service.  Maybe it’s nostalgia, maybe it’s something else, but when I heard about the call for mentors, I thought this would be some small positive step I could take to help someone out as I’ve been helped as I transitioned to this new professional role.

An additional benefit (for me) is that apparently there will be blogging prompts.  I look forward to those, as I’ve been lacking for structure and focus for blogging of late.  I anticipate this will be a mutually beneficial project for both my mentee and me.

If you’re interested in seeing what this is all about, check out the hashtag #SAVMP on Twitter.

Deven Black

At the time of writing, I’m supposed to be researching school reform initiatives for a grad class assignment.  Instead, I’ve spent the last hour or two refreshing my Facebook and Twitter feeds, watching educators from around the country mourn the loss of Deven Black.

I came to know Deven, as I have so many other wonderful educators in my career, through our shared activity on Twitter.  When we first “met”, Deven was a special education teacher in NYC, and he and I had many conversations about education (special and otherwise); we would later co-moderate a weekly chat on Twitter geared toward special education issues, which we did fairly regularly for the better part of a year.  He struck me as an interesting and deeply thoughtful guy for many reasons, not the least of which was the route he took into teaching.  From his blog’s “About” page:

After a stellar career as a middle school student I dropped out of two different high schools and a college, all before I was 17. That started what has been a long-lasting and continually evolving interest in schooling.

I started teaching at age 50, after being a newspaper reporter, radio newsman and talk-show host, voice-over artist, political campaign operative, bartender, restaurant manager, advertising copywriter, and public relations person. Of these careers, teaching is the most difficult, lowest paying and most rewarding. It took a long time to figure out, but being a teacher is what I want to be when I grow up. Like that is ever going to happen.

His career path in education later took him into the role of a school librarian, and I remember the zeal with which he approached his new position at the time.  He was written up in the School Library Journal in 2013, and won the first Bammy award for school librarians later that year.

While the specifics of our many conversations have long since faded from my memory, what stays with me from Deven – and what continues to inform my own work – is how much kindness, humanity, and thoughtfulness matter in teaching.  In the day-to-day work, it’s easy to get frustrated by and hung up on things that are, in the greater sense, ultimately pretty trivial.  Sometimes we – children and adults alike – put other things ahead of kindness: bureaucracy, pedantic rules, paperwork, outdated notions of authority, whatever.  In the long run, though, none of it is as important as showing kids you care.

His perspective, to me, was that of the underdog.  That may not be exactly the right word, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that he often pushed back against popular notions or opinions; sort of a “But did you ever consider…?” in defense of whatever people were tut-tutting about in the “these kids today” vein.  I don’t know if that was influenced by his own experience with formal education (as noted above), but it seems possible.  Listening to him was so valuable to me in part because that was a very different perspective than my own, as someone who was always very compliant and good at “doing school” as a kid.  He helped me get more in touch with my own empathy and humanity, which was particularly helpful in my position as a school psychologist.

Even in casual conversation, Deven challenged my thinking in such a way that even after we had fallen out of touch, I would (and still do) ask myself from time to time, “What would Deven have to say about this?”  He is one of a few educators whose influence – unbeknownst to them – acts as my own internal Jiminy Cricket, constantly checking my assumptions and gut reactions and forcing me to reexamine stances, situations, conflicts, and resolutions from multiple perspectives.  It’s a fairly short list of people who actively influence my thinking on a regular basis like that, but Deven was most certainly on it.

The circumstances surrounding Deven’s death are, to be frank, shocking. Maybe delving into that is appropriate for a piece on how it might and should have been prevented, but there are far better ways to memorialize the man, which is why I haven’t linked to any news articles here.  There are better things you can read.

Go read Deven’s blog.  There’s nearly four years worth of his collected writings on education archived there.

Go read his Twitter feed.  It seems to have been hijacked by spam most recently, but scroll down to the tweets dated early 2014 or earlier to see the kinds of resources he shared and hard questions he posed.

Go read his interview with the School Library Journal and find out why they called him “Middle School Maverick.”

Go read ALA’s writeup on his Bammy award win.  Regardless of what you or I think of these awards, he was recognized by his peers as one of the best.  That has to mean something.

Go read his interview with Wide Awake Minds, wherein he discusses the value of failure, curiosity, and school (h/t Ira Socol for the link).

Go watch his 2012 talk at #140Edu, “How to make dropping out of school work for you” (h/t Kristin Hokanson for the link)

I only knew the man for 7 or 8 years.  I certainly didn’t know him as well as others did, and I only actually met him face-to-face once, but through his writing and our conversations, he has had a tremendous influence on me.  I will miss him.

Update, 29 Jan 16 6:00pm

As expected, the tributes to Deven from the many people he impacted are starting to roll in.  I’ll add them here as I come across them: