So what did I glean in my almost month-long hiatus from my social online world? Not much that I didn’t already know. The world didn’t end. My family will always be more important than Twitter. I can learn without being online. There are bigger fish to fry. Etc. It gave me some time to rest and reflect and recharge, something I don’t often give myself enough time to do. And it gave me the opportunity to rethink some of my approach to the networks and communities I’m a part of online. Nothing earth shattering, and nothing I’m suggesting for anyone else either. But helpful to me, I hope, if I’m actually going to still be here on this blog and in these conversations as I hit the 10-year marker later this spring.
I thought a lot about Twitter, actually, and realized (again) that for me at least, it’s become as much of a bane as it has a boon. (This really isn’t news.) Much of the reason I don’t blog any longer, I think, is the Twitter effect. It’s easier just to Tweet out an interesting idea than to examine it more deeply here. I envy the many people who can do both, but I just don’t have the attention span or the time these days. So, I’m going to try to be much more structured about my Twitter time. I’m using Proxlet to sift out only Tweets with links. I’ve started using the scheduled Tweets feature in TweetDeck. I’ve cut down and really tried to diversify the hashtags I follow. I’m not going to check Twitter 20 or more times a day any longer, which was a habit that I was finding myself getting into late last year.
That all led me to consider even more deeply my time spent online in general. Robin Dunbar’s essay in the Times right after Christmas, “You’ve Got to Have (150) Friends” really stoked my thinking as well.
Put simply, our minds are not designed to allow us to have more than a very limited number of people in our social world. The emotional and psychological investments that a close relationship requires are considerable, and the emotional capital we have available is limited.
That’s not to say that I feel like I have more than a couple of handfulls of “close relationships” online…I don’t. But it is a reminder that even the more superficial interactions we have online are not just intellectual ones. Learning in these spaces requires some of that limited “emotional capital,” and frankly, I think I was getting to the point where I was expending too much of it at the box and not enough of it in my f2f life. I’ve been doing a great deal of offline writing of late, and I’ve found the “flow” that comes from that work to be blissful in a way that my online practice had lost. I still love the feel of getting lost in the links, don’t get me wrong. But at the end of the day, it’s really, really nice to have my hours of work reflected in a substantive piece of work, whether it’s text or anything else, instead of an assortment of Tweets, bookmarks and Evernotes. That’s not to say I’m giving up Tweeting or bookmarking or Evernoting. I’m just trying to make sure that all of that effort turns into something more useful…for me. To each his own.
This morning I found this amazing blog post by Dan Perez, “The Klout Myth and Living Above the Influence.” (Yes, I Tweeted it out.) In it, he makes a highly compelling case, to me at least, to take a hard look at how we spend our time online. It does a much better job than I in articulating the challenge. The message, in a nutshell, is “Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.” It’s definitely worth about 50 Tweets of your time.
I’ve pretty much stopped making resolutions, but I’m hoping that balance for me this year means more blogging, more reflecting, and more creating in general in the time I do give to these important albeit secondary pursuits. As always, we’ll see.
So what are your struggles this New Year as you reflect on your practice? Or am I the only one in reconfiguration mode?
Will,
Happy New Year!
I completely “get” what you’re saying, although I use the old-fashioned Twitter web page and choose not to invest any more energy into learning, scheduling, hashtagging my Twitter use. That seems like adding a level of complexity to an unworthy activity that is already a time sink.
I have found that the well-crafted wisecrack shared via Twitter can steer conversation in interesting ways.
However, in the main, I find that Twitter AND blogging makes me feel like I’m back in junior high school where popularity trumped everything else. Maybe that’s just me, but I find the experience addictive and repulsive simultaneously.
Twitter has not in any way changed my existing friendships or the ones I’ve made over the past couple of years in meatspace. I do have a few people I can confide in via the Twitter machine though. I know that I’m distracted by Twitter, but I’d just find some other way to waste time without it.
As for the issue of having 150 friends, I think that Web 2.0 technologies actually give us too little influence and too few intimate relationships. There are a small number of edubloggers who read the same stuff, tweet each other, friend each other on Facebook and now all write articles for the Huffington Post causing us to tweet and write on each others walls about the same stuff recursively. Our influence is way too small, too few of the people we follow respond to our tweets and that phenomena is tougher on my psyche than the risk of having too many relationships. I wish my cyber-relationships were more meaningful.
What is “new” about Twitter is the ability to be snarky with friends in real time over great distances. Watching a boxing match, trash talking about the stinkin’ Pittsburgh Steelers and commenting on political speeches or Jersey Shore is really cool.
When Alfie Kohn asked me why I use Twitter I replied with four reasons:
1) Shameless self-promotion
2) Starting fights
3) Getting quick answers to simple questions
4) Time wasting
I stand by these justifications!
Thanks, Gary. There’s no question that we each bring our own baggage to this space. But if that’s the case, there are no absolutes here. You feel repulsed. I feel energized. Others feel other things. Who’s right? Who knows? I agree that it’s easy to get caught up in the navel gazing of it all, but I continue to wonder how we use these tools with real purpose and effect, not whether we should we use them at all. We share information in new ways. That’s not a bad thing inherently. Should we keep pushing to use technology in more creative, constructivist ways? Absolutely.
Repulsed and energized, but also addicted.
Not sure even that feeling of addiction is particularly new. I’ve been checking my email constantly for decades.
I think many of us are conflicted about Twitter. The quick conversations and back-channeling are stimulating, but I see Twitter being most useful as an entry point to deeper reading and learning – a more diverse option to the RSS aggregator.
As always we run the risk of only skimming the surface in the Twitter context and it may detract us from deeper exploration. As Dan Perez says in the excellent blog post you cited, “The basis of one’s Klout score is correlated to clicks, comments and retweets, so it makes all the sense in the world that the more you tweet, the better the likelihood of a higher Klout score and the ‘perception’ of influence.” My retweets may be popular and that may be an indication that my followers value my judgement, but to what extent have I really shared my own ideas in any meaningful way?
I look forward to your renewed blogging vigour, Will. We all learn the most when we delve more deeply.
Glad to hear that you’re going to make an effort to do more blogging. Frankly, I’ve missed them.
In spite of having given Tweet two real tries and I find it to be a time drain. I like my information and communication to come with a more complete context. So my motto is, “I don’t Tweet.”
Like you, I spend too much time online…
Twitter…
I had one of these similar moments recently, but with Facebook. The “emotional capital” you mentioned seemed to be getting sucked out of me by the moment as I attempted to address feminist/racist/homophobic/(ahem, republican) comments that appeared in my feed. Why I felt the need to “school” these idiots that I may have peripherally known from a ceramics class in 10th grade is beyond me. So I left Facebook for a while. I haven’t had the same issues with Twitter, though I am often overwhelmed by the information. I tell myself I’m learning all the time from the people I follow on Twitter, but I wonder if I really am. I read the articles, bookmark them into my blackhole of a Diigo account, and rarely reflect upon them. Time for me to think about these things.
How quickly we move to an almost nostalgic view of “life before twitter”. While I think these conversations are important I think Gary said it well when he said,
It seems like people think that before twitter they were curing cancer, writing novels and being better parents. As Gary says, I was wasting time elsewhere. Even the phrase, “wasting time” is questionable. What one person sees as me wasting time on twitter discussing bacon can also been seen as building relationships and trust. I’m not even suggesting that everyone see and use twitter in that way. The fact that you’ve filtered out links and focus on hashtags suggest you have a very clear purpose for using twitter. That’s great but as we’ve bantered about many times. Not everyone uses it for that singular purpose.
I’m not disagreeing with your premise Will, I think it’s great to be reflective and assess your time and efforts. I just guard against a false sense of nostalgia and categorization of habits as time wasting. Not saying that you are but simply posting a warning.
Thanks for the thoughts, Dean. Yeah…I tried to repeat the “To each his own” sentiment in this post…maybe I didn’t do it enough. I’m just focused on me, and if my thinking spurs others with theirs, all good. But as I say often, please, don’t anyone be like me. One person’s wasted time is another’s gold. So be it.
Ditto
Interesting how these tools like twitter and blogs promise diversity of thought, etc. etc. but we naturally gravitate back to smaller tribes even within these tools. I was listening to NPR yesterday and they were talking about Cirque du Soleil and the training and trust required by the trapeze artists, http://www.npr.org/2011/01/05/132678699/training-and-trust-partners-on-the-flying-trapeze . How do they develop that trust?… They talk to each other, often. For large organizations, like schools, that have mainly singularly goals, preparing learners for more learning, and a myriad of dependent and independent influencing factors and just as many possible solutions/strategies, hundreds, if not thousands, of potential contributors, the evolving improvement process requires well developed trust among all those involved. If one of the important, if not most important aspect of developing trust is “talking” to one another, how do you do that effectively in an organization that consists of thousands of possible contributors? Could fact that we naturally gravitate back to smaller groups with common interest be telling us something? If we can’t physically go up and talk often, face to face, to each contributor in or organization, maybe we are using these social tools (frequently) to facilitate the development of that trust by “talking” often online? Do you think you know the point of view of people you “follow” online, and thus can determine how much trust you have in them? Could leaders in school organizations, if you are not talking to all the contributors (f2f, not likely) better use online social media tools to develop that trust? (Why do you use twitter?) Besides cultivating ideas out of the things the people you follow post, I think a big use of social media tools is to develop trust in the people you (everyone) lead. Sorry for the long reply, but helped me square some ideas 😉
John,
I am with you. For me, while I enjoy the networking occasionally- too much of it it frustrates me and leaves me wanting more depth. Even the link harvesting, I ask myself just how often I go back and look at any of those links. I asked Will- when does a collection of links become like the “Friday folder” he use to talk about so often.
I appreciate that out of my networking falls community (those smaller tribes of which you spoke). For me, it is the community building, the deep connections, the purposeful collaboration, the connection to my passion- children, and the relationship building beyond talks of school to life that move me.
I am in awe of how these technologies have extended my reach beyond the me, the “I”- beyond “my conversations and ideas”, to a visceral connection with those, who if I had been born at any other time than this, simply wouldn’t have existed.
I wrote a post a while back- Matters of the Heart that encompasses much of what this thread is discussing. A piece from that post…
“I wonder if what my friend was longing for was passion. Maybe his own? Maybe that of others? I too have felt it. As the compelling case for change message has been repeated and repeated through many different voices, could it be that it has lost it’s effectiveness for some? With the fervor of Gregorian monks we all chant collectively … Connect– Commit– Collaborate with a constant hum of tools, tools, tools resonating in the background. But for what cause? To what end? We know the culture needs to shift– but to where? All that seems to be missing is leadership. Leadership that has a command of direction and motivation. Leadership that understands how to leverage- not only the wisdom of the crowd, but also the technologies needed to connect tribes and amplify their work. Which takes me to the real point of this post– my motivation, my passion, my blogging from the heart.”
Maybe there is too big of an expectation about using Twitter and other social media platforms. If we look at it at face value I think we would reach the same conclusion Gary has. Sure not all conversations I have are deep, creating lasting bonds of friendship. What is wrong with shallow banter?
Nothing! Banter away!
I was very pleased to read “That’s not to say I’m giving up Tweeting or bookmarking or Evernoting.”
because you are not the NORM of any of those (well, okay, I have not seen your evernotes) but because your ethic of going “above and beyond the normal usage” you have made it much easier for the rest of us.
Your bookmarking – that you might be questioning as “something more useful” — truly is. The way you share the insight of the link you are deliciousing has truly been very “more useful” to me. I appreciate a synopsis before I read and appreciate that you take the time to do so. Plus, when you drop a link….I can depend on it being of quality and not just something you stumbled over. I need you to continue to bookmark – frequently — And I hope you continue to do so.
We are each on a journey in this world of “ed-tech”. Thank you for sharing with us your walk.
Glad to hear SOMEONE appreciated that. ;0) Now we’ll have to see if Delicious survives or not.
Hey Will,
I’m not sure your “to each his or her own…” message came through that clearly. That’s OK, but I say that because I wonder if, for someone like you, the “conversation” or the rhetoric on Twitter is stuff you wrestle with during nearly all of your professional time. If you’re not writing about “it,” you’re discussing “it” with PLP folks or presenting “it” or, or, or… So, I can see how you might need to get away from “it” on Twitter.
I have found that to be the case for me. I don’t #chitchat much about #edreform on Twitter much these days. Twitter is more the water cooler where I “hang out” and shoot the breeze.
However, I suspect that for many K-12 educators, the daily grind of the real day job doesn’t allow them to be thinking about big picture #edreform stuff, so Twitter is their space to do that.
That said, I do have one growing concern about/for all of the social media use by the edutwitterblogosphere folks… I worry that it becomes too easy to glom onto other people’s ideas and to pass them off in barely derivative ways. There’s so much “yes!” and “OMG, yes!” and “so and so nails it…” and, especially, what I call “re-blogging” that people are not thinking for themselves. I just see very little novel thinking these days. I may not be making sense here, and maybe that’s because I can’t think for myself anymore…
Excellent points. One of the hardest parts for me is trying to keep seeing and thinking about all of this through the lens that most teachers and “normal” people bring to it. I’m such an outlier in all of this, and I know sometimes I lose perspective on what it’s like for folks who don’t do this for a living. That’s actually one of the things I love about PLP…it tends to keep me more grounded.
And I agree on the novel thinking being lacking. I’m guilty of the reblogging stuff to some extent, but I do try to bring some context to it that pushes the ideas in some new ways. Not always successful.
No. You’re not “guilty of the reblogging stuff” in the way Jon is calling out. We all forward on things we wish to advocate for/generate discussion with/etc. I could be off, but I’m feel that Jon is talking about the same sort of digital ping pong for the sake of a Klout (sp?) score… that I am envisioning.
Forget “bringing content” in 140. People know what you do. Pass on what you will. I appreciate it from you much as I do from about a dozen others. Feel free to generate conversation with the words of others. That is part of the power here. Provoke those of use you know with the content you suspect will rile us. Create powerful debates around the ideas (wherever they may arise) you find powerful.
The “so and so nails it” is not what I see you doing here.
I don’t see the question as to Twitter or not to Twitter (replace Twitter with whatever you’d like). I think you capture the sentiment very well with Dan Perez’s quotation from Aesop,
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The sentiments you express in your post are ones I am hearing more and more. There was a time when some in education complained about the curriculum being a mile wide and an inch deep. It appears that some of us are doing the same with our online experiences.
Is it fatigue? Is it that regardless of how hard we try, our days are still only 24 hours long?
Seems like the pendulum is about to swing in the other direction.
I for one, am looking for the balance, but in the meantime am enjoying the ride.
I think Twitter (and the diverse reaction to Twitter) is a perfect metaphor for learning. When do we let kids choose to dive in, disconnect, or have a free form discussion on football or entropy in the classroom?
Twitter is what it is. How people react to it is a mirror of how they manage their own experience and their own needs.
I wrote a blog post about this based on the last time you wrote about your ambivalence toward Twitter. I think it still stands up: http://blog.genyes.org/index.php/2008/07/19/twitter-as-a-metaphor-for-learning/
I’m not advocating kids running wild with no direction. But kids will participate in learning opportunities that allow for choices – both in content and style. It’s the expertise of the educator to create opportunities that invite kids to challenge themselves.
As adults, we are responsible for doing that for ourselves more often than not!
John Seely Brown’s new book “A New Culture of Learning” has me thinking about the play aspect in all of this. It’s one of his major themes. “When play happens within a medium for learning…it creates a context in which information, ideas, and passions grow.”
And thanks for reminding me of all that Twitter angst from a few years back. I don’t hate it now. It is what it is. Zen.
In a way, I prefer twitter to blogs because twitter allows me to get more people’s opinions in shorter period of time. At times, it is more beneficial for me to get a lot of different ideas rather than a couple in-depth analysis of a topic.
I think it is really valuable to think about how we spend our time online. I spend hours a day online, but I rarely stop to think about what I am doing there, and that leads to time spent doing something other than what I intended.
Why does one even need an audience to blog? Or Tweet? Or Bookmark?
When I began blogging four years ago I did so because I wanted a place to store notes and ideas that I could access no matter what building I was in or what computer I was at. The social element became a nice and unexpected side benefit. More so with social bookmarking. I mean, who are half of these people in my Delicious network? I don’t know but I know they usually are bookmarking sites I am interested in.
Twitter was harder for me to grasp in the beginning because there was not an apparent personal productivity application I could see until I took the time to build a network and interact with people. After building that network I find affordances in the network that are not necessarily social but definitely amplify my productivity, awareness, and access to information. Now I have started at times to use Twitter as a place to store little notes to myself or quotes to come back to later.
These three cases might sound cold and self-serving but I offer them as examples of how the use of these tools are beneficial and useful for utilitarian purposes. I don’t need the benefits of dialogue, comments, @replies, RTs, “Likes,” or 5 stars to derive benefit in using these tools. If the social element were to go away I would probably still use most of these social media tools. But, I am extremely grateful for the relationships these tools have led me to. I would never want to dismiss or downplay it’s role.
However, when blogging starts to becomes about how many hits your post got or comments it received, or when people start to care too much about how many followers they have or how much their tweets get retweeted the whole endeavor becomes less authentic and rather disingenuous. If you had no followers would you still Tweet? If you had no readers would you still blog? If no one ever watched your YouTube video would you make it? I think I would.
I agree! It’s hard to avoid the echo-chamber issue that was mentioned in earlier comments if we are only worried about OUR influence on others online. How about what we learn from others?
Like you, I began blogging to reflect on and to keep track of my own learning. Nice when a conversation starts with the folks who actually listen to others (there are some out there), but it’s not absolutely necessary for me either.
I’m not nostalgic of ‘life before twitter’, but twitter has changed my blogging considerably and the way I think blogs are perceived. Not making a value statement on that, it’s just different now. I used to write a post and then get a trickle of comments over a week, even two, as people travelled to their RSS reader. I barely go to my own RSS reader now, and when I do, I go to posts others have shared first. Instead of my Reader, I usually follow links on Twitter now. @L_Hilt sent me here with a RT that said, “Love the honest and raw reflection.”… and the reality is that if I hadn’t followed the link, this post would have been added to the 1,000+ unread items in my Google Reader.
Almost 2 years ago now, I had to seriously shift my attitude around online information. I was gullibly trying to read every tweet in my ‘stream’ and diligently trying to keep my unread items on Google Reader at a handful. I saw these as pools of information and I wanted to hold on to the information that came into the pool. It was too much. The shift for me was seeing information as a river. Now, I’ll paddle along the stream, but when I get out, I didn’t feel the need to pay attention to the stream of information that goes by. It has been liberating.
The key is finding balance rather than being inefficient as I tried to demonstrate in this 4 slide presentation I did for a Connectivism course: http://www.slideshare.net/datruss/connectivism-relationships-and-balance-presentation
That was the first assignment for the course and it helped me decide to drop out of the course as I tried to seek balance.
I think I’ve made a few points, but if I could make one more it would be that my life still lacks balance and I still spend too much time online… but 3 years ago I would have ‘wasted’ that same amount of time, or more, watching TV. In the wise words of the Comedy Network’s tag-line… to me my online life is ‘Time well wasted’.
Am I right in thinking that I’m hearing many of you speak from a well-established and pretty experienced, knowledgeable point of view…? Whereas I’m a regular classroom teacher, deep in the trenches, and I’ve come to Twitter and Blogging very recently. So for me, Twitter has given me sudden access to an incredibly exciting array of educational ideas and people and tools that I would definitely NOT have discovered and decided to explore otherwise. And that is because I’ve been able to tap into your world: you experts who have gone before me — your blogs, your higher level thinking, your challenges, your experiences in trying new tools and apps and learning strategies, your acceptance and support of us “newbies” — all of the things you’ve done collectively have provided me with the most exciting educational learning curve that I’ve been challenged with in 20 years!
On the other hand, going back to school today and starting a huge ground-breaking (read: back-breaking) project with my students, it’s already quite clear that I’ll absolutely have to cut all this time on Twitter down to the bare essentials, so that I can focus on teaching and trying to implement whatever I can manage from all the things I’ve learned and bookmarked so far.
Will I miss it? Does it matter? Will anyone miss me? Barely at all. And that’s fine by me. I don’t want Twitter and Networking tools to help me build relationships, but to discover resources I can use with my kids — I like David’s river metaphor and being fine with getting out of the water and letting the stream of information continue passing on by. But I say that, knowing that when I tweet out a shout for help, I can pretty safely assume now, that someone will likely come to my aid. What an amazing river!!!
I just hope that by the time I’m ready to come back in, that you folks will still BE in here, reflecting and adding your 2-cents worth on all of your NEWEST thinkings and learnings and musings — because I’m following you!! Not on Twitter, but in my classroom… with a couple hundred real-live students who YOU are influencing HUGELY through me, and soon, hopefully, through the efforts of my colleagues.
So please keep on Twittering and Blogging your way to finding the Balance in your Life you seek. But just keep the rest of us posted on how things are going with that, eh?
(-;
Yep. Each to their own. And thanks for letting me benefit from yours!
@beachcat11
Will,
I enjoyed your post and had to smile because I was just blogging about how Hemingway’s explanation of his writing process hit home with me and the ‘unbalanced’ feelings I’ve been having lately.
Too funny! http://bsherry.wordpress.com/
Will,
I am glad to see you back and enjoyed the post! I had gotten away from much of my on-line reading, responding, interacting over the last several weeks; and although I never spent an inordinate amount of time on Twitter, even that time has been reduced. I needed a break – and very much identified with Dan Perez’s post (thanks so much for the link!). I had found myself to often glued to my laptop, becoming too much of a surfer and scanner as opposed to the reader and “muller” I had been, and had not read a book from cover to cover in quite some time. I decided it was time to ‘disconnect’ for awhile. I also decided it was time for me to see what the Harry Potter books were all about, having several nieces and nephews who were huge fans. (I am halfway through the 6th book!). The mini-revelation I am coming to, is that it has been far too easy for me to skim, scan, and dabble in thought and not to do more purposeful and directed work – both in my current job and pursuing other endeavors – that I want to do and believe I can and should do. Without taking myself too seriously, I do want to be more thoughtful in where and how I invest my energy and my efforts – and that is in both my personal life and my professional life. Some times just stopping to take an inventory of oneself is very beneficial. So, I appreciated your post, Will. I did hear the “to each his own” in your words – and that may be because of where I am at. I am still in the trenches, but have been teetering on the brink of what else could I be doing to feel more actively involved in changing education in some genuine way. Your posts tend to foster good conversation – but also allow me to do some deeper thinking for myself – off-line!
If someone would have told me when I was a young thing, that time is the most expensive thing I’ll ever own, I would have laughed at them. Having now frittered away over a half century of it, I have a different view. So my time has become much more precious.
As a result I have a love-hate relationship with Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook; not so much with blogs. My involvement with the former goes in cycles. I do enjoy twitter, but to make it more than Jon’s water cooler, I would have to really follow through all those links. There’s a lot of trash there and I have to switch applications to even see it. In blogs, the meat (sorry Will) is much more accessible.
I agree with Stephen Downes that web-based peer review is getting credible, but I don’t think he was talking about 140 bit sound-bits. Speaking of sound bites, I’d be interested to hear about other Web 2.0 cost-benefits. For instance are people using podcasts a lot these days? I am not an audible learner, so I don’t tend to follow them. What about more time-based tools like Elluminate? Does it meet your needs/contribute substantially?
Hi, Will,
Last year, Twitter was the main vehicle through which I established a network of professionals that truly added to my learning and helped me develop my practice. For that I am appreciative and glad I dedicated extra time to doing so. I also tried to dedicate more time to blogging and have been grateful for the many thoughtful responses to my posts that helped me extend and reflect upon my writing and my work. I’ve been introduced to so many inspiring people, programs, and ideas through this network… this year, though, I want to take the time to do more careful reading of the posts and articles that are shared. Too often my time is spent perusing articles at a superficial level. I need to do a better job of reading for meaning and then acting upon the ideas I encounter, to help transform learning opportunities for the teachers and students in my school.
I am gland you came back from your week off refreshed and ready to dive back in to social networking. I have read a few articles simialar to the one Rising above the influence. It is best sometime to step back, catch a breath and refocus.
Keep up the good work.
I love taking a hiatus from technology on a regular basis; it clarifies for me not what is important but how much of the time I prove what I say is important by my actions.
I also find it very, very ironic that even though you are writing about streamlining your interaction with social media you have so many social feeds listed in the margin (“margin”: is that the technological term?) of your blog.