I could go on about how Twitter has expanded my practice, my point of view, and my edu-buzzword vocabulary. Alternatively, I could debate whether or not educators should get connected via Twitter.
Instead…I have been considering my Twitter-use-fallout “habits of mind” that until recently I was not clearly aware of.
My top three habits provided à la Twitter training are:
1. The Habit of Backchanneling
I vividly remember 3 years ago, talking with a student as he received a text from a student across the room. I could not, for the life of me, fathom what on earth they were doing; talking to each other across the room via text? It was baffling and mind-boggling behaviour. However, it fascinated me, so much so, that I wanted to understand what exactly was going on. Similarly to travelling to Mexico and spending 2 weeks ensconced in a 4 star all-inclusive, you can’t really claim you understand the local customs. As a tourist in a foreign country you cannot judge social norms and customs until you have experienced them in context. I understood that I had to immerse myself before I could decide.
Now looking back I understand what students were doing; they were participating in a form of backchanneling. They were backchanneling class, back channeling their lives…I finally get it. Only now, because I have experienced it.
Using back channels at conferences, meetings and in class has caused me to think and communicate with clarity and precision, making my contributive puzzle piece clean edged and meaningful. When students Instagram their lab set up or Tweet out a funny comment made in class, I see how integral to creating a healthy and thriving learning environment each act is; they are selecting what is important about their experience then sharing and archiving it…they are actively participating in their learning!
2. Habits to tame the stream; thinking fast and thinking slow.
When I started teaching, I perceived information as an immobile mass sitting rigid and captive in a textbook. Occasionally an article would surface, making small scratches on the large marble statue of content. Now content no longer sits for long, content flows like a raging river during spring run off. Nowhere is this more apparent than out on Twitter. First immersion into this flow, can be mentally painful and overwhelming, like using a power washer on your face, blasting you backwards and putting you off-balance.
David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale, writes:
To work in this flow effectively I use both fast and a slow thinking to navigate. Thinking fast is needed when I am in the midst of the flow; I need to be agile, nimble and maneuver my way through the deluge of tantalizing tidbits. I need to instantly decide what is relevant and what I can ignore. I need the help of tools (Hashtags and Twitter lists are such tools) for sorting and efficiently storing the information for later processing.
The thinking slow is not an immediately obvious consequence of Twitter’s training. Thinking slow happens over long periods of time and may require back tracking, swirling in an eddy until the stream brings something new down that pushes me out and on. Fast and slow thinking complement each other, and I find fast thinking actually slows my slow thinking down, making it deeper and richer (see habit 3 below). Both these speeds are needed for my overall progress down the stream, one is not dominant or better, they travel together in the same river bed, just as the water pictured above travels at different speeds in the same river bed. Deliciously I (think) I finally get this sentence that has been a brain knot I have been working on for several weeks from Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age by George Siemens : “The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe. Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today.”
3. Habit of consuming “more concentrated” information.
Not watered down, not shipped in from Chile and tasteless…rather…ideas and content fresh from the source.
In the past ideas, initiatives and visions for change were “shipped in” from far away. By the time the message or idea arrived at my doorstep it was dilute, watered down or modified. Just as in broken telephone, each transaction had altered the original message every so slightly and the message that finally arrived was mangled and distorted.
In this new era of information distribution, I can go to the source, maybe even talk to the author on the phone to clarify (true story) and ask them to give pertinent and related examples.
I have acquired a taste for information in its purest form, undiluted by interpretation or agenda.
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What mad skills or habits of mind has Twitter given you or made you aware of?
