Last night @RobinThailand invited me to join a Virtual Staffroom podcast. So I fired up Skype and accepted an invite from someone I didn’t really know before, @betchaboy. I was following him but I don’t think we had chatted much before last night.
He runs a fantastic podcast called the Virtual Staffroom. He describes it as, bringing a bunch of people together to chat. Last night, the topic was open and we started with copyright law because of a question one of the people in the conversation asked. Our discussion ranged from copyright law, to creative commons, to finding sources of images, using iPods in the classroom, DRM of said iPods, whether or not the iPad is useful in education. It was a great conversation and it felt just like we were in a staffroom discussing stuff at lunch.
The difference of course was that we had 6 people chatting from 4 different countries, representing 3 different nationalities. A conversation about copyright law is going to be richer with such different experiences of what the law actually is, and how it affects education in our different countries. About half of our conversation was about copyright in general, with consensus being that the current laws don’t make much sense. If the purpose of copyright law is to protect innovation, we agreed the current laws are failing to do this.
However, aside from what we talked about, the structure for me really worked. There were some small technical changes, but to me, this is what #edchat should be. We have this gigantic "virtual room" full of people chatting during our weekly sessions, and while I enjoy the exchange of ideas, it has gotten too big to handle. It is becoming increasingly difficult to handle the flow of information during this conversation.
If our purpose is to create conversation between educators, and exchange ideas, then I think we should look at our format more closely. Is it really achieving that? When the actual chat is over, #edchat continues more informally and works really well but when the official chat is on, I can’t really follow the entire conversation, nor would I want to. I likened #edchat to 500 people shouting in a room, all trying to be heard at once to a colleague, and once she tried it, she agreed.
I’d like to see #edchat continue, but I think that next time, I will try and pull off a few people from #edchat to have a more personal discussion via Skype. Rather than trying to have a gigantic conversation with everyone, I think a weekly discussion with 4 or 5 other teachers via live audio would be far more valuable. Anyone want to join me next week?
Tom Whitby says:
Thanks for the suggestion. The purpose of #edchat however is not to be the Discussion but the Chat to start the discussion. It would be crazy to try to follow over 3,000 tweets that arrive within an hour. The best strategy I have found is to engage only those chatters whose views I choose to tackle, either in agreement or disagreement.Beyond personal reflection and the complete archive after the conclusion, the following days offer a great number of blog posts on the #edchat topic.I referred to much of this in my post, #Edchat Revisited http://tomwhitby.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/edchat-revisited/
July 9, 2010 — 11:06 am
David Wees says:
Okay fair enough. Let’s start #edchat with some questions then, and then break into smaller groups via hashtags. This will make the process easier to follow for everyone. One suggestion recently from @janellewilson was to use hashtags by subject area or grade level. Another idea was to separate each question into it’s own hashtag (and then be careful not to mix tags). We could also have some dedicated subtopic hashtags, like #edreform, #edparents, #edstudents, #edadmin, #edtech, etc…
I think #edchat is incredibly valuable, but only currently have a tiny, tiny fraction of all of the teachers using this tool. What will happen if every teacher gets on board? Current system isn’t scalable, just thinking we should look ahead now and make the system work for us, rather than us working to fit to the system.
July 9, 2010 — 11:14 am
Tom Whitby says:
Everything is a trade off. If we did breakout into groups we would lose the perspective of those who may not be directly involved with a topic, but have an unbiased opinion that offers a new perspective to an old problem. Again, anyone is free to take from #Edchat what they need to create their own discussion groups. The format of #Edchat has been a starter for thoughts, reflections,posts, and conferences. It is working fine as is for now. We accept the fact that it does not suit everyone’s needs or likes. It is not all things for all people.
Your personal reflection, reaction, passion, and need to create something more is what #Edchat has been created for. It works. Please take things further with your plan to involve more educators. And thanks for participating so vibrantly and so passionately in #Edchat.
July 9, 2010 — 11:31 am
David Wees says:
Maybe we can just find some ways to make #edchat more new person friendly? I agree that the format is largely working, but I’d like to turn it more into a social where people break into smaller groups. I’ll have to think about this more.
July 9, 2010 — 9:14 pm
Raymond Johnson says:
I was one of the commenters who vented my frustrations on Tom’s post, “#Edchat Revisited.” After being away from #edchat for a while, I came back to it very overwhelmed by the volume and speed of the conversation and it left me thinking of alternatives. I’m encouraged by subject-specific chats (#mathchat, for example), even though I still think Twitter is too limited a tool to do this type of communication effectively.
Thankfully, in his comments here Tom is right on – #edchat is a weekly brainstorming session, not a beginning-to-end conversation. Now that I see it from a new perspective, I realize that we need to think about how we build on to #edchat, not change it. A small group of educators on Skype sounds like a great idea, and I’d be happy to participate. I think Google Wave has real potential for extending conversations to larger groups than Skype, but still probably less than 40-50 engaged participants.
I feel like #edchat is our weekly community keynote, and what we’re missing now are a variety of breakout sessions. Some people write follow-up blogs, and those are important to capture and develop ideas from #edchat that would otherwise be lost to the Twitterverse. The difficulty with some of these breakout sessions is the ability to spontaneously organize subgroups and their hosts. Maybe it would be enough to just use the last 10 minutes of an #edchat to invite others to join together in other virtual spaces. Unfortunately, the organization of this process isn’t any less user-friendly for beginners than #edchat itself.
July 10, 2010 — 1:40 pm