The #Quartweet Project

Last time, I wrote at great length about the behind-the-scenes work that goes into bringing a multi-building project to fruition. Now that we’re officially after the fact, I can speak a bit to what exactly that project was.

Late last school year, Marc Uys, Executive Director of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra, reached out to one of the elementary music teachers in our district, Dan Beal, to gauge his interest in participating in a project with the German group Signum Quartet. The SQ was experimenting with something they were calling “quartweets” – short arrangements for string quartet of no more than 140 notes (to parallel a tweet’s 140-character limit) – and they were soliciting quartweet submissions from their fans via social media. PSO and SQ asked Dan if they could partner with our district to workshop and perform quartweets written by students. SQ would work with violist/educator Jessica Meyer to flesh out the students’ original compositions, which would be recorded by the quartet and published via social media, and also performed twice: once at a concert for district students, and again at a free evening concert for our community.

Dan brought the idea to me and explained the parameters: the Signum Quartet would only be here in the States for a limited period of time at the end of September, so if we were going to do it, there was no room for discussion about the time frame. Keep in mind it was after Memorial Day when we first started discussing this, so between then and the end of the school year (about three weeks hence – you know, when nothing else is happening) we had to:

identify participants (after some discussion, we decided to focus on rising third graders in all four elementary schools)
roll this out to the other music teachers and enlist their help in identifying potential participants
contact participant parents/guardians and secure all necessary permissions for publishing their work online
help prep the students to work independently on their compositions over the summer

After school let out, all we could do was wait until September and hope the students didn’t lose interest in the project over the summer.

Fast forward to September…

Not only did the students not lose interest, they all completed their works and submitted them to their teachers. On September 29, Jessica Meyer and the Signum Quartet conducted two workshops with our seven student composers to flesh out their pieces and bring them to life.

It was such a pleasure to watch Ms. Meyer work with our students. While she is clearly a very accomplished musician, she is also a teacher who has a knack for helping students determine how their composition tells a story. That, combined with SQ’s willingness to play a piece a million different ways until the composer found the right one, made for an incredible learning experience.

The following day, we bussed all 300+ third graders from four buildings to our middle school, where they listened to the world premieres of seven local, home-grown quartweets by our Lawrence Township composers, as well as other quartweet-ish short pieces by lesser-known musicians (some hacks called Bach and Beethoven). The culminating experience was the free community concert, held the evening of October 1 at our high school, at which the SQ once again played all seven of the student quartweets as well as other, similarly short classical pieces. The students even got to sit onstage with the SQ and speak a bit to the inspiration behind their pieces.

The experience is now over, but I have to believe that the memories will truly last a lifetime for the young people involved in this project. I’m very proud of the student composers and grateful to the long list of people involved in bringing this idea to fruition.

You can read local news coverage of the event here (with commentary from Dan Beal and Marc Uys), read about Signum Quartet’s Quartweet project here (with directions for writing and sharing your own!), and don’t forget to check out the hashtag #quartweet on Twitter to hear examples of 140-note pieces from composers young and old around the world!

Nodes in the Network

So a funny thing happened on the way to my inbox…

I received an email early last month through the “Contact” page on my website with the subject line, “Do you know a child named Kiera who would use a winter hat?”

This caught my attention because, as luck would have it, I do indeed have a daughter named Kiera, and who can’t use a winter hat in February?

Not sure what this was all about, I read on. I’m glad I did, because it turns out it was an email from Dr. Linda Quirke, a sociology professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada. Turns out a friend of Dr. Quirke’s made personalized wool beanies as party favors for a four-year-old’s birthday party, but misspelled one of the partygoer’s names as K-I-E-R-A, and therefore couldn’t use it. Hating to see a perfectly good hat go to waste, Dr. Quirke took to Twitter to search “daughter Kiera”, to see if anybody had a child who spelled her name that way.

She found a tweet to me from my Twitter friend Diane Cordell (presumably this recent retweet of me announcing Kiera’s birth five years ago?), went to my Twitter profile, where she found a link to my website, and then the “Contact” page, from whence she sent me her message.

Never one to turn down free hat offers from the Internet, I e-mailed Linda my address and sure enough, about a week later:

Nearly six years after becoming active on Twitter and Facebook, the ability of these services to create connections between people still amazes me. That we are so eminently searchable online these days (some of us more than others, granted) is something I am convinced we need to embed in our teaching and learning. Some schools approach it from the standpoint of “be careful what you say/do online”, but beyond that, think of the relationships – personal and professional – that can arise through social media.

In Deschooling Society, Ivan Illich proposes – among other things – that we raze the current educational system and learn through apprenticeship instead, identifying our areas of need, seeking out masters of their trade, and learning at their feet. The logistics underlying that idea are not as far-fetched as they may have once seemed. The network already exists; it’s here. Will we teach our students to use it to make connections with other smart people, regardless of geographic location, and learn from and share ideas with them? Will we teach students not only to take from these resources, but also to contribute their own learning to the mix so that others may learn from them? Or will we simply use it to keep up with what celebrities and athletes are eating for lunch?

I know it’s a stretch to go from this cute hat story to Ivan Illich, but I think the bigger point is that anyone who has a Facebook page or a Twitter account – whether they like it or not – is a node in a network, and it does students a disservice to not: a) make them aware of this, b) illustrate that for them, and c) help them realize how to harness and contribute to the power of that human network. That will go a long way toward creating the “21st century” and “lifelong” learners that we are so fond of referencing in the edu-jargon.

Johanna and Linda, thank you so much for reminding me of this, as well as for Kiera’s hat. She loves it, and I love how she got it.

I’m Damian Bariexca, and This Is How I Internet

I can’t pinpoint exactly why, but five years after joining Facebook, I’m starting to sour on the service. In my experience, it’s good for a few things like keeping up with people from my past or sharing jokes and kid pictures with friends and colleagues, but beyond that, it just feels like it’s kind of there in my life without any other specific value.

I’m not going to delete my Facebook account; even if I was, I’m not that dramatic that I’d do so with such fanfare. Much like my telephone or postal address, it provides me with one avenue of connecting with people. But in his Lifehacker article “Why I’ve Opted for a Piecemeal Social Network over Facebook or Google+”, Adam Pash pretty well addresses at least one of the reasons I’m not so big on Facebook any more: instead of focusing on one or two services and doing them well, it tries to be everything to everyone (e-mail replacement, photo sharing service, location check-in) and only does a so-so job of it.

Of course, the flipside to that coin is that one can choose to use many different services, all of which only serve one or two of Facebook’s many functions. As Pash notes in his article, the benefit to doing this is that if I become unhappy with any service (remember the Great Instagram TOS Debacle of 2012?), I can feel free to pull the plug entirely on that service without losing EVERYTHING.

In my grand tradition of ~~tech-related navel-gazing~~ self-reflection, I’ve put down a few thoughts about how I use what I use, and why I use it:

Top Tier Services

Twitter: My first social network (I was active there several months before joining Facebook), I use Twitter primarily for professional purposes: connecting with other educators and sharing resources and education-related articles (with occasional silliness!). To contrast my use of the two, I’d say I use Twitter more for professional connection, and Facebook more for personal.

My blog: This is my personal, public space where I can write and reflect. Unlike Facebook Notes, this space of mine is open to the world, and as I’ve said before, since I pay for the domain name and webhosting, I feel a greater sense of ownership over it than when I wrote on a free, hosted blog. Edit, 2/17/13: Just came across this piece by Doug Belshaw that frames the self-hosting argument in light of the recent announcement that Posterous is shutting down. Greater ownership, but also greater control.

Flickr: After a hiatus, I’ve come back to Flickr for sharing photos. The Pro accounts are somewhat pricey, but Flickr has a robust community of photographers, and I am more comfortable with the level of control I feel I have over how my photos are used, or if I allow them to be used at all (via Creative Commons licenses). I deleted my Instagram account amid the aforementioned TOS kerfluffle, and I’m still not entirely comfortable with Facebook’s approach to user photos; as a result I don’t tend to post a whole lot of personal pics on the service. In addition to Flickr (which is for public sharing), I also keep my family’s digital photo album on Picasa. It’s not for public consumption, but I can share privately with family members via a specific link so my parents, in-laws, etc., can see them as well.

Aside from Facebook, these are the services I use most often (and most dynamically) for social networking. Other services I use either much more infrequently or without the same social focus.

Second String Services

Foursquare: I sometimes push my location checkins to Facebook or Twitter if I feel they are share-worthy (most aren’t), but I use it mostly to update the map on my professional portfolio website.

Google+: I’ve tried so hard to get into G+, but I just can’t, at least not now. Maybe it’s social network overload, but I just can’t. I push my blog posts to my G+ account, when I remember.

LinkedIn: This one probably makes the most sense to maintain and keep current, which I do. Right now it’s pretty much just to have a presence there, but it may become more valuable to me in future endeavors.

Goodreads: I enjoy seeing what my friends are reading, and occasionally chat with them on this service. I use it mostly for my own record keeping about books I’ve read or want to read.

RunKeeper: Same rationale as Goodreads. Tracking my running stats is incredibly motivating for me; the social piece of this service is secondary.

Diigo: I use this to bookmark sites relevant to special education & school psychology. I auto-publish my Diigo saves to Twitter via IFTTT, but don’t actively “friend” people on Diigo itself.

Delicious: Same as Diigo, but I use Delicious to maintain an archive of interesting articles I share to Twitter. This service replaces the long-defunct “Shared Items” function in Google Reader.

Of course, much of what I do on these services gets pushed to Facebook anyway, but that’s primarily because that’s where most of “my people” are. As with any social network, the real value is in the people, not the tool, and right now, most of the people in my life are on Facebook, which keeps me tethered there to some extent. It’s why I didn’t leave Twitter for identi.ca back in 2008, and why I haven’t quit Facebook for Google+. Still, on the tool side, I’m finding less use for Facebook these days and more for these other services.

Considering Comments

One thing I love about the Internet is the potential for falling down several rabbit holes as you poke around in the hypertext – maybe not so great when you have a finite task to accomplish, but as a leisure activity it beats channel surfing for me any day of the week.

One such recent excursion led me to this post by Matt Gemmell, a Scottish iOS and Mac developer (not my usual reading fare). In his post “Comments Off”, Matt outlines his reasons for shutting off comments on his blog (in the interest of brevity, I’m just quoting the major points with my responses in between; click through to Matt’s post for his full explanations):

They’re for a tiny minority. Compared to page-views, only the smallest fraction of people will actually leave a comment on the article itself. Twitter mentions (for my particular readership/audience) are at least three times as common.

This has been my experience as well. Whenever I publish a post, I advertise it on Facebook, Twitter, and more recently, LinkedIn. While I occasionally get some comments on the blog, more discussion tends to take place on Facebook and Twitter. I guess that’s where most folks “live” these days, and it’s easier to comment under a link on the site you’re already on than to click through and comment on another site.

You should never read the bottom half of the internet. This doesn’t tend to apply quite so much to this blog, but generally speaking, comments on the web don’t contribute very much. […]

Comments encourage unconsidered responses. […] If your blog allows comments, you’re inviting people into your house – but sadly, some of them don’t conduct themselves appropriately.

Comments allow anonymity and separation of your words from your identity. […]

I grouped points 2-4 together because they’re all variations on a common theme. Love the first sentence above. Never really thought about it that way, but maybe there’s something to it. Most comment threads on the news sites I read end up devolving into “lol republicans” and “lol democrats” and drown out the discussion. As for anonymity, I think it can be a good thing – it allows for frank discourse without fear of retribution, but certainly we know the flipside of that particular coin.

Comments create a burden of moderation on the blog owner. […]

Not such a big problem for me and this little ol’ blog, but for more widely read blogs? I can see this. The Akismet WP plugin has done an excellent job of keeping the spam at bay with only a handful of false positives in the three years or so I’ve been using it.

Matt suggests three alternatives to commenting: writing a response on your own blog (as I’m doing now), discussing on Twitter (follow me there!), or sending the author an email. I’m OK with the first two – I’d even add Facebook as another venue for discussion, if you have such overlap in audience – but I can’t recall a single blog post I’ve read in the five years I’ve been reading them that inspired me to send an email to the author. I guess if you feel strongly enough…

Look, I’ll be honest: I don’t get a ton of comments on this blog, so it’s probably a bit presumptuous for me to even go here, but Matt’s post got me thinking about whether or not to shut off the works over here as well.

As a reader (and perhaps writer) of blogs, what do you think of this? Are comments superficial conversation, or do they allow for constructive feedback? Have Twitter and Facebook made blog comments obsolete? I haven’t shut off comments (yet), so please weigh in below!

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.

Apace of Change

by Damian Bariexca, Ed.D.

Archive for the ‘Twitter’ Category

The #Quartweet Project