Tag Archive for 'twitter'

YouthNet

Published by Lindsea on February 25, 2008 in Learning. 16 Comments

Last week sometime (I don’t keep track of days), I video-Skyped with the Korean Project Global Cooling club. PGC is the brain child of Clay Burell, with the aid of Bill Farren (who made the Did You Ever Wonder video). Their goal, in the words of Christopher Watson (the teacher helping coordinate PGC Hawaii), is to mobilize a global network of students to report on the efforts for sustainability in their communities, and also to connect them for further work together. The idea for the concert is to bring attention to the website and all the work and resources that will be posted there. We’ll be having a Hawaii-based concert for the cause in April. I was amazed at how easy it was to connect with people half-way around the world. True, their time zone maybe be a day and a half ahead of me, but that doesn’t mean I can’t come to their Project Global Cooling meetings.

What I really hope this connection between people all over the world evolves into is a place where teachers won’t have to do the connecting for the students. When we talk about a sustainable future, we don’t just mean environmentally. Places like Nervousness.org (an art project forum) are self-sustaining home bases where projects are formed between like-minded artists. There is no third party that sets them up, nor are there painfully difficult organizational problems to deal with. The artists do the art, exchange addresses, send the art, and then one person puts it all together. I see no reason why there can’t be somewhere for students to gather, talk, and create with their contemporaries (sans teacher).

We’ve all talked about how it’s time to stop underestimating kids, how it’s time to give us a voice. Out on the blogosphere front, things are definitely improving. But I look at things like Twitter (where the student population would be considered “endangered” at best), and, like Sean, I wonder why students haven’t all taken to the web. The answer is simple: where would they go? There is no single place for global student collaboration.

That’s why I created two places that I think will help students to self-connect.

The first place is a Twitter account called YouthNet. This Twitter account is a tool for students to find other students on Twitter. They can also use it to introduce themselves to the student network. For example, this would be my tweet: “@YouthNet I’m Lindsea, 16 years old, Hawaii. Interested in art, writing, photography, music, sustainability, film. skype=sonicyouthgurl”. In these 140 characters or less, I’m able to introduce myself, say where I’m from, and mention the areas in which I’m interested in starting projects. YouthNet would follow only students, so actually finding other students on Twitter wouldn’t be difficult. Student Twitterers are then able to advertise their projects (school-related or not) to other students.

The second place is a Wikispace wiki. The wiki is similar to the Twitter account in that it is a tool for starting projects and forming connections with similarly passioned people. There’s a page called World Connection where people list their name, blog address, Skype screen name, Twitter account, e-mail address, and interests. This is the starting point for networking. Then there is the “Talk” page, which basically serves as a place for discussion (obviously), and a very chillaxed forum for either casual or serious conversation. If the students choose, they can use Talk as the starting place for their projects. For brainstorming, collaborating, and swapping ideas, this is the place.

In the video chat I had with PGC in Korea, one of Clay’s students, Soojin, gives the example of a World Geography project. Let’s see how this project would work using YouthNet tools: So person X is assigned a World Geography project of her choosing. She decides to do it on exploring the anthropology of young people in different countries. Using YouthNet, she would first post the thesis of her project on the Talk page. Interested parties would then reply with their own input. She could also look through the World Connection page and contact the students interested in writing. She’d send out a mass email to all students interested, telling them in more detail what the parameters of the project are and the deadline. The students would write about their lives in the various countries all over the world, send her a couple pictures, and then person X would write a summary, and then self-publish the original stories and pictures on lulu.com.

This place that I’m creating is for students, first and foremost. It is platform for self-directed collaboration with fellow students all over the world, and it is the epitome of unschooliness and passion-based learning. The best part about this is that once it’s created and all the details are worked out, the project will be sustainable. That is, once it’s up and running, there will be no central leader. The students would have complete control. My youthful idealism has complete faith in my fellow students’ ability to lead themselves with world consciousness and integrity. I know that we’re capable of utilizing something like this to take the technological emphasis out of Internet collaboration, and use these tools only as a medium to crystallize all of our amazing potential.

Global Villages

Published by Arthus Erea on December 11, 2007 in Leading, and Learning. 31 Comments

In The Sun

I live in two small towns. One, in rural Vermont, fits the classic definition of a small town: a quaint town hall and white church. Even more importantly: the community is closely knit. Whenever any interesting event happens, everybody knows about it within 24 hours. News spreads like wildfire; and our town town paper only comes out every month. We do not rely upon formal systems to spread the news. Instead, every person leverages their social network (the analog kind) to spread the news. Some people have immense networks (mayoral candidates) while others might only share the news with a couple of people. Regardless of how they learn it, within a week everyone knows about Mary’s new son.

I also live in another kind of small town. In this town, I control who attains citizenship. I am able to sculpt this village (network) to my exact tastes; creating a village with only those who interest me. This is a crucial aspect of our new networks—it is constantly engaging. How often have you been in a room filled with people but felt completely alone? This does not happen in our personal networks built online. Whether you agree with those in your learning network or not, they are always a source of a good conversation. Consequently, everyone in the network grows closer and closer into a tightly knit community.

Online Communities MapWhile many attempts have been made to map the internet before, too many of them focus upon the what and the how rather than the who. One of my favorite maps of the internet shows each tool as a country. I believe this is fundamentally wrong, because we build our network around the people, not the place. It doesn’t take a plane ticket to get from Myspace to Facebook—it takes a couple of steps. Usually, most of your network will walk right along with you. Thus, it really just becomes a matter of walking down the streets with your friends with your network. Together, you form a small village, with location based upon similarities in interests, not on geography (both physical and virtual).

Street Map

Just like in a real village, the news in our virtual (social) villages spreads like wildfire. From person to person, the news is passed. Never have I seen a more perfect example of this than with Students 2.0. In our first day alone, we got over 2,500 visits to our splash page. A significant portion of these visits can be attributed to the power of Twitter and our personal learning network. When we first launched the splash page, I watched as the tweets flew by—the village truly came through for us. The gossip certainly triggered an amazing reaction, which ended up growing exponentially.

After the original buzz on Twitter, the local (to our social village) news media came in. In our social village, this is the blogosphere. Seeing the amount of gossip and buzz happening, the local news media believes it merits a story. Of course, once one newspaper picks up the story, the rest follow. Shortly, over 100 stories were written about Students 2.0: bringing in even more gossip and conversation; the self generated P.R. cycle continues. Of course, then it is time to pull in a camera crew to produce a video.

Seeing the success of the video, even more people talked about Students 2.0 and learned about the project. Continually, the vibrations resonate through the village. A town bell has been rung, and everyone congregates on the town green, eager to hear the news.

The launch of Students 2.0 has been a great example of how powerful our social villages can be. I myself have learned a lot about myself, marketing, and the world through the participation in this project and the dialogue with my social village.

Going back to my real world village, I bemoan the location of my high school; it is outside of the village. While both are dependent upon each other, the school is not a part of the village. Consequently, all of the conversations happening within the village rarely infiltrate the thick walls of school. However, as I have seen with Students 2.0, our social villages can add immense value—both professionally and personally. By not utilizing this network, schools become stagnant; news flows slowly and change moves at a snails pace.

A critical step forward for schools would be to embrace the social villages of students and faculty alike. Schools should be developing portals and websites which take into account the social aspects of our lives. Even more importantly, once those networks are developed, the users should have the ability to welcome others into their village; too often we see systems which further isolate the school community from the larger social community.

This doesn’t need to be a radical step. Rather, a control system can and should be adopted—just as we selectively chose the citizens in our social villages (Twitter). Regardless of how this change is accomplished, it must come about; if schools continue to be separate from our social villages, our villages will continue to evolve exponentially while schools will stay rooted in the past.

The social villages we build around us—spanning various mediums—extend our mind and offer immense power which schools would do well to integrate rather than ignore.

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported