Today a student e-mailed me that she was confused by the university's new student portal, so she used Google to search for my senior-level writing course. Instead of locating the advanced technical writing course site, she stumbled into my personal pages and my business pages.

This is not much of a problem, since my personal pages deal with my freelance writing. Having a student read my CV isn't exactly an issue. It's not exciting reading.

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At my school, we’re looking at what our school policy on social networking between students and faculty should be.

Our initial inclination was to create a restriction between students and faculty ‘friending’ each other on social networks. arvind and I have discussed this on our webcast a number of times. For example: here and here.  But then the exceptions happen:

1. I have used Flickr, a photo social network to collaborate with my students in photography.
2. Our student environmental club has used Facebook groups and invitations to plan events between students, faculty and parents.

Given the positives that can come out of social networks, does anyone have a policy that rides the appropriateness of use tight rope?

Your thoughts/comments are appreciated.

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Here are some general AUP resources I have collected on the subject:

School Computing Wiki: http://schoolcomputing.wikia.com/wiki/Acceptable_Use_Policies

David Warlick has recently jumped into this conversation: http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/archives/1452 and http://landmark-project.com/aup20/pmwiki.php

Photo from: http://flickr.com/photos/mkeefe/1457984966/

Do you love words? Of course you do, you're an English teacher! :) Well, anyway, I found Wordie today, a social network all about words:

Wordie lets you make lists of words and phrases. Words you love, words you hate, words on a given topic, whatever. Lists are visible to everyone but can be added to by just you, a group of friends, or anyone, as you wish.

Then, if you're feeling social, join the discussion. Wordies are friendly! Add citations and comments to words and lists. See who else has listed the same words.

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Here are the slides associated with two talks I gave yesterday on Blogging and Social Networking for the University of Florida Libraries Technology Expo 2008.

The turn out was greater than I expected (around 25). My goal was to talk on topic for about 10 minutes (15 max) and then open the floor to discussion and conversation. With this size of a group, this format proved to be quite fun and engaging, allowing for local expertise to shared and acknowledged.

Two items that are connected to the Social Networking presentation that I would like to point your attention to:

1) Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship by danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison -- a terrific primer for framing a definition of social networks and encapsulating early research associated with social network sites.

2) Why do people participate in social applications? by Josh Bernoff -- a blog post based on associated findings by the people at Forrester Research. Not as academic as the boyd & Ellison piece, but equally compelling in terms of thinking about what motivates people to participate in online social communities.

Other highlights:

At the end of my Social Networks talk, I asked participants what they would like to see in a social networking application. A young undergraduate student promptly raised his hand and said (I am paraphrasing),

I would like to be able to belong to a university network where each course had a socially managed website where students could upload their notes for a particular class, engage in discussions, share resources, collaborate on assignments.

The student was not satisfied that the university's current learning management system was adequate for such student-centered activity. He went on:

This site would be a resource hub, provided to the students by the university, and would be accessible to all students so they can get a sense of what kind of work is associated with a particular course or instructor.

I admit, the smile on my face crossed two county lines! I was amazed at the suggestion and the cooperative and participatory ethos engendered by the student's comment. Responses from other participants in the audience to his suggestion ranged from potential intellectual property issues, issues with the student honor code, as well as student privacy issues. Nevertheless, I imagine there could be a set of norms or ground rules developed outlining what participants in such a system could and could not do.

We're essentially talking about creating and organizing a wiki for each course on campus that could be sorted, viewed, and connected to a larger online social hub for students.

QUESTION:
Is anybody familiar with a similar service? Does this idea ring any bells with you? Your thoughts are dearly encouraged. 

If fashion refers to styles which are current at any given time, the social networking application industry will be in business for a long, long time.

Inherent in the term social networking tools is the idea that the mode will change more quickly than the culture as a whole. The terms "fashionable" and "unfashionable" are used to describe whether an application is quickly adopted potentially "enhancing" popular modes of interaction.

From Wikipedia: The term fashion is frequently used in a positive sense, as a synonym for glamor, beauty and style. In this sense, fashions are a sort of communal art, through which a culture examines its notions of beauty and goodness.

In this sense, social networking applications are a representation of a larger ethos, with each user a contributing factor within the the greater gestalt. I like how the Wikipedia authors relate the term fashion to the idea of an agreed upon communal art where notions of beauty and propriety are further explored literally, in this case, in a materialistic mode.

Similarly, fashion can denote a sense of trendiness, or of little or passing value -- passe or non-sustainable. Most people do not want to be associated with such a way of being or doing things, thus, like social networking tools themselves, fashions ultimately exist based on our need to explore, refine, represent, and expand our vision and understanding of our selves.

Artwork: My heroine, Maira Kalman.

A nice, brief description of four technologies people think will be key to long-term portability of data across social media.

Justin and I have been talking a lot lately about what’s wrong with social networking. Much has been written about social network fatigue and about the lack of data portability provided by many of the major social networks. For a variety of reasons, the portability of my identity and the graph of who my friends are and my relationships to them - in other words, me and my social network - is an extremely interesting problem to me. (And as Eric says, every good piece of software starts with a developer scratching his own itch.) Perhaps I’m not so interested in data portability aspects of getting my photos out of Flickr or my bookmarks out of Delicious because it’s already so easy to do. Getting my information about myself and my social network out of Facebook isn’t easy to do…

Facebook’s approach is a classic old-fashioned business model propped up by creating artificial scarcity where none actually exists. It’s much like the problems with the academic publishing businesses right now. The journal publishers want me to come up with a great research idea, go find funding for the work, do the work, write up the work, and then completely sign over all the rights to my work to them - so that I have to pay a license fee to use my own writing with my own students in my own classroom. Facebook wants me to have meet lots of people, make friends with many of them, spend my time connecting the dots between myself and my friends online, and label our relationships, so that Facebook can tell me I don’t have permission to use my own work. Springer, Elsevier, and Facebook… just another couple of data silos.

So Justin and I asked each other, instead of making it easier to get our data out of those silos, why trap our data in those silos in the first place? Let’s just bypass the whole problem. In the same way that we publish our research results on our own blogs instead of having the results hijacked by (published in) peer-reviewed journals, let’s take the same approach with our identities and social networks.

This would have to get implemented somehow, and since Justin and I are both Wordpress users here’s what we’re thinking:

• There doesn’t need to be a social network to join - you don’t need to pour your data into yet another silo.
• Your personal blog is the perfect place for all your profile information (a la Facebook) and your identity information (including the kinds of stuff you would aggregate and share via FriendFeed) to be aggregated and displayed. It’s your site; why not keep all your information about yourself and your friends there?
• Existing blog mechanisms like trackback and trackback moderation already show us how we can set up an “Add a Friend” feature in which we can build up a list of friends annotated with relationships (aka a social network) and then expose this list as XFN, FOAF, and whatever else you like (seems like RDF would be a natural choice).
• Existing plugins let us replicate most of Facebook and similar sites’ functionalities, including extended profiles, a “mini-feed” of what your friends are doing, the ability to “poke” friends, and of course the plugin architecture gives you an open platform for extending core functionality (replicating Facebook isn’t the end goal, but if we can’t “at least” do that it will be hard to get traction)
• Additional plugins could take us quickly beyond what Facebook and other sites have to offer
• Once your identity becomes completely intertwingled with your blog, things like OpenID start to make much more sense - your username is now also the URL to your identity
• &c.

This no-silos / everyone owns their own data approach gives you a fully distributed social network. Wordpress-Multiuser and existing plugins give you 70% of the fully distributed network. Let’s do the last 30%! Let’s not just “open” social networks, let’s fully distribute them and take back control. Let’s not just demand permissions to use our own data, let’s just own our own data so that we don’t need anyone’s permission.

Justin is blogging some of the other people thinking this way. I know Brian and Jim and Darcy are keen on extending WP-MU to support more personal, intimate learning experiences. Who else out there is interested?

New York Measuring Teachers by Test Scores

How's that for a headline?

Here's the article itself by JENNIFER MEDINA, published January 21, 2008 in the New York Times.

This proposition could have a wide ranging impact across the teaching profession-- from layoffs, to pay increases, to publishing companies building testing and training materials.

I feel compelled to ask, does a teacher who scores high on a standardized test make a better teacher? They might be academically more gifted, but this doesn't mean he or she is a better teacher.

This article scratches the surface of a larger issue concerning evaluation and supervision. How are schools regularly assessing teachers? What instruments are being used? What is being done with the data?

When I taught in high school, I was evaluated once a year by the principle. This evaluation went into my file. I never attended a follow-up meeting (none was ever scheduled).

So how could the administration tell if I was a good teacher? I could simply assign all my students A's and never ask them to lift a finger.

My school became a member of the Coalition of Essential Schools. There we learned protocols for creating critical friends groups where teachers worked in teams across the grades and curriculae to provide meaningful feedback on lessons, assignments, grading concerns, etc.

So while the principal never saw much of me, my critical friends network did. This group showed me ways to be more effective, more visible, more concerted regarding the time and energy I put into creating meaningful experiences for my students.

The group and its organizational principles provided me an opportunity for building fellowship and trust with my peers as well as developing a clear purpose for evaluating my teaching and students' work.  

The moral of my story:

Organizational structures have more to do with teacher success than achievement scores. 

Click here for more information on social networks and teacher professional development.  

http://xl-medium.net/WPblog/2008/01/15/networks-as-learning-

Preface

As I begin compiling resources that will become chapter two of my dissertation (i.e., the literature review), I thought I would share relevant findings as they seem appropriate. This week I offer you an historical glimpse of social networks as a means of supporting teacher professional development.

Introduction

Over the past three decades, a re-examination and re-framing of the notions of teaching, learning and schooling (which includes a fundamental examination of practice, policy, and organizational structures for teachers) have been introduced by a number of educational researchers (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999a, 1999b; Darling-Hammond, 1993; Lieberman, 1992; McLaughlin & Talbert, 1993). These studies have clearly revealed a tremendous amount of information about the organizational structures and conditions that best support sustainable teacher learning over time.

Organizational structures

To begin with, research tells us that teacher professional development is only sustainable if the organizational conditions are appropriate (Lieberman, 2000, p. 221). While this might seem like common sense, given the pressure of school reform measures, accommodating emerging technologies and changes in organizational structures has, in many cases, proven difficult (Lieberman, 2000, p. 221). Educational bureaucracies often prescribe "one size fits all" solutions that many times ignore the specific training and developmental needs of teachers within their specific contexts. (Lieberman, 2000, p. 221). additionally, teachers are often "'developed' by outside 'experts,' rather than participating in their own development" (Lieberman, 2000, p. 221).

Development networks

While bureaucracies do provide much needed functionality in managing hundreds of teachers, they can prove unwieldy and untidy when it comes to responding to the emergent conditions and "discrete needs of schools, teachers, and students" (Lieberman, 2000, p. 221). Research has demonstrated that educational development networks that employ organizational structures that are loose, responsive, and accountable are well suited to this era of new technologies and potentially rapid change (Lieberman, 2000, p. 221).

Teacher professional development networks provide an organizational means to serve school-based educators within the context of their own work. This network is composed of school- and university-based educators and is organized "to work together to better serve students" (Lieberman, 2000, p. 226) by providing a context of support for each educator.

Accordingly, teacher professional development networks can emerge spontaneously or intentionally based on the need for people to work together "on an agreed-upon purpose" (Lieberman, 2000, p. 226). These agreed-upon purposes develop and shift over time, thus the need for organizational structures to be relatively loose and flexible. Being loose and flexible does not mean the organizational structure does not promote or provide accountability measures. Instead, accountability criteria become part of the networks structure wherein requisite measures and milestones are factored in to the networks underlying structures themselves.

The benefit of teacher professional development networks is that they support bureaucratic reforms by tying professional development and growth to the interests and needs of practitioners.

Historical perspectives and research

Sixty school improvement networks were explored in the late 1970s by Allen Parker. Parker's research (1977) identified five key operational characteristics within these networks:

• commitment to an idea
• shared purpose
• a mix of information sharing and psychological support
• a facilitator who insures participation and equal treatment
• an egalitarian ethos

Other educational researchers picked up and expanded Parker's analysis by examining the theoretical implications from both the inside of the network and outside (Miles, 1978; Rosenbaum, 1977, Schon, 1977; McLaughlin & Talbert, 1993; Newmann & Wehlage, 1995). McLaughlin and Talbert (1993) examined secondary schools over a 5-year period and discovered that teachers who took risks and looked for new ways of working with their students developed organic learning networks with their peers thusly creating norms for an open, supportive professional development environment. These networks provided a structure for practitioners to share lesson plans, to learn from one another, and support each other in their practice, what we might call a critical friends groups.

In 1995 Newmann and Wehlage conducted a national 5-year study examining the common characteristics of elementary schools that were intentionally retooling organizational structures to better meet the needs of their students. They discovered that successful schools featured a professional network of practitioners who took collective responsibility in working together to develop a shared, clear purpose towards improving student learning.

It is clear from both McLaughlin and Talbert's (1993) and Newmann and Wehlage's (1995) research that school-based professional learning communities provided educators with the kinds of organizational structures that made professional learning both continuous and sustainable.

1n 1996, Lieberman and Grolnick conducted research on 16 educational reform networks operating for a minimum of 5 years. They examined common themes and tensions associated with these networks and discovered that, regardless of the network's genesis, the networks themselves served as training grounds for practitioners to collaboratively work together, work toward building consensus, and commit to continuous learning and professional development (Lieberman & Grolnick, 1996). Collaboration and collaborative relationships provided opportunities for practitioners to build trusting among network members which is critical to the nurturing and development of new ideas. According to Lieberman and Grolnick (1996) these new ideas aided in the building of network "buzz," i.e., interest and participation, as participants ideas and practices further developed and transformed.

In terms of tensions that were noted by Lieberman and Grolnick's (1996) study, many practitioner participants in these networks were continuously trying to balance long-term goals and short-term needs within their network and their daily, professional (school-based) practice. In this regard, Lieberman (2000) notes:

"Sustaining educators' commitment and interest hinges on keeping work focused on practice. However, focusing on practice involves taking a position as to where the knowledge comes from that informs the work of the network. This is of great importance because networks are trying to bring people together who have different ways of acquiring, developing, and using knowledge (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 1993; Sirotnik and Goodlad, 1998). Keeping a balance between inside knowledge (the experiential knowledge of teachers) and outside knowledge (knowledge created by research and conceptualization) is a hallmark of successful collaboratives" (p. 223).

Summary

In order for professional teacher networks to survive, the energy, participation, and commitment of network participants is vital. Organizational structures must be able to work with the bureaucratic needs of federal, state, and local authorities, as well as the needs of the school-based practitioner. Teacher professional development networks can provide a bridge that supports administrative directives and the growth and development needs of practitioners.

Next steps

What organizational structures provide mechanisms that allow practitioners to meet individual, student, and administration needs? Are there specific strategies that support the creation and continuous nourishment of a teacher professional development network?

And you?

Your thoughts and suggestions are highly encouraged.

References:

Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. L. (1993). Inside/outside: Teacher research and teacher knowledge. New York: Teachers College Press.

Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. L. (1999a). Teacher learning in professional communities: Three knowledge-practice relationships. In P.D. Pearson & A. Iran-Nejad (Eds.), Review of research in education (Vol. 24, pp. 251-307). Washington, DC: American educational Research Association.

Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. L. (1999b). The teacher research movement: A decade later. Educational Researcher, 28(7), 15-25.

Darling-Hammond, L. (1993). Reframing the school reform agenda: developing capacity for school transformation. Phi Delta Kappan, 74(10), 753-761. Lieberman, A. (1992, September). The meaning of scholarly activity and the building of community. Educational Researcher.

Lieberman, A. (2000). Networks as learning communities: Shaping the future of teacher development. Journal of Teacher Education, 51(3), 221-227.

Lieberman, A., & McLaughlin, M. W. (1992). Networks for educational change: Powerful and problematic. Phi Delta Kappan, 73(9), 673-677.

Lieberman, A., & Grolnick, M. (1996). Networks and reform in in American education. Teachers College Record, 98(1), 7-45.

McLaughlin, M. W., & Talbert, J. W. (1993). Contexts that matter for teaching and learning. Palo Alto, CA: Context Center on Secondary School Teaching.

Miles, M. B. (1978). On networking. Unpublished manuscript, Center for Policy Research, National Institute of Education, Washington, DC.

Newmann, F., & Wehlage, G. (1995). Successful school restructuring. Madison: Center on Organization and Restructuring of Schools, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Parker, A. (1977). Networks for innovation and problem solving and their use for improving education: A comparative overview. Unpublished manuscript, School Capacity for Problem Solving Group, National Institute for Education, Washington, DC.

Rosenbaum, A. (1977). Social networks as a policy resource: Some insights drawn from the community organizational and community action experiences. Unpublished manuscript, Network Development Staff, School Capacity for Problem Solving Group, National Institute of Education, Washington, DC.

Schon, D. A. (1977). Network related intervention. Unpublished manuscript, Center for Policy Research, national Institute of Education, Washington, DC.

Sirotnik, K., & Goodlad, J. I. (1988). School university partnerships: Concepts and cases. New York: Teachers College Press.

Google Images: typing from nlm.nih.com networks-2 from the University of Chicago SocialNetworks9 from licasdigital.com