I am sitting in the lobby of my hotel in San Antonio, waiting for the shuttle to take me back to the airport. For the first time since I arrived here, I am sitting at a full keyboard to write instead of frantically thumbing words into my iPhone keyboard. Here in the lobby, I have free wifi access, something that just wasn’t an option for me at the NCTE Convention.
I enjoyed very much having the opportunity to share work that we’ve been able to do with students in my district, as well as talking about the possibilities and logistics of tools like uStream, Mogulus, Twitter, Plurk and many others. The value of these particular tools, of course, is in modeling and demonstrating possibilities. We have so many options available to us, in theory, and we need to know what the barriers are to access so that we can begin to, or continue to, knock those down.
The Tech-On-The-Go kiosks, brainchildren of Kylene Beers and the product of a great deal of hard work by Sara Kajder and others, were a window for the conference attendees into the world of the shift that Karl and Anne and others talked so eloquently about in sessions all over the conference. Well done, y’all.
These kiosks, too, were windows into the conference for friends and colleagues and network connections of mine via our uStream and Chatterous sessions, opportunities to mix the friends that were here with the friends who were not, at least physically.
But it was just a taste, a frustratingly flighty, teeny tiny taste, of what it should have been. It should have been that we were able to make those connections in sessions and hallways, bringing in colleagues to share and think with as we learned together in conference presentations and conversations. (And, for $13 a day, I could have done so, although paying extra for what should be a piece of the puzzle for everyone rubs me the wrong way.)
I think NCTE is in a wonderfully frustrating place at the moment, looking at its almost 100 years of work and thinking very seriously and strategically about what is next, and how teaching and learning is changing and has always been changing. They are embracing the shift, as Karl has said, and it’s time for them to continue the push that they made this week.
Many of us within the organization (and plenty of folks who aren’t yet members) are willing, interested, and able to help with some of the geeky bits, as the legions of volunteers in the tech kiosks and several of the presenters in the sessions demonstrated. But it’ll take some support from the organization to make that happen.
One thing I hope next year’s organizers are already thinking about is how to provide meaningful wifi access to conference attendees so that we can not just see the possibilities in sessions and at kiosks, but can begin to practice with them in sessions and hallways. My computer, my favorite learning tool these days, sat unused in my bag as I relied upon my telephone and its connections to the outside world to bridge the gulf between myself and my learning networks who, although not all physically present, were here with me, and continue to provide me with questions and support and kind words and pushback. Through that connection and my networks, my NCTE conference, while physically situated in downtown San Antonio, reached literally around the world and all across the country.
More and more, I rely on those networks and those connections to help me do my learning and work. As I argue that we need to provide this connectivity in our schools and classrooms, I would also argue that we need that connectivity here, when teachers gather to learn and to work together to improve the learning we facilitate with our students. Shift happens, but we can and should be helping it along.
Kathleen Blake Yancey, president of NCTE, gave perhaps my favorite presentation of the conference, a stunning mix of image and speech, of thinking about teaching and thinking about technology, specifically the technologies of composition. (I hope that it is soon in video form so that I can share it with you. She has said she has interest in producing such a video, and you need to see what she did and what she said about composition here in the early days of the 21st Century. I’ll share if it makes it online.) Just before she closed, she reminded us all that, “If you are writing for the screen, you are writing for the network.” NCTE gets the shift, has defined it, and is beginning to talk about it in a thoughtful way. I am eager to see how the organization can take the talk of shifts and begin to model through actions what it says is the case.
Won’t that be an impressive thing?
I have enjoyed my time at the convention, connecting with colleagues old and new, and helping them to connect with the wider world of possibilities. I have faith in language and in language arts teachers, in the power of the written and spoken word and all the other ways we have to create, compose and share, and I know good things are coming. I also know, though, that time is short. Let us all be renewed and restored and get back to work. There’s plenty for all of us to do.
Good morning from the 2008 NCTE Annual Convention. I arrived yesterday and got the lay of the land while visiting with old friends, many of them at the NWP Annual Meeting, which occurs concurrently. (Too much good stuff crammed together, if you ask me.) Today, I’ll be doing a couple of sessions and hoping to attend several more. In my continuing quest to find the better, real time collaborative tools for convention or conference chatter, I’ve decided to try using Chatterous for this one.
I’ve created a group in Chatterous called “NCTE 2008″ that I’ll be using to share information on the ground from the conference. I’d love to chat with you there, either if you’re attending or if you have an interest in what’s shaking here. If you are attending, you might consider trying to connect with friends via the chat room, too. (It’s okay to type lots there, is all I’m saying. I’m sure you’ll think of several good things to say or do in the space that I’ve not considered.) I like Chatterous because it plays nicely with mobile devices, which is a must for this event. If you’re interested in seeing my notes, or chatting with others, I’d encourage you to join the room. If you haven’t an account, you’ll need to create one.
Selfishly, I’m hoping some folks will share session notes from events and presentations that I cannot attend.
I hope this is useful. If not, there’s always the mobile version of Cover It Live to try at the next conference. Or, for that matter, tomorrow. I’m here all weekend.
I’ve stewed and pondered and argued, for quite some time now about the “rules” or guidelines for what folks should do in regards to online networks. Specifically, I bristle whenever someone writes about how others should act or behave or post or not post or whatever. I don’t know that there’s one code of behavior that specifically works across contexts and cultures and all the other separations and connections between you and me. It’s complicated, at best. Dave, in a recent post, describes it this way:
If you are in a community you are, in some way, responsible to that community, in a network you are responsible to yourself and the rules that govern you are those set forth by our society as laws.
I think Dave makes a useful distinction in that I am responsible to a community, but in a network relationship or environment, I am responsible to myself. I find that people tend to feel “guilt” or “worry” or concern when they choose to act in a way that is useful to them but does not reflect the rules or culture of someone else. While I understand those feelings and sometimes have them myself, I’ve come to think that most of them are wasted energy, often, but not always, devolving into distraction.
In my network relationships or environments, it’s not useful for me to act as others would prefer I act; it’s preferable to act in a way that maximizes the value I receive from those networks. I find that there’s great value, both to me and to others, when I act in such a way.
Now, that doesn’t mean that there’s value in me being a jerk, or in treating others poorly (which is, I guess, also being a jerk), but it does mean that my concern for the feelings of others should probably end right around the time I figure out what I need to either do or understand. The value to others in a network relationship, at least as I’ve experienced it, comes from the ability to follow my process or to improve upon it to meet a slightly different set of needs. (Or, perhaps, there’s an aesthetic value to some of this, too, that I’m not getting at here.)
Over time, I’ve come to call this basic guideline that governs my behavior “selfish selflessness.” Or “selfless selfishness.” I get stuck on which word should come first there, but, basically, it seems that whenever I act in a way that focuses on my needs first, it ends ultimately more useful to others than it would’ve if I was thinking first of others and then myself. That’s a bit quite contradictory, but the older I get, the more I notice that the truly interesting bits of the world and of myself are the contradictory ones.
I enjoy and gain value from following folks who are doing interested things, and who find beauty and passion and anger and whatever from the world in which they regularly engage. I’m quite content to follow along behind someone blazing a trail of their own understanding. I think others are, too. There’s certainly a place for considering one’s audience, but when it comes to network behavior, I find value in considering myself first, audience second. (There’s another conversation lurking in this paragraph about the difference between writing for self and writing for others, but I’ll save that for later.)
Dave has launched a much more formal exploration of community responsibility. I’m looking forward to his continued exploration, as well as the continuation of my own limited explorations. I think his dichotomy of responsibility for communities and networks is worthy of much more thinking. I guess, if anything, I’d call this idea of selfish selflessness (certainly, there’s a better term), my own network responsibility guideline.
Below is a VoiceThread that contains some of the questions that I think are worth talking about from the presentation. Feel free to join in the conversation – I welcome your feedback and other thoughts.
