I just read a post by Lucy Gray on how to draw the line with LinkedIn relationships.  Lucy says she is sometimes uncomfortable denying relationships, but really wants to keep LinkedIn for professional relationships.  I agree with her on this stance and think her outlook is one that I share, but with one addition.  If I meet you at a conference and have some sort of meaningful discussion, I will try to follow that up with a LinkedIn connection to maintain the relationship.

Keep LinkedIn for professional relationships only.  Credibility in that space is important.

Hats off to Lucy Gray, an edublogger and nationally recognized speaker who has been putting out lists of daily links.  I usually find one or two of them that tickle my fancy including this one on the five stages of twitter acceptance…

I go in spurts using Twitter.  That in itself is problematic for me.  In order to get real value on twitter, you need to be regular with your postings.  People need to learn what you are about and you need to filter through the noise to find the people you are interested in following.  When I had my unlimited text message account I used twitter much more than I do now.  I’ve got the 200 message package with my iPhone and that just doesn’t get you very far when you are using your phone as  your main twitter conduit (and IMO the best way to stay active with it).

I’m using TweetDeck as my interface lately.  There are some advantages to the three column layout it has, but I’m still learning how to get the most out of it.

I think I’m only on stage 3 of twitter acceptance, but not because that’s where I want to be, its because that’s all I have time to be these days… There just isn’t time to do it all.

Posted while drinking hot chocolate and listening to “On the Radio” by Urban Knights.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I saw Lucy Gray present at the ICE COLD conference this past weekend.  During her presentation on using Google Tools in the classroom, she touched on Google Reader, RSS in general, and some recommendations for best practices surrounding RSS.  One thing that caught my attention was her recommendation to teachers that they should over-subscribe to RSS feeds and then not really worry about getting through everything they had subscribed to.

I have to disagree with Lucy on this point.  I think there is a time and place to oversubscribe to news feeds.  When you are first starting out with RSS, it does make a certain amount of sense to subscribe to many sources of information.  Lucy’s audience probably didn’t have much experience using RSS and would need to spend some time experimenting to find the mix of sources that is right for them.  I’m totally OK with that.  Where I disagree is with the retention of all of those sources for the long-haul.

I’ve got about 50 feeds that I follow on a daily basis.  As you can see from my reader trends page,  I consume lots and lots (a very technical term) of news. At this point, I think that I tend to over-subscribe.  Many of the sources I visit are self-referential, meaning that several sources quote each other quite frequently, espescially when a story is big.  I also subscribe to several Meta feeds, like the News Gang feed that is composed of feeds from other blogs and twitters of interesting people.  I could probably cut down my feeds to about 25 and not miss any of the big stories, product announcements, or upcoming events that I am interested in.

I think the value in RSS is that if you pick your feeds carefully, and change them over time so that as you add new sources, you weed out some of the old ones that you don’t find useful anymore, what you get is a smart agent that starts to pick out the items that are of interest, without a lot of repetition.  This maximizes the efficiency of your access to the information which is really the whole point of RSS to start with.  Just having lots of subscriptions just isn’t useful in my opinion.  If you are using RSS as a store of information,  you are re-creating the wheel.  Any of these stories will be available for the forseeable future through a Google search, so its not like the information will be lost if you don’t have it in your reader.

Oversubscribe, assess the sources of valuable content, weed out the duds, maximize your efficiency… That is how I would reccomend someone get started with RSS.

This past Saturday I attended the 2008 ICe COLD Mini-Conference in Lisle, IL.  It was a three hour, three session conference with what I’d estimate to be between 30 and 40 attendees.  At $5 for non-ICE member and $3 for members, it was a bargain.

The first session I went to was on using Wikis in the classroom.  I’ve got to say that I was a bit disappointed in the content of that session.  The scheduled presenter had a death in the family and another teacher was called in to substitute on content that she didn’t appear to be fully comfortable with.  The session focused primarily on the use of wikispaces for managing school-wide and classroom specific websites.  I think the session really missed the mark on the strength of wikis in a classroom environment.  The ability for students to build knowledge collaboratively over time is where the bulk of the discussion should have taken place.  Best practices for designing wiki assignments, rubric templates for evaluating those assignments, and examples of quality student products is what I was expecting to see.  Something else I was hoping to see was some type of analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the various wiki platforms for the education environment.

The main reason for attending the conferences was the second and third sessions presented by Lucy Gray dealing with Google tools for educators.  I was particularly interested in Google Docs and Spreadsheets and different ways they could be utilized in the classroom to foster collaboration and new models of sharing between teachers and students or between groups of students, or even between parents and students.  I think that there are a huge number of unexplored uses for these tools and I really wanted to get a start on my thinking on the topic in case my district decides to move to a 1-to-1 program in our middle school next year.  I didn’t get what I was looking for, but I did learn quite a bit about other Google tools that I may have discounted as non-educational in nature, so that was a plus.

I was very impressed with Lucy’s presence as a speaker and the way that she related to the teachers in the audience.  Anyone who has conducted professional development in schools knows how hard it can be to keep teachers focused and on-task.  Anyone who can keep the attention of teachers for two hours straight is obviously doing something right.  After the session ended I had a very productive discussion with Lucy about some of the projects she is working on at the Center for Urban School Improvement at the University of Chicago.  We also discussed the 1-to-1 program I have been working on for almost four years now.  It was a great talk, as is usually the case with conferences, the most important and useful discussions don’t happen in the sessions but in the hallway.

If you have a chance to hear Lucy talk, I would highly reccomend it.