Brian Bailey

So how did Twitter bring about my participation in the Social Media workshop at the #cirpa2011 conference? Late one night last Fall I received an unsolicited tweet from a Clint Lalonde (@clintlalonde), asking me how I was enjoying my MA LrnTech program so far. He had seen an #edtech tweet of mine, clicked on my profile, read my bio which included the fact that I was taking my MA at RRU and decided to fire off an intro tweet to me. We exchanged a few tweets in rapid succession and I quickly found out that he was a year ahead of me in the program, was currently working on his thesis (which happened to be about the role of twitter in developing Personal Learning Networks…hmmm…! http://clintlalonde.net/2011/09/13/the-role-of-twitter-in-personal-learning-networks/) and was working (now the Manager of Distributed Learning at RRU) at Camosun College on Vancouver Island. I was intrigued by his thesis topic as I was a twitter newbie, a PLN newbie and wasn’t at all sure as to what these really were and how they were related.

Anyways, in March I started my new position as an Institutional Research Analyst at Capilano University in North Vancouver and I tweeted this out to my followers. Clint noticed and tweeted back that I should get in touch with his former colleague Anny Schaefer (@AnnySchaefer), Educational Research Analyst and Acting Manager at Camosun College as she was also interested in exploring social media within the context of Institutional Research. She in turn connected me with Mike Krywy (@brotherk_13), Senior Research and Planning Analyst at Red River College in Winnipeg and he then asked me if I would join him in presenting a social media workshop at CIRPA, much to my delight (this collaboration has led to a bunch of other exciting opportunities but that’s another post…). We have since gotten together over the phone and online to plan this workshop but we won’t actually meet each other face to face until the day of our presentation. That’s a remarkable thought for someone of my age who clearly remembers life before the Internet!

So, this Twitter “stuff” REALLY works! It can bring like-minded professionals together. It facilitates collaboration. The point is, without twitter, I would NOT have met all of the people I mentioned above and I would NOT be co-presenting this workshop. That the above chain of events happened amazes me as I’m not the world’s greatest networker. In fact, I greatly prefer how these connections transpired so naturally online, without any pressure or stress, over face-to-face networking. Actually, if one can precede face-to-face with an online introduction I think it makes the face-to-face all that much easier. So, there are great tools out there – but at the end of the day – it’s up to you to use them.

There are two distinct parts to the story of how this Social Media workshop came about, each worthy of separate blog entries. Part 1 will examine how I became a twitter proponent and Part deux will show how my participation in this workshop, quite fittingly, would not have come about without twitter.

A little over a year ago I did not tweet…although my kids are always quick to point out that I have been known to emit other, less desireable sounds from time to time. Back in 2008, I had been curious enough to set up a Twitter account but my interest soon waned as I really couldn’t figure out the value in it. I wasn’t interested in reading a tweet about Britney Spears and Gene Simmonds love-child; like many others, that’s what I erroneously thought it was all about. A couple of years passed and I started my MA in Learning and Technology. In the very first course, our professor strongly suggested that we start using Twitter in order to develop a personal learning network. What the heck was that I wondered, but was too afraid to ask, electing to suffer from imposter syndrome in silence. Not that it made any difference as no one ever really seemed to be able to explain it to me in any event. It turned out to be one of those things you had to learn by doing….kind of like teaching.

So I logged in to my old twitter account, tweeted a couple of times and then…nothing. The main reason for this was that I added all of the other students in my cohort as tweeters to follow (because I didn’t know who to follow or how to follow the appropriate people), and they were as clueless as I was regarding twitter so there was no interaction going on whatsoever. Another course started and once again, our prof strongly encouraged us to use twitter by making it a component of our participation mark. They set up an account for our class and created a hashtag (#) for all course-related tweets. Soon everyone in the class was posting comments but many of the comments were about how they still didn’t get exactly what twitter was for and weren’t sure how to find credible people to follow.  At least I discovered that all my classmates (and I really mean ALL of them) were on the same page although they didn’t admit to it in class. Hmmm…maybe twitter is useful as a way of gauging what people are REALLY thinking, I thought to myself, and that might be very useful in a professional context when one is trying to evaluate, say , the latest educational research (a somehat dim lightbulb switched on). Then I got a brainstorm, a pretty rare event at my age, when brownouts are a far more likely occurence. Why not check my prof’s account to see who she’s following in the education realm,  then follow them myself. I mean, there’s no law against it, it’s not like plagarism and, guess what, much to my surprise, twitter is set up to facilitate users doing EXACTLY that!

Right away I discovered that most users posted their areas of interest in their brief bios which allowed me to quickly decide who was an educator vs. who wasn’t.  A brief glance at their tweets would give a very quick feel for what they were interested in, their general level of intelligence, usefullness of resources they linked to and their level of participation (important). At the same time, I started posting links to educational resources related to my MA coursework. As I started following more educators I started receiving links to a huge number of useful educational resources. I started sharing some of my resources and my followers started commenting on how useful they found them, whether they agreed or disagreed with the author, suggesting related resources, activities they used in their classrooms, information about upcoming conferences and events, etc. etc.  I became hooked as I quickly discovered that I was being drawn in to very pleasant world-wide community of educators full of really motivating, passionate, supportive and innovative individuals who cared about the future of education. A tresure trove of relevant, high-quality information related to my educational interests was soon flowing in mind-boggling quantities, into my twitter account….To Be Continued…

Welcome to the “Creating a Social Media Workshop” blog! On October 22nd, 2011, Mike Krywy and yours truly, Brian Bailey , will co-present a Social Media workshop at the annual CIRPA Conference in Fredricton, New Brunswick, Canada.  The purpose of this blog is to detail the rationale and planning that went into this workshop and to review useful supplemental resources for particpants. There might also be the occasional missive, rant or posting of inconsequential facts but I’ll make an effort to keep those to a minimum! Comments are greatly appreciated!