Susan Banister

After the success of the audio recording I did with @chrisrat (thanks CallBurner!), it seems obvious that talking to as many people as possible about their prvate/personal use of Twitter and other social media is going to be really productive.

So here’s the next in a growing series – @susanbanister who works for Channel 4 Learning.

Her company is at the beginning of its journey into social media and Susan has some fascinating insights to share in Part 2:

Music: Kevin MacLeod Can’t use this flash audio player? Here’s a link to download the mp3 – http://drop.io/kmaudio/asset/susanbanister-musicl-mp3

Look out for part 3 – I might come and ask you to take part. If you’d like to be interviewed, please add a comment below or contact me on Twitter – @kevinmulryne

Do you put all your tweets in one basket?

Yesterday I listened to the latest episode of the fantastic Explicit Web podcast. If you are interested in web design, you really ought to subscribe – it’s hosted by 3 engaging designers who choose some very varied and interesting topics to discuss. (Warning – they occasionally swear when they are excited/annoyed.) One of this week’s topics was particularly relevant to something I have been thinking about recently and something I am researching for the National College – how companies and organisations use Twitter.

How do companies and organisations use Twitter?

The guy on the podcast (sorry I can’t remember his name) identifies two ways of using Twitter. Actually I think there are more than this and it’s impossible to categorise all use into definite categories but here’s basically what he was saying:

1. Twitter for updates – no human element, no direct interaction
2. Twitter for conversation – human contact and intentional, personal interaction

He likened type 1 to an RSS feed. In fact, he bemoaned the fact that he often receives the same information via RSS and Twitter so ends up unfollowing the offending Twitter account. Is this a problem? If you work for an organisation (any kind) or business, do you split up your Tweets into a ‘news’ Twitter feed and a ‘personal’ Twitter feed? Do you use your personal account for business tweets or do you/can you keep them separate? I think it’s more likely that there is a third way.  I think personal tweets will always blur into work and vice-versa as this is the way humans interact and it’s the way I think Twitter encourages.

How should you behave in a Tweeted world?

Is it necessary to be genuine in all you tweet? Should you be yourself in your personal Twitter account? Should you avoid selling your company or organisation’s wares? It looks like a difficult balancing act.

Step forward the expert – Chris Ratcliffe!

Chris Ratcliffe

Someone I have followed on Twitter for ages who seems to manage this blurred identity effortlessly is @chrisrat. So I was delighted that he agreed to let me pick his brains and record the output via Skype and the excellent CallBurner. Here’s his Prezi on the subject of e-marketing and our subsequent conversation:

Music: Kevin MacLeod Can’t use this flash audio player? Here’s a link to download the mp3 – http://drop.io/kmaudio/asset/recorded-cal-musicl-mp3 Photo credit: framer2009

Dr Kathy Seddon – online learning guru and famous Welsh person (@kathyseddon) recently asked me to tell her everything I know about Twitter.

She called it a ‘brain dump’.

It took some time, as you can imagine.

Later on she described me as a ‘digital gardener’. This is not an expression I had heard before but it struck a bit of a chord so I thought I’d share my thinking and a few questions.

If you have heard this term before, do let me know as I’d like to credit the originator. UPDATE: see the comments below!

GARDENER? CURATOR? IMMIGRANT? RESIDENT?

The debate around the usefulness of terms like ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’ has raged for years, as I’m sure you know. Like all labels, these can useful as starting points for debate but don’t stand up to proper analysis. There’s always a risk they will be used as shortcuts to avoid discussing or analysing the real issues.

• “They will be fine with this technology – they’re all digital natives.”
• “We can’t ask them to do that – they are digital immigrants and won’t be able to cope.”

Recently, I have also heard the term ‘curator’ a lot and, once again, it is used with the assumption that all the audience understand what it means – it is used as shorthand. I have to say it seems a bit dry to me.

BETT 2010

At the BETT show in January I took part in a discussion with (amongst others) @daveowhite about digital identity and he introduced me to the concepts of ‘digital residents’ and ‘digital vistors’. As I work in e-learning for adults at the moment this made a lot of sense.

I would classify myself most definitely as a ‘digital resident’ – hence this blog! I work to maintain and develop my online persona via blogging, twitter, posterous, delicious, Moblog, Moby Picture etc. In fact, after seeing @tombarrett ‘s home page I have set up http://everything.mulryne.com to collect a lot of these together. This sounds quite like a gardener, tending plants and creating the right conditions for growth. I tend the places on the web where I reside – I want them to grow and portray me in a positive way- to be a fruitful expression of my (online) personality.

ADULT LEARNERS

However, many (but crucially not all) of the adults I work with are very much ‘digital visitors’ – they like the web, they are not necessarily scared of it but they want to get on, get what they want and then get off again – leaving no trace that they have been there. It reminds me of the way I used the internet way back in the early 90s when I paid by the minute.

So how can we facilitate learning for groups of adults who might be ‘digital residents’ or ‘digital visitors’? What difference does it make? How far down the age range does it go?

Certainly, I’d say that every time I hear someone use one of these terms from now on, I’m going to question exactly what they mean and whether or not it’s just an excuse to avoid the hard work of analysing our audience properly.

Why don’t you do the same?

Creative Commons image credit

• The need for music
• The need to dance
• The need for stories
• The need to create
• The need for community

As I was growing up, my need to create was a powerful force. I realised one day that whenever I felt down, my personal therapy consisted of being creative.

I used to sit down with a pad and a cheap, retractable pencil and copy illustrations from ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ and ‘Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there’. I still have the pictures, now in digital format, courtesy of http://www.wiqet.com/

Nowadays, my creative needs are satisfied in a number of different ways including writing music. I sing with my son in Holy Trinity Church Choir and we have performed some  responses I wrote several times in the last year.

A CREATIVE CHALLENGE

At the beginning of this year I decided that I would set myself the task of completing six anthems for Holy Trinity Choir in 2010. It is the 800th Anniversary of the Church so it seems like a good idea to mark this personally. I feel that I will only actually succeed in finishing some serious music if I have this kind of deadline – I have been meaning to write properly for many years.

The other reason I feel the time is right for this is the discovery of a free music notation program, Muse Score, which is fantastic. I used to use Sibelius but it’s rather complicated and I can’t possibly afford the updates.

So I am underway with the Six Anthems for 2010. The first is almost complete – Into Thy Hands I Commend My Spirit.

Look out for updates.

THE FAMOUS WI-FI T-SHIRT

Even before I arrived at BETT, @ProperCoffee, @phillhowson, @architela and @peter_s_clarke had convinced me to wear my geek Wi-Fi T-shirt in my breaks from stand duty. I think without their encouragement I probably wouldn’t have bothered. So here’s the proof:

Wi-Fi T-shirt

Transformational? Well if you know me, you’d probably agree this is a bit of a departure. It’s a bit of fun but not the kind of fun I usually take part in…

So, spurred on by my new-found confidence, I started to take part in #BETTtig on Twitter. This meant I got to meet both @dughall and @deerwood who both turned up at the National College stand at the same time. I BETTtigged @deerwood and so the game continued.

TEDx AND THE ‘I CAN’ BUG

After a torrent of tweeting during the day, I decided to see if I could get into the TEDx Orenda event, despite not having a ticket – again, this is out of character for me! It turned out to be very straightforward to get into and I settled down with the trusty mobile to check the tweets via the official tag #TEDx.

An inspirational video from Kiran Bir Sethi set the tone for the evening as we heard the story of how Indian children have been empowered through what she calls the ‘I can’ bug. In this spirit, I sought out various Twitter contacts including @DawnHallybone, @TerryFreedman and someone I have wanted to meet for a very long time, @Alfie, who was one of the presenters. It was a fantastic event with a wide variety of quality speakers.

@Alfie at TEDx

I could have sloped away after the event and in previous years I think I would have done but the momentum built up by my Twitter activities  and TEDx led me to introduce myself to people who were, without exception, warm, friendly and keen to talk.

TWITTER AT BETT – GET INVOLVED!

So, without wishing to labour the point, I have had an incredible first day at BETT this year and it was all thanks to Twitter and the fantastic folk in my Personal Learning Network. What will day 2 bring? See you on Twitter… #BETT2010

Royal Shakespeare Theatre

This is what the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon looks like today.

Obviously, it’s in the middle of a re-build. A lot of the original, 1930s façade has been retained with modern additions.

The most obvious of the additions is the viewing tower on the right. It was not in the original design and was added by the architects to make the scheme more welcoming and encourage visitors, even if they are not coming to a performance. You can read the full story of the design here.

VIEWING TOWER OR CAMPANILE?

When I first saw the tower I thought I recognised its shape, next to the theatre. Suddenly it came to me – the tower reminded me of an Italian campanile. In fact one campanile in particular – next to the Duomo in Florence.

Now, this post is at serious risk of sounding highly pretentious but just bear with me.

Florence Duomo and Campanile

This is what Florence Cathedral (Duomo) and bell tower (campanile) looks like. It’s very difficult to get a good view from the front but you get the idea. Better images are here and here (but not Creative Commons).

What I’m wondering is whether or not the architects had this in mind when they proposed the tower. Is there some kind of connection between the two buildings or is it pure coincidence?

There are obviously many connections between the plays of Shakespeare and Italy but what about Shakespeare and Florence? Maybe they had in mind that the RST is like a cathedral to Shakespeare?

If anyone knows anything about this, please put me out of my misery and leave a comment!

Photo credit:

Wallwisher

I need to introduce someone to the world of UK education soon so I was trying to think of all the relevant education organisations she will need to investigate to get a good idea of the ‘domain’.

This, I found, is not an easy task. There are many important bodies both within and beyond the government sphere. I was sure to miss lots out. So I turned to my personal learning network.

PERSONAL LEARNING NETWORK

For me, this consists of my colleagues at work and my Twitter buddy list. A quick request for a link on Twitter resulted in a great link to a page on the DCSF site from @ChrisPadden which was a great start.

I then thought how I could get more of my PLN involved and decided to use the lovely http://www.wallwisher.com to set up a wall for suggestions. Tweeting and messages to my work colleagues have so far generated 25 suggestions on the wall which can be seen here:

http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/edorgs

Please feel free to add any more you can think of.

This fantastic response has further convinced me of the value of crowdsourcing via the PLN – and it’s also been a lot of fun seeing it develop!

When all the responses are in, I intend to transfer the links to a more useable format/system. If you have any ideas of what I could use, let me know!

Holy Trinity Church - a thin place

Jane (not her real name), a long-standing member of the congregation of a local church recently died at quite a young age.

THIN PLACES

At her funeral, the minister giving the address referred to the concept of thin places. This idea comes from pre-Christian Ireland and describes special places where the distance between this world and the next seems very small. Some of the aura of the other world seems to have crossed into these places through a divide which is thin enough to allow this kind of transfer.

Everyone experiences thin places differently and everyone has their own, personal collection of thin places, whether or not they are religious. Perhaps they have special memories of a place or a time when they were happy, at peace or in love. For me, thin places include Trinity Hall Chapel where my wife and I sang in the choir, Culbone in Somerset where we stayed in a fantastic holiday cottage and the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, where we were married.

THIN PEOPLE?

It’s not very helpful terminology but it seems clear to me that there are also ‘thin’ people. Jane was one of these. The minister visited her shortly before she died and said it was like being in the presence of someone who was beginning to be ‘beamed up’ in the Star Trek fashion. Jane was always thin, though. Everyone who met her noticed it. She was the leader of the church welcome team for a reason.

THIN LEARNING?

So what has all this got to do with education, learning or elearning? Well, I was wondering what we might be able to do to create thin learning – online or offline.

The ultimate in user-centred, usable and accessible online environments would, I suppose be the thinnest – the ones which get in the way the least. I have heard people saying that when the technology becomes essentially invisible the learning takes over but it’s not really possible to have invisible learning environments – they are always visible in some way. It’s easy to give examples of environments which are the opposite of thin – several I have used are at the very least ‘tubby’.

Another obvious example would be the presentations we have all had to endure which are so thick they message is completely obscured – you can’t see the message for the medium.

It won’t be the same for everyone, of course, just like thin places. Art studios in secondary schools are manic, disorganised, chaotic places for some but for others they are thin – letting the creativity flow and stimulating deep learning. I suppose the trick is to maximise thinness for as many as possible.

THIN TEACHERS?

I’m sure we can all think of thin teachers – mine was a history teacher who dramatised the topics with dry humour and had an amazing mastery of the subject. History came alive and the room melted away – the walls were made thin and history flowed through.

I also tried to create a thin environment in my classroom. When introducing a year 3/4 class to the internet (this was a long time ago!) I suspended thin tape in a complicated web from the ceiling, joining pictures of various types of computers – pretty obvious but seemed to work for them.

WHO’S THIN?

Maybe I’ll finish with a few recommendations of people I think may be amongst the ranks of the thin:

• @tombarrett with all his collaborative and creative crowdsourcing activities (amongst many other thin practices)
• @dawnhallybone the doyen of classroom games-based learning
• @russeltarr history teacher and online guru
• @mwclarkson ICT super-teacher and blogging super-power

That’s only scratching the surface, of course – add your own nominations for thin people below…

Photo credit:

Is it a blog? Is it a plane?

Many thanks to Twitter buddies in my PLN for persuading me to just use this WordPress blog for the Mulryne web site from now on.

When is a blog not a blog?

As they pointed out, WP has many, many plug-ins and the ability to set up pages so you can make parts of it look like a website anyway.

So here we go with the blebsite/weblogsite or whatever.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bestrated1/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0