Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

The “Shift to Networks”

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Just a couple of quotes that found me this morning, some pattern recognition in my sleepy brain.

Joi Ito in the New York Times:

I don’t think education is about centralized instruction anymore; rather, it is the process establishing oneself as a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.

And George Siemens at his blog:

Planned information structures like textbooks and courses simply can’t adapt quickly enough to incorporate network-speed information development. Instead of being the hub of the learning experiences, books, courses, and classrooms become something more like a node in part of a much broader (often global) network. The shift to networks is transformative in how a society organizes itself.

Two pretty smart guys echoing each other and making me think more deeply about what needs to happen to make this a reality in our classrooms. How do we help our students establish themselves as a “node” in a broad, global network of creativity and learning? Shouldn’t that be one of the fundamental questions that drives our work in schools right now?

The answers start, as always, with our own willingness and ability to go there. But they also start with transparently asking the big questions in our schools and communities. In light of the changes that the Web is bringing to our learning lives:

  • What do we mean by learning?
  • What does it mean to be educated?
  • What is our value in a world filled with content and teachers?
  • How do we best help students become patient, self-sufficient, sensitive, intelligent learners?

And finally this from George a couple of weeks ago:

When the education system is synchronized with the interests and passions of learners, the process is invigorating and tremendously motivating. However, when learners and educators have to fight the existing education system in order to learn and teach, it’s time for dramatic change.

Too many of us are fighting the system to learn and teach. We’re out of synch. If we’re not having these conversations in our communities, we really need to be.

“The Network is Literal Survival”

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Some interesting thoughts on networks by Deborah Mills-Scofield:

For me, the network is literal survival. My family, throughout history, escaped to places where we had family or friends who would support, hide, and in the case of America letting my mom and grandparents enter, sponsor us. No sponsor, no entry; no entry, Auschwitz. Without the network, the odds of survival were slim to none. Fortunately, for most of us this is not the case. But don’t let that negate the importance of the network for your survival.

Without the network, you don’t get new ideas into your organization, you don’t see trends and issues that affect you and your customers, you don’t grow and develop your people with new challenges and opportunities, you aren’t attractive for young talent, you don’t learn about new technologies or business models, you don’t create new markets and you risk deluding yourself with your own ideas. You don’t increase your own value and advance your own career. Without the network you stagnate, you become stale. With the network you grow, provide meaningful and valuable solutions to your customers and not just survive, but thrive.

Much of this rings true for our learning networks as well, assuming, of course, we’ve done good job of including a diverse set of voices in the mix. 

Personal Learning Networks (An Excerpt)

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(Cross posted at the ASCD Whole Child Blog, here is a snip from my new book, co-authored with Rob Manabelli, which comes out in May.)

Seventh/eighth grade teacher Clarence Fisher has an interesting way of describing his classroom up in Snow Lake, Manitoba. As he tells it, it has “thin walls,” meaning that despite being eight hours north of the nearest metropolitan airport, his students are getting out into the world on a regular basis, using the Web to connect and collaborate with students in far flung places from around the globe. The name of Clarence’s blog, “Remote Access,” sums up nicely the opportunities that his students have in their networked classroom.

“Learning is only as powerful as the network it occurs in,” Clarence says. “No doubt, there is still value in the learning that occurs between teachers and students in classrooms. But the power of that learning is more solid and more relevant at the end of the day if the networks and the connections are larger.”

Without question, Clarence imbues the notion of the “connected learner.” Aside from reflecting on his life and his practice on his blog, he uses Twitter to grow his network, uses Delicious to capture and share bookmarks, and makes other tools like Skype and YouTube a regular part of his learning life. In other words, he’s deeply rooted in the learning networks he advocates for his students.

“It’s changed everything for me as a learner,” he says. “I teach in a small school of 145 kids, so I don’t know what it’s like to have a lot of colleagues. I can’t imagine closing my door and having to generate all of these ideas on my own.”

So Clarence helps his students create these networked interactions at every turn. A few years ago, his students collaborated with a classroom in Los Angeles to study S.E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders, using Skype for live conversations and blogs to capture their reflections on both the story and the interactions. More recently, his students studied The Book Thief by Markus Zusak with a class of Ontario students, listening online as their teachers read the book aloud while conducting a chat in the background filled with questions, reflections, and predictions as to what would happen next. Over the years, his students have worked with kids in Australia, Brazil, Argentina, and China, just to name a few.

But here’s the thing. While Clarence may be the conductor of these connections at the outset, most of the networking quickly starts coming from his students. As he was beginning to explore the idea of the “thin walled” classroom back in 2006, he wrote on his blog:

The connections have had very little to do with me. I’ve provided access, direction, and time, but little else. I have not had to make elaborate plans with teachers, nor have I had to coordinate efforts, parceling out contacts and juggling numbers. It is all about the kids. The kids have made contacts. They have begun to find voices that are meaningful to them, and voices they are interested in hearing more from. They are becoming connectors and mavens, drawing together strings of a community. They are beginning to expect to work in this way. They want to know what the people in their network are saying, to hear about their lives and their learning. They want feedback on their own learning, and they want to know they are surrounded by a community who hears them. They make no distinction about class, about race, about proficiency in English, or about geography. They are only interested in the conversation and what it means to them.

That’s a very different picture from what happens in most traditional classrooms, but it captures the essence of what student (and teacher) learning can look like in schools these days. “Thin walls” expand the classroom, and in the process deepen our understanding and practice of all of those “21st Century Skills” that we examined earlier, the critical thinking, the problem solving skills, and the rest. And as students begin to experience the powerful pull of connection to other students and teachers outside of their physical spaces, they also begin to see the world writ large as a part of their daily learning lives. Just as Clarence says that these networks “changed everything for me as a learner” they also change just about everything about our interactions with the kids we teach, the way we think about classrooms, and the way we see the world. Those are big statements, but these shifts are being played out every day in profound ways. And more and more they reflect the real world of learning that our students will graduate into, whether we help them get there or not.

No doubt, all of this has huge implications for us as educators. In fact, even those of us living at the heart of these changes feel some discomfort trying to think through all the ways that the Web challenges the traditional structures of schools and classrooms and learning. But here’s the thing: given these opportunities for connection that the Web now brings us, schools will have to start leveraging the power of these networks. And here are the two game-changing conditions that make that statement hard to deny: right now, if we have access, we now have two billion potential teachers and, soon, the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips.

That, in no uncertain terms, is different.

Most schools were built upon the idea that knowledge and teachers are scarce. When you have limited access to information and you want to deliver what you do have to every citizen in an age with little communication technology, you build what schools are today: age-grouped, discipline-separated classrooms run by an expert adult who can manage the successful completion of the curriculum by a hundred or so students at a time. We mete out that knowledge in discrete parts, carefully monitoring students progress through one-size-fits all assessments, deeming them “educated” when they have proven their mastery at, more often than not, getting the right answer and, to a lesser degree, displaying certain skills that show a “literacy” in reading and writing. Most of us know these systems intimately, and for 120 years or so, they’ve pretty much delivered what we’ve asked them to.

But, what happens when knowledge and teachers aren’t scarce? What happens when it becomes exceedingly easy to people and content around the things you want to learn when you want to learn them? What happens when in the next decade or so, almost everyone gains access to these profoundly different learning spaces, filled with teachers and content outside the walls through the devices they carry in their pockets? What happens when we don’t need schools to manage the delivery of content any more, when we can get it on our own, anytime we need it, from anywhere we’re connected, from anyone who might be connected with us?

In a word, things change.

For each of us as learners in the world at large, the fundamental change is that we can be much more in control of the learning we do. It’s not about the next unit in the curriculum as much as it is what we need to know when we need to know it. And it’s not so much even what we carry around in our heads, all of that “just in case” knowledge that schools are so good at making sure students get these days. As Jay Cross, the author of Informal Learning, suggests, in a connected world, it’s more about how much knowledge you can access. “‘What can you do?’ has been replaced with, ‘What can you and your network connections do?’ Knowledge itself is moving from the individual to the individual and his contacts.” If we have access to our networks, we’re a lot smarter than we used to be. In fact, “connection with others in a network is of prime importance in having access to a wide repository of knowledge,” according to Vance Stevens of the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi. In other words, if we want to make the most of our brains these days, we need to connect online.

What hasn’t changed is this: learning, online or off, is still social, and that’s good news for all of us. If you’re seeing a vision of students sitting in front of computers working through self-paced curricula and interacting with a teacher only on occasion, you’re way, way off. That’s not effective online learning. What is possible, however, is that because of the connections we can now make on the web, there is as much potential (if not more) for meaningful learning to occur in the interactions between people online than in their face to face places. Why? Primarily because online, we can connect to others who share our passions to learn in extended, deeper ways that in many ways can’t occur offline. That’s not to say that face-to-face learning isn’t important or valuable. It is. But so is the learning we can now do on the Web. And it’s the melding of the two that will shape our schools in the 21st century.

Excerpted with permission from R. Mancabelli & W. Richardson (in press), Personal Learning Networks, Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.

Pulling Networks Together

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I’ve been slowly but surely working my way through John Seely Brown’s (and others) new book Pull, and I’m liking it quite a bit. It sets up a pretty convincing picture of what it means to be living in a world where we make our way through the many connections that are now possible in the social and learning networks we have access to online. What has been striking to me is the way that Brown and his co-authors have been hammering home the continued importance of face to face connections and the value of serendipity in making those connections. They write at length about the value in attending conferences on topics that we have passion for, and making ourselves as available as possible to the conversations outside of the meeting rooms. I know that we’ve talked about that a great deal as well, how many of us go to conferences these days for the spontaneous conversations that can erupt when you get into a place that’s full of people who love what you love, and that the “presentations” pale in comparison (though they do have their purpose.)

Anyway, I thought I’d share one idea that the authors put forth in terms of how to think about the personal learning networks that we can create in both our face to face and virtual worlds. Basically, it’s a set of five questions that are intended to get readers thinking deeply about their passions and about the connections they form around them. I’m going to throw just a sentence or two of personal reaction to each one in italics, but I’m wondering how others might approach these as a way of starting to think more globally about networks.

1. Can you identify the fifty smartest or most accomplished people who share your passions or interests, regardless of where they reside? I think I can probably come pretty close, though I haven’t created a list. I’ve been lucky enough to have been swimming in these waters for long enough (nine years!) to have a pretty good idea of who is there, at least in the virtual space. And since my passion has to do with the virtual, there probably aren’t too many who linger just in physical space. (Hopefully that made some sense.)

2. How many of these people are currently in your professional / personal networks? Again, this is just a guess, but I’d hope that the majority of them are. I can rattle off at least half a dozen, however, who aren’t, primarily because of my hesitancy to reach out to them (for a variety of reasons). This part can be a struggle at times.

3. How many of these people have you been able to engage actively in an initiative related to your shared passions or interests? Obviously, the percentage gets smaller and smaller here. This reminds me of the the “collective action” piece that Clay Shirky talks about, or at the very least, creating something together. When I think about how many people I have actually “actively engaged” I wonder why it’s not more.

4. To how many of these people would you feel comfortable reaching out and mobilizing in a new initiative related to your shared passions and interests? I’d say most, but not all. That’s a constant point of reflection for me…What stops me?

5. For these fifty people, how effectively are you using social media to increase your mutual awareness of each other’s activities? Obviously, to some extent, that depends on the other person’s “findability.” I’m pretty confident that if someone was looking for me via online social tools, they’d find me. Not sure if that’s always that case.

Some interesting questions to ponder when thinking about our intentional construction of these networks and communities.

Don't, Don't, Don't vs. Do, Do, Do

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Recently, I presented at a school on an opening day for teachers where the first thing that greeted everyone on the table in the lobby was an 8-page Acceptable Use Policy which staff members were picking up as they filed into the school. I picked one up too, and when I had a moment I started paging through it, looking at all the ways in which students (and teachers) could get themselves in trouble on the school network. The middle three pages were filled with an A-Y double spaced list (guess they were saving room for one more rule next year) which spelled out the many transgressions that were not going to be tolerated, things like people shouldn’t be harassing one another, going around the filter, accessing shopping sites, accessing any sites that were “social in nature” and, the big one, downloading software to school computers for personal use. And much, much more.

Frankly, I couldn’t help thinking that if I was a student in this district, I think I would actually beg NOT to get a computer. Between the filters and the restrictions, I had a hard time imagining what I would be able to use them for in ways that would actually stimulate my learning. I’d rather take my chances with my phone and my computer at home. (About 90% of students in this district had access from home.)

But the other part that struck me was what this policy said about the curriculum in that district. I wondered aloud to some administrators and teachers later if the stiff policies spoke volumes about what they weren’t teaching in their classrooms K-12 as their students went through the system. I mean wouldn’t it seem that if kids were taught throughout the curriculum about the ethical and appropriate use of computers and the Internet that much more of that policy could be spent going over what students could actually do with the computer rather than the “don’t dos” that were listed? At that point, we’d probably have to change the name to an “Admirable Use Policy” or something, but imagine if students walked in on the first day of class, picked up that policy and read things like:

“Do use our network to connect to other students and adults who share your passions with whom you can learn.”

“Do use our network to help your teachers find experts and other teachers from around the world.”

“Do use our network to publish your best work in text and multimedia for a global audience.”

“Do use our network to explore your own creativity and passions, to ask questions and seek answers from other teachers online.”

“Do use our network to download resources that you can use to remix and republish your own learning online.”

“Do use our network to collaborate with others to change the world in meaningful, positive ways.”

Etc. (Add your own below.)

Now, obviously, that would mean that the curriculum would be preparing students to do that all along, But I’m thinking that if I was a student and I read those “dos”  on the first day of school, I’d be itching to get to class.

(Photo by Checlap.)

Writing to Connect

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So a number of different threads are congealing in my tired brain regarding writing and blogging and why we do all of this stuff. The post that finally led me to try to get this down was Bud’s Brain Dump on NCTE where he quotes council president Kathleen Blake Yancey as saying this:

If you are writing for the screen, you are writing for the network.

Oh. Yeah. How nice that is to hear, isn’t it? Not “global audience,” but “network”. And as Bud unpacks his conference experience, you get the sense that this whole blogging thing may finally, finally, finally be tipping over the edge in terms not just of a tool to publish but of a tool to connect.

And that is a crucial distinction, I think. Yes, we write to communicate. But now that we are writing in hypertext, in social spaces, in “networked publics,” there’s a whole ‘nother side of it. For as much as I am writing this right now to articulate my thoughts clearly and cogently to anyone who chooses to read it, what I am also attempting to do is connect these ideas to others’ ideas, both in support and in opposition, around this topic. Without rehashing all of those posts about Donald Murray and Jay David Bolter, I’m trying to engage you in some way other than just a nod of the head or a sigh of exasperation. I’m trying to connect you to other ideas, other minds. I want a conversation, and that changes the way I write. And it changes the way we think about teaching writing. This is not simply about publishing, about taking what we did on paper and throwing it up on a blog and patting ourselves on the back.

This after-the-publishing part is difficult because we are forced to attempt to do it in filtered, restricted, contrived spaces for learning, spaces that are not conducive to this type of writing or learning. Barbara Ganley (who was featured last week in the Times as a “slow blogger”) is consdering this as well.

As a college teacher, I thought I was all about collaborative learning, about students taking responsibility for their learning and their lives–together–but how can you do that within an artificial environment? Within a closed environment?…Teaching and collaborating and learning and working inside an academic institution have absolutely nothing to do with how to do those things out in the world.

And I continue to wonder if the two are even possible to combine. Those of us who write to connect and who live our learning lives in these spaces feel the dissonance all the time. We go where we want, identify our own teachers, find what we need, share as much as we can, engage in dialogue, direct our own learning as it meets our needs and desires. That does not feel like what’s happening to my own children or most others in the “system.”

Barbara’s post is worth reading not just for her own reflections but for the connections she creates in the writing process. She took me to Scott Leslie, whose post “planning to share versus just sharing” is as one of the commentors called it, “another doozy.” Scott writes about how frustrating this dissonance is, how difficult institutions make it from a tradition and culture standpoint to make this kind of learning happen.

In all of this lies the tension of the world “out there,” outside the walls, this great unknown, or more likely, this great potential wrench in ointment to what we’ve been so darn good at doing for all of these years. I can’t tell you how many “why me?” looks I get from people who listen politely to my presentations but then probably want to go home and throw up. And I think it’s because they’re not writing for the network. They’re not connecting, seeing the value, feeling the network love. Scott nails it:

Now I contrast that with the learning networks which I inhabit, and in which every single day I share my learning and have knowledge and learning shared back with me. I know it works. I literally don’t think I could do my job any longer without it – the pace of change is too rapid, the number of developments I need to follow and master too great, and without my network I would drown. But I am not drowning, indeed I feel regularly that I am enjoying surfing these waves and glance over to see other surfers right there beside me, silly grins on all of our faces. So it feels to me like it’s working, like we ARE sharing, and thriving because of it.

Oh. Yeah.

(Photo “A fractal night on my street” by kevindooley.)

Assessing Network Building

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So lately I’ve been talking and thinking more and more about this idea of a “performance standard” that reads something like “Students create, grow and navigate online personal learning networks in safe, effective and ethical ways” and what that would mean in a NETS type framework. For instance, students:

  • locate, identify and evaluate potential mentors or teachers online
  • communicate with co-learners clearly and effectively in a variety of modes
  • share work online using a variety of media in appropriate and creative ways
  • track, read, evaluate, organize, utilize and share relevant information effectively

And so on. It starts some interesting conversations among those who haven’t yet considered or been much exposed to the idea of online learning networks, and often, those conversations lead to “how do we assess that?” The only obvious answer is that it probably isn’t happening on a test.

I constantly struggle with my own work in this. The last few weeks, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the nodes in my network, trying to think critically about diversity, reexamining the tools I use to access it, looking at the ways I interact and what I contribute. For all sorts of time-related reasons, I’m not happy with the scope of my work right now either; it feels too text heavy, too comfortable. And, for many of the same reasons and even though I have made some changes of late, my network seems static. I need to come up with some strategies for freshening things up around here.

I know assessing networks takes understanding networks, and that’s why I’m still very much into the “think about this in your own practice first” mode. But at some point, it would be interesting, and hopefully necessary, to think about ways in which we’d assess our students in this undertaking.

Michael Wesch's Presentation to Library of Congress

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So this is definitely worth an hour of your time if you haven’t already invested it. (I seem to be about four days late to stuff any more…go figure.) Michael Wesch of Kansas State and the “Machine is Us” fame gave an overview of the cultural significance of You Tube to the LOC, and suffice to say, it’s incredibly interesting stuff.

The really bizarre part for me, at least, is that two of the viral videos that he discusses in the presentation just popped up on my radar thanks to my own kids. Tess, who is turning 11 today, pulled up the “Charlie Bit Me” video on my iPhone the other day and Tucker cranked up the Sponge Bob version of “Crank Dat” just yesterday and started dancing around the house. I felt SO out of it. (“You haven’t seen this, Dad?”) For all that I live and breathe this stuff, I’m such a loser…

Anyway, the best part about this presentation is that it doesn’t try to make any real bold statement other than this is what the YouTube world (and much of the rest of the online world) is like these days: highly networked, highly individualized in terms of content distribution and organization, and incredibly personal. It captures to a large degree the “networked individualism” that Barry Weller talks about and that Wesch refs in the video. (I’ve got some reading to do on that score as well…)

The one concept that really struck me was the idea of “the collapse of context.” I think one of the most difficult things for those who are not familiar with these technologies (and even for some that are) is how different the contexts can be for the content we create. We really don’t know when a video or a blog post or whatever else we create is going to be “read” or how it’s going to be shared or what the response cues might be. And it got me thinking even more about George Siemens’ idea of context and how important it is to be able to identify the immediate circumstances for learning before implementing a tool or a particular pedagogy. My brain is humming…

At any rate, I’d add this to any list of “must views” for this year…

Controlled Connectedness

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Been taking a bit of break in these parts of late, still reading and watching a lot, writing a fair share of offline stuff, and plowing through a lot of trashy beach novels which, I’ve decided, are my antidote to over connectedness. (It’s also a great way to spend 4.5 hours on the tarmac while on your way to missing a keynote in Colorado…) Playing with some tools and my jail broken then unjail broken iPhone and all the new apps. Kind of in grazing mode. It’s troubling (?) though that at moments I still feel what I can only describe as some weird form of network separation anxiety from time to time, like I must be missing something important or not learning everything I need to learn. It passes more quickly the longer I stay away, it seems. Now, for instance, when I look at the really compelling video stuff that Dan Meyer is cranking out my first response isn’t “I need to find the time to learn that” as much as it is “thank god he’s investing the time and sharing out his reflections,” then reading and reflecting on others reflections, letting it all just sit.

Went for a couple of days to Virginia Beach to visit with Sheryl and her family and we spent a lot of time in a boat on the bay fishing and reading and chatting. In talking with her son Noah about how connected we all seem to be (text messages in between casts, etc.) one of us hit on the phrase above, and it bounced around in my brain for a bit. It seemed to fit the place I’m in right now, attempting, with pretty good success, actually, to control my connectedness, and to let the conversations happen elsewhere, jumping in when I feel compelled. Connecting, (ironically) to Nancy White’s idea of slow communities (like slow food) and wondering some more about the process of network participation and how much pull is too much pull, etc.

And that’s it…just checking in…just wanted to capture that. You have a great day now…

The "Conversation" About "Conversations"

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Lots of interesting and angst-ridden writing flowing around of late about the “conversations” happening in the edublogosphere, set off in some measure by a recent post by Doug Belshaw.

The edublogosphere has changed from being about ‘the conversation’ to being part of ‘the network’. It all smacks a little too much of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ and, to be honest, viral marketing of Web 2.0 apps.

The comments thread holds flashes of all sorts of emotions: frustration, resolve, anger, intimidation. It’s one of the more compelling “conversations” that I’ve read recently and worth taking the time to sift through. John Larkin captures much of it, but centrally, he says “The conversations are limited to a few but cloned by many.”

Graham Wegner weighs in as well, taking a more expansive tact:

But there’s a lot of conversation out there – one can choose to connect to the visionaries and push for meaningful change or extend one’s global staffroom to gain support, inspiration and resources in equal measure. I tend to dabble in all camps on this blog anyway – no issue’s too big for me to have an uninformed go at and I want to improve what I take into the classroom tomorrow as well.

And then there was Doug Noon, compelled in some part by the “conversation” above to dive into Twitter after showing some resolve not to.

The interesting thing, and the thing that moved me to set up the Twitter account, was that with the Diigo stampede, Graham Wegner’s post about edublogging and the bigger conversation, this post about filtering Twitter so that it works more like Del.icio.us, and Miguel’s expansive vision for using Diigo to build a multipurpose networking application, I began to give some more serious thought to what seems to be a changing blogscape.

And, finally, there was Chris Craft in a short little dig in the comments on my “Tweaking Twitter” post where after reading that I was trying to filter out the links from my Twitter feed he asked simply “So what you’re saying is it’s about the links, not the conversation?”

I’ve always maintained, and still do, that the bulk of my learning these days comes in the conversation, that the publishing piece, the putting myself out there in a blog post (or video, or stream or whatever) is only the first step and, in reality, is not where I learn the most. I learn when my thoughts get pushed, when I read what others have written about other ideas on their own blogs, when I engage in the conversations about those ideas. And these “conversations” are different; they are not synchronous (though they are getting moreso), they are not linear, and as just the short sampling of link above conveys, there is a lot of complexity in the distributed nature of how we “talk” in this realm. In fact I think that might be the biggest frustration that newcomers to these tools experience. It’s random, seemingly aimless, and requires a whole bunch of other skills to navigate effectively.

And now, the conversations are morphing further. There are more voices. While it’s humbling to get 160 comments on a blog post, is it better? Now I have 300 Tweets a day to make sense of, and talk about raising the frustration level. What do you do when a Tweet comes by that say “@whoever45 I am so, so sorry to hear that! What can we do?” Or “@whoever 36 Great link! Thanks!” No context. No thread to speak of. The “conversation” has to be remanufactured, or in many cases, simply let go. And Twitter just feels like the bridge between true asynchronous dialogue and the emerging, constant backchannel that crops up on streams and at Chatzy during presentations, pushing the “conversation” further. To be honest, I think I’m most off put by the backchannel not because it can be a distraction to whatever it is we’re backchannelling about but because it totally strips the reflective, thought mulling-over part from the “conversation” process.

Guess I’m getting a little angsty myself.

Doug links to a Wired post by Bruce Sterling who quotes Stowe Boyd, and his assessment doesn’t make me feel any better.

Basically, conversation is moving from a very static and slow form of conversation — the comments thread on blog posts — to a more dynamic and fast form of conversation: into the flow in Twitter, Friendfeed, and others. I think this directionality may be like a law of the universe: conversation moves to where is is most social…The way I am getting tugged to blog posts is increasingly as a mention within a conversational bite in Twitter or Friendfeed. I then click out of the flow to see the larger post, and offer my view in the flow — not on the blog — and then I return to the flow, where I will be spending most of my time. This makes sense: I want to talk about the blog post with the person who brought it to my attention, more so that with some group of strangers at the blog, or even the author, who I may not know at all. I also don’t think we can expect the fragmentation of the social experience to slow down: it will get a lot worse before it gets better.

Funny thing is, I like the stranger’s voice. Doesn’t that sound like it just perpetuates the echo chamber we all seem to be trying to get away from?

At the end of the day, I’m just flailing around in here like the next person trying to see how if all makes sense for myself and for my own children. The conversations are shifting, both in form and content. In the process, it gets more challenging to help others make some sense of it for themselves. But I wonder as we continue to spend more of our online conversation time in the moment if we aren’t losing much of the value that the potential of conversation with these tools can bring.

To me, it’s about both the conversation and the network. I depend on the network connections I have to filter and find and share and provoke, but without the deeper conversations among the nodes in that network, it’s feeling like the connections lose value.

(Photo “Flowing Systems” by  exper)