Bud the Teacher

I received a Twitter direct message earlier today from someone who is frequently a teacher of mine.  This individual was curious about why my Twitter following/follower ratio was something like four to one.  My answer, which was also a direct message, was:

The short answer is because I don’t find value in following every person that follows me. It’s a bit more complicated than that, though.

There’s an awful lot of baggage tied up in followers and friends and whatnot online, but there doesn’t need to be.  One reason I’ve always liked Twitter is that I find that it’s incredibly open.  Through an @ message, anyone can get the attention of anyone else who uses the service (so long as the person you want to get a hold of  has their @messages settings in Twitter open to anybody.)

But the way I screen Twitter followers and make decisions about who to follow is pretty simple:  If I find the person or the content helpful to me in my work or engaging in some other way (funny, wise, curiosity-inducing, teaching, etc.), I follow.  If I don’t, I don’t.

It’s not personal.  Except when it is.  By that, I mean that there are far more people in the world than I can learn from at any one time.  If I find a stream useful, I keep it around.  If I don’t find it useful, I let it go.  If the person or stream is more distraction than help, I let it/them go, too.  I don’t have a magic number of people or a ratio, but about four to one seems to be consistent – I get the question of “Why are you not following as many people as follow you?” enough that I’ve noticed the trend.

I don’t follow all the folks that follow me for a bunch of reasons.  Some folks aren’t teaching me anything.  Others are sharing resources I’m finding from other sources.  For the most part, I don’t block folks whom I don’t like or find “offensive” that follow me.

I expect no reciprocity in my reading and/or following habits.  I continually think others who expect such are misunderstanding the opportunities herein, or are using social media for drastically different purposes than I, which is fine, except when they expect me to follow their “rules.”  I try to approach most of these spaces as places in which I can be selflessly selfish.

There’s very little new here.  Friendships and other relationships in “real life” are often one-way.  We get a little hinky sometimes when we see these relationships documented, though.  No need.

One hundred percent of my family is technologically literate. No, really.  I’ve got the numbers to back that up.

Here’s how I would report that to the Department of Education:

Number of members of my family: 4

Number who are technologicaly literate: 4.

If you know me or my family at all, I suspect that you would challenge my numbers.  Why?  Because two of the four members of my immediate family are children.  Young children.  One’s three.  The other’s a ten-month-old.  How in the world are they technologically literate?

See, what I did back there, and what most folks who collect statistics do all the time, is that I got to define my terms.  For the purposes of this data reporting, I have defined technologically literacy as the ability to turn the TV in our living room off with the remote control.  Everyone in my family has accomplished this action – although not all of them deliberately so.

I was reminded today, as I sat through a conversation about data reporting now and data reporting to come, that reporting a number in a column or a data field seems like such a simple thing.  How many computers do you have?  (Easy to answer – you can count.)   How many 8th graders do you have?  (Easy to answer.)  How many of them are technologically literate?  (Um.  Well.  That one’s harder.)

That last one all depends on how you’re defining technological literacy.  And how to assess it.  And we’re not all in agreement about the best way(s) to do that.  The devil continues to be in the details.  (Oh, and while we’re kind of on the subject, here’s an analysis of many of the different definitions of 21st Century Skills, which Nancy White happened to tweet along while I was in the other conversation. We’ve got lots of definitions, and now definitions of the definitions, but we still don’t know how to teach the blasted things.  Nuts.)

When you see a statistic, I hope that you are looking past the number and seeking the definitions and the methodology.  I hope you’re teaching your students to do so, too.  I continue to be worried that, for all the data we’ve got, it isn’t any good.