Like many other bloggers that I consider to be colleagues, my blogging has tapered off quite a bit over the years, and while some of the fault lies in myself, I put most of the blame squarely on Twitter. Why take half an hour to write several paragraphs, hyperlink it up and find an appropriate image, when I can just spout off 140 characters and move on? It just makes sense, right? That’s why I’m rather looking forward to Flutter’s official launch.

I jest, but it does bring out an obvious reason why blogging is becoming less and less of a ‘hot topic’ and Twitter keeps getting the buzz. It’s quick, it’s easy, it’s accessible, and most of all it doesn’t require a significant commitment. While it’s very arguable whether that’s a good thing or not, it’s a reality.

It used to be the standard, just an assumption that everybody would have a blog. Join a PLN, create a blog, set up your aggregator, be a part of the club. But now…. Well, I’m spending less and less time even using my aggregator. If it’s important enough to read, more than likely someone will tweet about it. And if they don’t… well, there’s a lot of good things to read that I miss. I can live with that. The library is full of them.

So the question then becomes, with dozens of microblog options out there (and even nanoblogs!), would you recommend a newbie start a blog? If somebody who is just getting started with community building and personal learning networks wanted an avenue to share, would you even suggest that they start a blog or set up an aggregator? Or do you shuffle them straight to Twitter/Plurk and roll from there? Or a different option altogether?

And don’t worry, I’m not missing the irony of posting this on a blog. I’ll be tweeting it out as well!

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I think that many people (myself included) that share sites like Twitter at conferences inadvertently do our attendees a disservice. In the effort of attempting to demonstrate how wonderful, simple, powerful and dynamic it is, we make it seem much more effortless than it really is.

For example… How many times per day do you see somebody say, “Give a shout out to the people in Nepal who are attending my presentation about social networks about using the Luge to teach physics!” And then 30-40 people reply with a hearty “Hello”. So attendees believe all it takes it to toss a tweet out there, and dozens of responses will pour in.

What isn’t necessarily shown, or may just be glossed over, is the fact that it takes TIME and EFFORT to gain a few hundred followers. And without having a critical mass of people to message out to, your odds of getting a response from a general tweet are VERY small. If you have 40 followers, more than likely none of them are actually online at the same time as you. And even if they are, who knows if they’re checking Twitter? And even if they are, who knows if they’ll see your tweet? And if they do, how many people will see it and ignore it, versus will see it and respond?

For example, if I send out a “Please give these folks a shout out” tweet, I expect maybe about 30-40 responses on a typical school day during normal hours. If it’s a weekend, or in the evening, you can cut that number in half. I currently have about 5000 followers. So at best, that’s less than 1%. At that rate, if you have 100 followers, could you realistically expect an instant response from even a single person? I’m not sure… It depends on who is following you.

That’s not to say that everyone should run out and get more followers. My point is simply, things aren’t necessarily as rosy and simple as we may make them seem during presentations.

I can’t tell you how many times I see a Twitter newbie who has under 50 followers throw out a request like, “I’m trying to find schools that have updated their AUP this year. If you know someone, please tell me.” Then when they don’t get any responses, they get frustrated and may wind up quitting. While I can’t address what may be an issue with persistence, I do think that person has set themselves up for failure.

I really do think you need to follow/be followed by about 100 people at the least for Twitter to begin to be valuable. If you have a dedicated, highly focused group, that number may be smaller, but in general I think that’s a fair ballpark. If you have less than that, you need to be much more aggressive to get responses.

A few suggestions for people who are new to Twitter or have relatively small audiences right now.

1) Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with putting a message out there multiple times. If you’re worried about looking like a spammer, reword it. Mention that your STILL looking for information. But it’s entirely possible that people didn’t see your message. So give them another chance. And yet another.

2) Ask some people directly to respond. If you send a tweet that includes @TheirUsername, more than likely they will see it. It may take a day or two before they look for personal replies, but most people WILL see it. Unless they have fairly strict privacy settings, it should work. So if there’s someone you think might be able to help you out, send it directly to them by using this feature.

3) Reach out to the hubs in your network. Let’s face it, some people have more followers than others. Maybe they do a lot of conferences, maybe they just have too much time on their hands. Regardless, they may have a longer reach than you do. So contact them directly and ask them to retweet it for you! I’m extremely grateful to have the audience that I do, and I’m happy to share them whenever someone asks. By doing this, you maybe be able to ensure that your request has been seen by a few thousand people instead of a few dozen. Doesn’t guarantee a response, but it does give you better odds.

Of course, the best solution in the long term is to build up your own community. The only real way to do that is to maintain your own presence, to reach out to others, and to follow people and give them the chance to follow you.

For those of you that do present sessions including Twitter, do you see the same thing happening? Is it just me or is this something you’ve experienced yourself? And if so, how do you address it?

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In the past few years, I’ve been pretty darn lucky to be able to speak at quite a few conferences. I’ve also been blessed enough to include in my network dozens of people that do the same, whether it’s for a living or ‘on the side’. I’ve found that for the most part, presentations tend to fall into one of two categories.

1) What we (educators) should be doing.

2) What you can actually do right now.

I’ve always gravitated towards sessions in the former category. I like the ones that make me think, that encourage me to breakdown my ideas about what education means and h ow we do it, and then to rebuild them with new ideas and information. But rarely does that make much of a concrete difference in reality. When I do keynotes of this nature, I truly hope that I’m inspiring educators to reach farther, think bigger, and to become the very innovators that they currently look up to. But I always through in at least a few concrete ideas that people can do ‘on Monday’. Why? Because more often than not, those are the things that people scribble down and actually come back to.

I hear the same conversations on Twitter again and again. ‘We don’t need tools, we need pedagogy, we need understanding, we need new policies, we need leadership, we need political reform.’ And at the same time, I keep thinking to how many emails and comments I’ve received from people along the lines of, “Thanks so much for showing me Blabberize, I used it with my students and they were more engaged than they’ve been all year!” Will that change the education system in America? No. But for one classroom and one teacher on at least one day, it made a difference.

I’m not saying Blabberize is the most wonderful thing in the world. It just one of hundreds of Web 2.0 tools. But what is wonderful is that it made an old lesson new, that it energized a teacher who was then able to energize her students. To me, it just doesn’t get any better than that.

I’ve heard so much criticism of ISTE over the past few days because so many of the sessions at NECC are what many consider to be ‘low level’. They’re discussions of tools, of toys, of websites and widgets. That won’t create any systemic reform in education. But if even a fraction of the teachers who attend learn a few new tricks and perhaps hear about a network like the DEN, Classroom 2.0, Plurk, or Twitter… isn’t that enough?

I like to think that my Top 10 Web 2.0 presentation has more in it than just a list of websites. I try to really focus in on why it’s important for teachers to delve into that world, how they connect together, and how to change their mindset it the way they use them. But more than anything, I hope to make them look simple, accessible, and within their grasp. And if a roomful of teachers see that presentation and leave thinking, “Wow, I really believe that I can do that stuff he was showing” then I’d consider it a success. Maybe I won’t be the one making broad sweeping changes to the US Education system. I can live with knowing that in a small way I’ve helped a group of teachers look at their lesson plans through new lenses, and maybe inspired them to do just one thing differently. If they can use some of these new technologies to make learning exciting again for the students, then I couldn’t ask for anything more.

Is that such a bad thing?

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Anybody who spends any significant time on Twitter is familiar with the concept of trending topics. They’re essentially a taste of what’s on people’s minds and typically revolve around recent news, television events, buzz generating blog posts and of course, memes.

At large conferences like NECC, with hundreds of people using the #NECC09 hashtag in their tweets, some people speculated whether it would become a trending topic or not. The answer was a resounding No.

It has always been a mystery to me as to just how many posts were required to make it into the trending topics list, and recently Buzzgain published their own research of the subject. The results?

Between 12 (midnight) to 6 am PDT: approximately 1200 tweets and about 500 users to be trending

Between 6 am to 12 Noon PDT: 1700 tweets and about 733 users

Between 12 noon to 6 pm: 1500 tweets and about 812 users (this may be because there are more people during this time but they tweet a lot less)

Between 6 pm to 12 midnight: 1900 tweets and about 922 users

So at best, during the overnight hours when traffic is lowest, it would take about 1200 tweets using a given hashtag to become at trending topic. Not only that, considering that according to their research, a trending topic has an average shelf life of about 11 minutes, there would need to be more than 100 tweets per minute for it to attain the ‘weight’ needed.

While there may be 139,665 people in the education directory of Twellow, you have to go several hundred deep just to wade past all the social media junkies obsessed with gaining the most followers.

I don’t know how many ‘real’ educators there are on Twitter, but I do know that there just aren’t enough to make a dent in the Twitterverse on a mass scale. In fact, it’s futile to even put any efforts in trying to effect real change there. It’s wonderful for making connections and sharing ideas, but it’s just not the right place to effect any significant change. No matter how loud the choir sings, it’s just not going to be heard above the clamor about Harry Potter and Michael Jackson (no connection between the two implied).

As popular as Twitter is, as popular as Facebook is, they are both still used by only a fraction of educators, and within that fraction, they only reach the niche audience you have. I’m grateful to have a fairly large audience on Twitter, but even so that’s still less than 5,000 people, and of those I know a large number likely registered and never logged in again.

It isn’t that there isn’t value information being communicated via Twitter. It’s just a shame that it’s only causing small ripples and then disappearing into the ether.

The reality is, ‘old school’ communications are still the most effective for dealing with the masses. Email and newsletters still carry quite a bit of weight, and from my own experience tend to reach much farther than a tweet or blog post.

With that in mind I’m curious to hear your ideas for getting the ‘big ideas’ and key conversations out to the masses. Should we be aggregating them together and creating a “Tales from the Eduverse” mailing list? Sending out a newsletter in print or via email?

The critical question being, if the ‘right’ ideas are being shared in the blogosphere/TwitterPlurkoverse, how do we communicate them out to the rest of the education community?

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Hi. My name is Steve Dembo. If you do a Google search for “Dembo” I have four hits on the front page. Considering all the famous Dembo’s, that’s quite a mediocre feat! And that’s how I identified myself to most people for the first few decades of my life.

About five years ago, I registered the domain name Teach42.com. Since then, there are thousands of people who know me primarily by that name. It has become my brand, my online identity, my signature. People know that if they see Teach42 on a website, that’s me.

This is nothing unusual though. Anybody who registers for just about any website has some sort of alter-ego now. An alias that they use to refer to themselves. Use the same one often enough, and you become quite attached to it.

How disappointed would you be if you had visited Twitter, intending to register, only to find that YOUR username had already been taken? Somebody else was online and communicating under the name that you had dibs on. Deliberate or not is irrelevant. First come, first served.

This has led to hundreds of thousands of URL’s being snatched up and squatted on. The cost is so low that it’s easy to grab them, either to hang on to or to put up for sale/auction. Heck, for only 8 bucks, I can register any open domain I want. 8 bucks is nothing, right?

Well, mull this one over. Twitter accounts are free. And considering that Twitter is now one of the largest social networking sites on the internet, are names on Twitter as valuable as domain names? Some sites seem to think so. People are snagging up Twitter names and putting them up for sale. After all, there’s only a finite amount of ‘good’ ones, right?

Of course, why stop at Twitter? While it may be the flavor of the month, who knows what will be replacing it. With new sites being launched daily, perhaps the next big thing went public this morning. How can you ensure that you will be able to get in there and get that perfect username, the same one that you used everywhere else?

Sites like UsernameCheck.com provide lists of Web 2.0 and social sites, and will check your username against all of them, to let you see where it has been registered and where it as available still. You could easily use that to see where you haven’t registered yet and start chasing windmills, registering your username on every site out there. But more will be coming out tomorrow, and the day after that. Can anyone really keep up?

Which leads me to KnowEm.com. It’s similar to UserNameCheck, but with one small twist. They’ll check where you’ve registered … and for a small fee they’ll register you on the rest. Then, for $20 a month, they’ll keep registering you on any new sites that they add, an estimated 15-20 per week.

I puked a little when I read that at first. Really?? I’m going to pay more than I currently pay for Tivo to have somebody register my name at every site that gets released? But then I started thinking about how bummed I’d be if I didn’t have Teach42 registered on Twitter. Or on Flickr. Or anywhere else for that matter. It’s my own personal brand. It has led to my current job, speaking gigs around the country, and an audience that I’m eternally grateful for. Is that worth a few bucks per month? Well, I haven’t plugged in my PayPal account yet, but I no longer think it’s such a crazy idea.

And that’s for me on a personal level. From a business standpoint, I think it’s almost a no-brainer. Why wouldn’t you want to maintain a tight leash on your brand and online identity?

So the question is, just how valuable is your online name? Can you put a price on it? And how upset would you be if it wasn’t available? What, if anything, would you spend to ensure that you maintain control of it and to be 100% positive that you have it reserved for you when the next big thing hits?

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The other night I was scanning through tweets about Phish’s recent concert, and came across the tweet of a certain MusicLoverChick. The tweet was interesting, but what was even more interesting to me was the fact that the gramaphone in her profile pic MOVED. It was subtle, but every second or two, it just thumped a little. And yet, that little bit of motion BLEW ME AWAY. I have been so used to looking at Twitter images as static and motionless, that just the little bit of animation was enough to knock me off my rocker.

Of course, I simply HAD to know how it was done.

After a few searches, I found a couple of sites with decent directions. And it didn’t look that hard at all! Just take an animated GIF and upload it, right? Well, in reality it wasn’t QUITE so simple.

Here’s how I did it.
1) Get your footage. I decided to use a video and started off with a video of Aiden that I had recorded in Qik. Unfortunately, Qik’s download feature is broken right now, but there’s a hidden way to get access to those files still through the RSS feed. If you go to http://qik.com/USERNAME/latest-videos, you’ll get their RSS feed of videos WITH the download links available. Footage obtained.
2) Trim it down. I used QuickTime Pro. Popped open the video and trimmed it down to JUST the part I wanted. Or at least the part I THOUGHT I wanted at the time, but more on that later.
3) Export it as images. Using Quicktime Pro, one of your Export options is Movie to Image Sequence. Choose that and it’ll save your video clip frame by frame as jpg images. My 8 second clip resulted in a couple hundred images.
4) Crop and resize it. This part may be a bit tricky, and might be worth doing prior to step three if you have a video editor that’ll do it. Instead, I grabbed photoshop and created an action that cropped the image down to a square (centered) and then resized it down to 150×150. Then I used the Batch fucntion in Photoshop to resize the entire folder of images at once.
5) Create an Animated GIF from it. While there are dozens of programs that will create animated GIF’s, I took advantage of a free one for the mac: GifFun. All you do is drag in your folder of images, make a few tweaks and then click on Create GIF. One thing to keep in mind though is that you probably want it to have something like 3-5 microseconds between frames, and by default it is set at 20ms. Change that in the program options first, so when you bring in your images, they’ll all be at a nice 5 ms between frames. Then click on Loop Forever and Make GIF and away you go. I haven’t tried any of these yet, but here are 5 online tools for creating animated GIF’s.
6) Trim it down…. AGAIN. The resulting image will be opened in your browser. Just save the iamge to your computer for now. Once you do, check on the file size. Twitter won’t take anything over 700KB, but I found that I had better success in the final step with smaller file sizes. So try to keep it down to around 500kb or smaller. How do you do that? Two ways. In the options for the program, you can reduce the color palette or in GIFFun, click on Minimize Output. Not sure what that does, but it does shrink down the file. you can also remove unnecessary frames from the GIF. So in the eye example, I went from over 200 frames down to a paltry 89 frames. It’s a shorter animation, but the file size requires it. C’est la vie.
7) Upload it. Rinse, repeat. You’re now ready to upload it to Twitter, which unfortunately is the most complicated step in the whole process. First of all, Twitter is not supposed to support animated GIF’s. While that may be their official stance, the site DOES support it…. kinda. You’re able to upload GIF’s as an avatar pic. But animated GIF’s routinely fail. Seems like there’s some faulty code there, and the first 10 times or so that I tried to upload my animation, it failed. I tried in Firefox on the Mac and got the Fail Whale. I tried in Safari and got the same. I tried in Firefox for Windows and no dice. I tried in IE7 for Windows and nada. Then I tried in Opera for Windows……. and SUCCESS! My boy was on the screen bonking his head for all to see.

So what’s the moral of the story here? If you want to upload an animated GIF, you’re going to need to be patient, persistent and may need to try uploading it 30-40 times before it works. If it consistently fails, try tweaking it just a touch. Maybe shrinking it down a little, removing a few frames. And then keep trying to upload it. There’s no magic formula for this part. Just be persistent. When I tried to change it from Aiden bonking his head to my eye blinking, I failed about 40 times before I resized it, failed 10 more times before it finally went through.

One thing to note. Seems that Twitter isn’t happy with their inability to handle animated GIFs well. Supposedly, they won’t be accepting new ones anymore.

There is no plan to remove existing GIF images. You’ll still be able to use JPEG (image/jpeg and image/jpg) and PNG (image/png) images, but new GIF images will no longer be accepted. This code should be ready within the next week.

That was posted on the dev boards on January 29th. Seems they’re running a little bit behind schedule. Point is though, if you’re interested in having an animated avatar, I wouldn’t waste any time. Could be locked out any day now and then the only people who will have them are those that are grandfathered in.

I can’t help but think that as more and more people do this, Twitter is going to look more like the Daily Prophet from Harry Potter. I know some find it distracting, but I love seeing how people express themselves. Look forward to seeing what you come up with!

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Andy Carvin shared this video via tweet that does in incredible job of summing up what the New Permanent Record is, in a much more succinct way than I’ve ever managed to.

As you watch this video, consider what these students will look like when they enter your classroom. Honestly, will they care one whit whether you put their first and last name on the same page as their photo? Will their parents insist that you keep their identity private… or will they insist that you exhibit their learning publicly?

Is your school prepared for students that will have a larger digital portfolio before they enter kindergarten, than most of us educators have as adults?

Enjoy:

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As many of you have seen on Twitter lately, I’ve been promoting my wife’s new social network Jobless In Chicago. She was one of the many people who were let go from their jobs as the economy has continued it’s steady nosedive. With signs looking like things will be getting worse before they get better, she decided to create a Ning for people to support each other and their efforts to find new employment. I personally know at least 8 or 9 people that have been let go recently and many many more that are in fear of it.

When times get rough, it’s important for people to band together. We’ve all been jobless at one time or another, we’re all hurting from the economy right now, and many of us have family members and friends that have been greatly impacted by layoffs. So Jobless In Chicago is a site for people to share ideas for finding new jobs, support for people that are struggling, and suggestions for new ways to get back on the right track.

You don’t need to be jobless or live in Chicago to participate. Show your support ‘employmently challenged’ people who are banding together. Stop by the Ning and join today!

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Image via WikipediaA legal blogger I’m friends with, Dennis Kennedy, once stated that within 18 months of getting a blog, most people will have a new job (here’s the link to Dennis’s actual blog post on the topic).Sort of a spoof on Moore’s law, but I haven’t found it to be too far off. I landed a new job within a couple of years of starting Teach42, and owe the blog 100% of the credit for me being hired. I’ve seen many many fantastic educators transition to technology facilitator positions, or go off into consulting, and more often than not it’s because of the exposure they received from their blog. Bigger and better is a wonderful thing.

There’s a flip side to that though. I also know quite a few educators that are becoming more and more disillusioned with their jobs and are leaving teaching, and I can’t help but wonder how much of the blame falls on being part of an open network. Allow me to explain.

Example #1. Teacher A works in a decent district. It isn’t a dream job, but nor is it a slum. She does her job, does it well and loves working with the kids. Then she joins Classroom 2.0 and Twitter and other related sites. She reads about Chris Lehmann and SLA, she hears the great things that Eric Langhorst is doing with students in Missouri, she watches the amazing projects that Vicki Davis comes up with in Georgia… Then all of a sudden her school doesn’t look so great anymore. Why isn’t her school as tech savvy and ‘with it’ as those other schools? Why aren’t her administrators more on the cutting edge of educational theory, and why aren’t more teachers upset by this? Gradually, she starts to realize that her school is just behind and always will be. It’s not worth the time and effort to make the change there, perhaps she’d be better off trying to find a new school to teach at that ‘gets it’. A school where she can really spread her wings with like minded colleagues. Time to dust off the resume.

Example #2. Teacher B goes to a conference and attends a session about forming a personal learning network. He loves the idea and jumps on board. He registers for Twitter, joins a few communities, creates his own blog. He starts getting all these crazy ideas for doing things differently with his students. However, whenever he brings up an idea to his department head, he gets shot down. The DH is ok with blogging, but wants it to be behind the firewall. He doesn’t understand that you miss out on the ‘magic’ if you don’t do it publicly. Podcasts get shot down entirely, and most Web 2.0 sites that he wants to try are blocked. He requests that some get unblocked but nothing seems to happen for days. Gradually he gets more and more upset that most educators are able to take advantage of these great tools, but he isn’t. He is frustrated with his department head’s lack of support, the IT departments lack of response, and can’t figure out why more teachers won’t raise their voice at the injustice of it all. He feels like he has a better grasp of the needs of technology in education than anyone else he works with. Consequently, when a position opens up for a technology integration specialist, he starts giving it some serious thought…

Those are just two examples cobbled together from several conversations I’ve had with people over the past few months. In a nutshell, the newly-gone-natives are getting restless. Being close to people who are amazing examples of the best integration success stories in the world has led to mountain sized feelings of the grass being greener elsewhere. It’s leading to a great many people to think to themselves either, “Surely other schools are more ‘with it’ than mine” or even worse, “Education is doomed because nobody gets it besides we few.”

These are people that were happy, productive, and doing right by students before they got connected. Could it be that the PLN like the Matrix? Once you’re connected, you can never go back. And education is a lot dirtier than most people realized.

Image by dullhunk via FlickrTake the red pill if you want, but once you go down that rabbit hole, you may wind up depressed, disillusioned, and with a strong desire to seek greener pastures. Is being hyper-connected bad for morale?

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Image via WikipediaIt’s not unusual when somebody shares a tip with me and then appends it by saying, “But I’m sure you already knew about that already.” I always find that funny because the only reason that I am familiar with so many sites and applications, is because people have learned about them and taken the time to share them! Rarely would I ever be so bold as to say that I was the ‘first’ person to discover something. It’s like we’re playing a giant game telephone, but in a multi-linear fashion. If I have any secret, it’s that I do my best to stay connected with a rather large group of people that are much more cutting edge than many of them believe themselves to be.

And that’s the other piece that I find absolutely fascinating. It often seems that most people that come up to me and chat after a presentation start up the conversation by saying, “I’m so far behind everyone, but I’m trying to catch up.” I couldn’t disagree more. In my experience, most educators are still FAR ahead of the curve.

Here’s what I mean. Jump onto a public bus or train. How many people on there do you think have ever created a blog? Listening to a podcast? Have created a network on Twitter? Know how to use Google Docs? Have collaborated on a wiki? And so on… What percentage of teachers do you think are adept in all those things? I dare say the overall percentage would be fairly low.

That’s why I truly do believe that the people who are sharing ideas with me on Twitter or staying behind to chat after presentations are more than likely WAY ahead of the majority of educators. They just don’t seem to believe it themselves. Why is it so hard to believe?

So out of curiosity, I’d love to hear where you think you fall on the bell curve. Ahead, behind, right on the top of the wave? And why?

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