Chris Lott

[photo by diamond-mind]

Some said it couldn’t be done. Some said the subject didn’t even exist. Some claimed it couldn’t be quantified enough to be useful. But somehow today Jared Stein, Scott Leslie and I managed to put on (I think) a pretty successful workshop on the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) for educators. I facilitated the “beginner” sessions– focusing on the blog as a hub for activities and tools that make up one’s PLE and feed reading for both management/efficiency and as another way to participate in the larger conversation. I took care to continually focus on the Personal in the concept of the PLE, using the blog as a way to make and sustain human connections and as a means to start the cycle of the virtuous circle of intellectual and social capital building.

Outside of some inexcusable logistical and technical issues (how long will it take WCET organizers to realize that robust Internet access is a must for the entire conference venue, not to mention hands-on web-based workshops like ours? Does a breakout room that is three floors and a small maze away from the main room make sense? If laptops are promised isn’t it reasonable to expect that they will be delivered to the room prior to the session starting? Don’t pre-conference participants, who have paid a pretty penny to attend, deserve coffee and juice on the coffee breaks?) things went pretty smoothly. We were blessed with a group that wasn’t highly experienced but was generally pretty clueful, with little time being spent on basic browser operations, negotiating account signups and other things that can stall progress.

[photo by highline5]

My only real regret is that I wasn’t able to sit in on Scott and Jared’s session. My job was easier because I’ve developed a pretty good method for contextualizing blogging and feed reading and network participation… things get significantly hazier when you start talking about data mashups and such.

After the session we had the special interest dinners. Our strand was supposed to have 45 but ended up with only half that. The food was so-so, but the big problem (apparently) was that it was too cold at the outside tables we were given. Guess I am Alaskan through and through– I felt quite comfortable at 67F or so! But, as usual, the real fun was the dinner table conversation with friends I only get to see in person at functions like this. I was reminded very clearly of why Twitter has become so valuable in my working life– it’s the closest thing I have to providing the informal, wide-ranging, social interaction that plays out at conference dinners, hallway conversations, and late nights at a hotel bar. It’s not the same Twittering with @sleslie @jstein @diamond_mind @johnkrutsch @gsoutherndl as hanging out around a frozen table or a booth made for lovin’, but it’s close and I’m thankful for it.

 
[photo by highline5]

Finally, a word about the hotel– I mean “resort.” There’s no question this is a higher-end popular resort and I’m sure that for a certain kind of traveler it is a fine spot for a vacation. But it’s a lousy venue for an educational technology conference. The internet access– hardwired and wireless, in the room, lobby, and conference areas– is consistently poor. Word is that there won’t be *any* wireless in conference areas for the rest of the week, which is completely ridiculous. And education travelers are, most often, on a per-diem that just isn’t adequate for a hotel like this. My per-diem doesn’t cover even a single meal, not to mention the incidentals like constant tipping opportunities. It’s not that I mind the extra cost, but given the fiscal reality, the truth of Bryan Alexander’s law of hotel Internet (the more expensive the hotel the more expensive and poorly performing the internet access will be), and that much of the value of conferences is having a comfortable way to interact with people met during conference activities… I just don’t understand why venues like this are chosen.

One of my students who is just learning about web feeds and feed reading commented to me that she liked the “fluidity” of the medium, then noted:

I found that several of the converted” track 80-some feeds a day. The thought made my head hurt, but the reality is that I will probably be just as “engaged” as soon as I get my favorites linked.

This triggered the firing of many synapses, connecting together a variety of dots from my own social network: Brian Lamb’s recent post about a conference that completely escaped his radar (at the time), Bryan Alexander’s Twit about social networks as triads that lead me to his post on the subject referencing Stephen Downes’ catch of Ton Zylstra’s visualization and Jyrie Engesrom’s writing on social objects. This dark path lit up when I came across Gardner Campbell’s post on Distributed Cognition that illustrates the power of the social network and ends with sound advice:

Oh yes, and the moral of the story: link out to other bloggers early and often. Something about casting your bread upon the waters…

It’s taken me longer to copy and paste links than it did to follow that path. It will take me far longer to write this entry than it did to read all of the entries. But it has already been immensely valuable to my thinking and will influence some projects I am working on.

The thing is– and this is what is so hard to convey to others– this kind of eye-opening experience happens nearly every day. If it didn’t, I couldn’t keep working in this field, where the difficulties and apathy and institutional lethargy vastly outnumber the tangible moments of success. And it has nothing to do with being a super voracious informavore, with working extra hard to keep up, or with spending all of my free time working. While occasionally guilty of the first, my information consumption habits encompass many other areas outside of work. Moreover, I don’t even try to keep up, and when I work from home it’s on other work that isn’t reflected here.

There’s too much information and always has been… it was just that in the past it was easier to ignore the deep waters of the unknown because they were harder to access, often locked away behind gatekeepers of various kinds, and generally were static resources that we fetched at certain times for certain purposes. Very little information came to us except that which we directly asked for. But the environment has changed dramatically.

In addition to the kinds of resources we’ve always had, we have the powerful ability to tap into the vital knowledge in the heads of our colleagues, idols, and students. Our “collection” is no longer just, or mostly, pointers to reservoirs but an infosphere in constant flux, fed by flows from sources into and around our immediate locus of need and desire. I constantly refer to Downes’ metaphor of resources, information, and learning as water flowing through the network, not something we think about capturing constantly and storing in our cupboards, but something we turn on and use when we need it.

As I told my student, learning to stimulate and manage this flow is the information literacy skill of the age. The secrets to doing so aren’t secrets at all:

First, and perhaps hardest, we have to learn to be OK with not “keeping up” in the traditional sense. People worry about 20, or 50, or 100 web feeds because they are considering them in the old frame of scarcity and control– as resources to consume all at once lest they be lost. If they have unread feeds, unseen sites, unheard podcasts, unabsorbed articles in their environment they feel uneasy, even agitated. It isn’t that there weren’t all these undigested items before, they just didn’t know about them. This agitation can be paralyzing. I liken it to my own fear of swimming in deep water, which is an extension of my fear of heights. Though I know how to swim and I never need to go more than a few feet deep to do so, I have a hard time with water more than five feet deep. I’d rather stay in the boat and ignore those depths despite there being no rational or logical basis to my fear: swimming in 4 feet of water is no different than swimming in 250 feet. Too many feel this way in the sea of information– better to turn away from the depths than jump in. For some reason we expect to be complete Olympic swimmers when treading water and occasionally dog-paddling are perfectly OK.

Keeping up in the information age doesn’t mean absorbing everything in your immediate vicinity, it means keeping your network tuned and fresh so that the information is there when you need it. The important things find their way to you because they carry some of the energy of other participants.

The second key “secret” is an echo of Gardner’s refrain, and what makes the network effects carrying the important information to us work: you have to be an active participant in that network. What you put into the network– directly and indirectly– shapes the network to your needs and makes possible the reflection and amplification that brings the important stuff to you. Blog posts, twitters, information linked in socially enabled applications like flickr, del.icio.us and stumbleupon, facebook updates, comments, wiki edits… whatever methods make sense in your environment will work, but only if you are engaged. Trying to be an old-school passive consumer in a participation based network is like traveling to a new place and then holing up in your hotel watching the same programs and eating food from the same restaurant chains… you’re a consumer rather than a resident and you’re not only going to miss out on the most important happenings, but you’ll never even know about them.

There’s a lot of talk about Personal Learning Environments right now, and rightly so. But PLEs are not just for students any more than learning is just for students. Educators are faced with extra demands: not only do they need to learn to create and participate in their own social network– essentially a PLE– for professional advantages, but they will face daunting hurdles when helping their students in this critical area if they have no experience with it themselves.