Not Getting Twitter

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The above video is funny. There is nothing wrong with that. What it points out though is how difficult it can be to understand new technology. There is nothing interesting about Twitter. It is a very simple tool. It allows users to post 140 character messages and follow others. It doesn't always even do that very well. The real power in Twitter is not the technology but the network, and that is everything. The networks that can emerge in Twitter can be very powerful. They can also be inane - a lot depends on the intention and critical thinking skills of the user. If you want to use it to socialize with your friends, there is nothing wrong with that. But Twitter can be used to build professional and learning networks of great power. It can be a living encyclopedia, job board, emergency network, political action coordinator, or problem-solving tool. There is nothing superficial or mundane about that! If you are interested, look at the HIM101 materials on this blog (Health Information Management) to see what I think are some effective uses of Twitter. Even users of technology are not always clear on why a piece of technology is successful or useful. I know instructors who use Second Life very effectively who still think that the novelty or "fun" is the primary reason it works so well as a teaching and learning platform. That is the shiny surface - it is really the connections that people are able to make - the community building that makes all the difference.

Educating for the Future

It can be a difficult task to design a course that is meant to provide students with the skills that they will need five years from now. We should not be able to do that, but my experience with technology over the last 25 years tells me that you can. While the technology changes at an ever increasing pace, the core critical skills have been changing slowly and some not at all. This is an evolving list, but my previous course, HIM 101 identifies six core new media skills for students:

1. Critically evaluate everything you read, see, or hear
2. Connect new knowledge with previous experience (put it in your own words)
3. Connect with reliable information (not perfect information, it doesn't exist in any media)
4. Connect with peers and experts
5. Share and publish (Get a blog, connect with other blogs)
6. Transmogrify content (Take a text, turn it into music and pictures - learn something new)

We can teach and model these skills in any class. Our HIM 101 and my English 95 course proves that. All of these skills are based on things that we are already doing and teaching in one way or another. In later postings I will go into each one of these skills in detail. Please feel free to leave a comment if you would like to add a skill for discussion.

Those skills do change slowly because the skills are related to the learning modalities of the human mind, not the content or the media. As media changes, we discover new learning modalities but a lot of the tech changes are extrapolations of existing technologies. In the early days of the internet, people were still just reading pages. Later, visual and social intelligence comes into play as the technology becomes more powerful and more connected.

If you decide to do something innovative, take these warnings with you. You will spend a lot of time telling students and administrators that as difficult (or as easy) as some students find the technology, it is not about the technology. It has nothing to do with newness, coolness or hype factors; semantics, or buzzwords. Although all of that may be present, it is about the core skills that will enable any student to be successful not only with technology, but their subject matter course.

Health Information Management 101

I am very excited about this syllabus I wrote with Charlene Gore for a class that we co-teach, Health Information Management 101. This course is a credit/no credit, two unit, student success course where we teach the students all of the technology they will need to be successful in the HIM program: their learning management system, web 2.0 tools, and Second Life (it is used on campus). The idea is to get all of the technology, formation of learning networks, and information access all in one class. This lets the teachers leverage the technology without having to teach it. We hope that this is rolled out campus-wide one day. The bump in the road is that it takes teachers willing to embrace web 2.0 technologies, a leaderless model ala "The Starfish and the Spider" (learning is lead by students in small groups facilitated by teachers), and portfolio assessment. The course is still in refinement and we would love feedback from others who share a similar vision.

HIM101 Syllabus - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: HIM101 Syllabus

Study: Fastest Growing US Companies Rapidly Adopting Social Media - ReadWriteWeb

Study: Fastest Growing US Companies Rapidly Adopting Social Media - ReadWriteWeb: "A one year follow up on a study of social media adoption at 500 of the fastest growing companies in the US has found that familiarity with and use of blogs, podcasting, wikis, online video and social networking has skyrocketed in 2008 to nearly double what it was in 2007. 77% of respondents now report at least some use of a social media tool in their business."

I did not find the results of this study surprising at all. I was talking to some people at Harcourt once about a new hire. They had two nearly identical candidates both with internships and a freshly minted degree. They went for the candidate who was comfortable with blogs. Creating a student success like our HIM 101 course at Tacoma Community College is not just an eccentric choice of technologies; using social media tools for teaching and learning prepares the students for the actual workplace. In all my years in the private sector as an employee or consultant, no one has ever asked me to take a multiple choice test or write a ten page paper. There are things that need to be written, but they are almost always written collaboratively. We do a great disservice by not including those skills in our teaching and assessment.