The objective of my presentation at NCTM in New Orleans was to introduce participants to social media, which was made difficult because participants did not have Internet access. As it turns out, this ended up forcing me into a couple of activities which were pivotal experiences for participants.
Here are my slides from my presentation.
Instead of trying to bring my participants to the Internet, I brought the Internet (or at least a portion of it) to my participants, and in doing so, provided them with concrete examples of how people use social media to interact.
I started my presentation by sharing some of the stories I have from my use of it, and who I have been able to interact with and how this has enriched my professional learning. If you use social media as a professional tool, then you have some of these stories too.
Next, I gave them an experience of what it might be like to participate in a live Twitter session. Participants were given a question, 30 seconds to find new group members, and 140 seconds (suggested by Dvora) to discuss the question in their small groups. This highlights that Twitter conversations are often with people you don’t know very well, and can be brief and short interactions.
I then asked participants to describe the attributes of our face to face conversations, and then speculate as to how these might transfer to an online conversation. I then highlighted for participants some of the features of these kinds of conversations. In particular, the conversations parallel conversations you would have with people face to face, but that conversations online can take place between participants who are separated by vast geographic (and cultural) differences.
Participants went around the room and read one or two of the four blog posts I had printed and put up on the wall, and put sticky notes up to comment on the blog posts. We then debriefed the experience with the main observation being that blogging is a lot like reading and responding to a letter from the editor.
Finally I wrapped up by talking about some of the specific projects that have been created through collaboration with other people in the online mathematics education community, and how our participation online has resulted in resources of real value in our teaching.
In the final questions at the end, one participant astutely observed that it would be easy to find a “how-to” guide online, but that he felt my “why-to” session was more helpful. There’s no reason to tell people how to do a bunch of technical details if they don’t see a reason to do them.