Twitter Lists & Aggregated Content: Are We Responsible?

I was part of an interesting discussion on Twitter Friday night and I wanted to share it here, as well as add a few final thoughts. Participants that I reference are Bud Hunt, Brian Crosby, Dean Shareski, Anne Van Meter, Barbara Barreda, and Karen Fasimpaur. Thanks to all of you for helping me think through these ideas.

The discussion started with a tweet from Bud Hunt where he shared some of what his school district is doing with Twitter. Here’s part of the tweet trail (I’m sure there were comments from other folks as well, but these are the ones I remembered and grabbed).





































I just want to add a few concluding thoughts. First, full disclosure, Bud called me on his way home from work and we talked for a while about this.

Second, I wasn’t arguing against what Bud’s district is doing. In fact, I really, really like what they’re doing, I was just trying to explore the ramifications and think through some of the issues.

Third, I wanted to “finish” my part of the discussion with Karen that was interrupted by my having to go make dinner. This is what I would’ve tweeted next (is this then a set of retroactive tweets?):

• @kfasimpaur It’s not so much the linking that I see as the problem.
• It’s the creation and the encouragement.
• By creating the Twitter list, @budtheteacher’s district has created something *new*, not just linked to something.
• I think the act of creation does imply some type of “ownership” and “responsibility”
• And when they publicize it & encourage folks both to add themselves to the list & to follow, that also blurs the lines.
• So, say a student in Bud’s district joins the Twitter list. Then he tweets that he’s . . .
• . . . planning on hurting himself or others. Is there some kind of monitoring in place? . . .
• . . . Should there be? Or say he tweets something offensive, then what?
• The fact the district has a disclaimer http://blogs.stvrain.k12.co.us/twitter/opt-in/ that they . . .
• . . . “reserve the right to determine the membership of the SVVSD’s Twitter Lists” implies some ownership . . .
• . . . and that some quasi-monitoring might be going on.
• So, again, I support what his district is doing and love the transparency and the community.
• But I do think it’s really complicated and there are many things we still need to think through.

Now, I actually might have tweeted something different because there probably would’ve been some replies in there that would have altered my thinking, but you get the idea.

Transparency and community building by teachers, schools and districts is something I very much support, and I think what St. Vrain is doing is very compelling and very interesting, but I also think it’s uncharted territory and there are some pretty complicated issues involved. This is a really important conversation to have, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Thought(s) For The Day 10-7-08

I presented at the SPARK conference today at Arizona State University and the keynote speaker was Scott McNealy from Sun. He said many interesting things regarding his views on sharing (for it), open source (very much for it), and the financial bailout by the U.S. Government (very, very much against it). He told the students not to pay so much attention to the “mission” of companies, but their cause (a "higher order bit"). He said Sun’s cause was to "Eliminate the digital divide without harming the planet." (Sun’s thin client Sun Ray terminals are inexpensive and use only 4 watts.)

He also spent a decent amount of time plugging Curriki, which I thought was interesting given that this was a gathering of mostly IT folks (the conference was designed to bring together folks from the IT industry and students in ASU’s various IT and Business programs).

At one point, when he was talking about open source and the importance of transparency, he said:

If the trojan horse had been made of glass, do you think they’d have rolled it through the gate?

Now, at that point he was specifically talking about transparency and the security advantages of open source software, but I thought it related very nicely to all the conversations we’ve had about transparency in the education space.

Later he talked about how many foreign governments are going open source for both security and cost reasons and that the U.S. is lagging behind in this area. Many of the business and academic leaders of Arizona were in the room and he challenged them to “open Arizona” as a way to get more people "on the network" and involved in 21st century learning and working. That got me thinking again about the use of proprietary software in my own school district and wondering how much longer we can continue to be "closed." No answers to that question, just thinking.

Tapped In To U of M

I had the opportunity yesterday to use Tapped In for the first time. Two teachers from my staff development (Anne Smith and Barbara Stahlhut) and I had an opportunity to chat with graduate students from the University of Michigan. They’re enrolled in a graduate teacher certification program and are taking a class titled "Teaching with Technology." According to one of the instructors (Jeff Stanzler), the class attempts to "expose our students to different ways of thinking about schools and about pedagogy (along with some peeks at web 2.0 technologies, video editing, etc.)." They set up "virtual conferences" with a few folks, including us, to "learn about the creative ways in which you're thinking about both professional and community development, and could hear more about the role that technology has played in this endeavor."

If you’re interested, here’s the transcript of the session (pdf). I don’t think there’s anything particularly earth shaking in there, but I thought I’d link to it in case anyone wondered how a group chat might look. It was fun to do and I hope it was at least a little bit helpful for those graduate students. I’m still learning how to be comfortable in real-time online conversations; they definitely don’t feel natural to me yet. It’s still hard for me to translate what’s in my head into relatively short sentences in real-time, and to keep up with multiple questions at the same time. And I do still feel somewhat at a loss without the face-to-face contact to get a better feel for how the conversation is going. Definitely some skills there I need to work on, so thanks Jeff and Liz and grad students for the practice.