Today’s #edchat on Twitter was about how we can break free of the echo chamber that is #edchat. We all have great ideas, but how can we turn those great ideas into action? Our objective is not to stop our great conversations but to also move beyond our conversations into concrete action.
Here’s a great blog post with a summary of the different ideas from the night, as well as the perspective of the author, Matt Guthrie. I don’t want to repeat what he says, but his post is totally worth reading. The summary of the entire chat is here.
There was some action taken tonight, which I hope sees enough follow through to be useful. For example, one member of #edchat started a wiki where we can gather together our successes and failures in the area of educational reform.
I started a document to help organize a standard argument we can use to bring down the Internet filters at our schools. The objective with this document is to share our individual arguments for why Internet filters are ineffective.
Another suggestion from @TeacherReality is to create local teacher "think tanks" which are linked to our national or international teacher organizations.
What other concrete steps toward educational reform have you see that were a result of one of our conversations on #edchat?
Cory Roush says:
She hasn’t posted anything just yet, but it looks like Mary Beth Hertz (@mbteach) is working on something that could be used to lobby your legislators: http://twitter.com/mbteach/status/17913228982
July 6, 2010 — 10:37 pm
David Wees says:
Nice. Hopefully she’ll be able to work in an international version of it. One of my frustrations with #edchat is that so often the focus is what happens in the USA.
July 6, 2010 — 10:42 pm
Ed says:
I posted this comment on Matt Guthrie’s blog too…
I hear the ‘echo chamber’ mentioned a lot (maybe because of the echo!)so I’d like to share my thoughts on that. There are educators joining in all the time who hadn’t been involved before… in twitter, in #edchat, in reading blogs and then blogging themselves. Don’t underestimate the power of all this to bring about change. There are always educators who are reading and following and listening and learning (some of them quietly). I know how much I have learnt and how my thinking has shifted in the past year. I know how many people tell me they are now learning from me and the links I recommend.I’m convinced that change is happening slowly but surely from within… that it’s not just an echo chamber of the same voices all the time.
July 7, 2010 — 9:33 am
David Wees says:
While I agree this is true, I really feel like we can do more than what we are currently doing with #edchat. We should continue the discussion on #edchat, and those of us who have been part of the conversation for a long time should move to the next step, which is action.
July 7, 2010 — 11:20 am