Category: Twitter

Join the inaugural #creativitychat

Creativity, TwitterPublished onUpdated onLeave a Comment on Join the inaugural #creativitychat

Togs on. I’m jumping into the swirling currents of Twitter chats.

Why

There is little in terms of coordinated Twitter chats about creativity in all of it’s wonderful complexity. I have decided to establish a new, regular Twitter chat for people to coalesce and gravitate towards.

#creativitychat

I want to help people become more creative. One of the ways I can do this is establish a chat that connects people, that inspires action, engagement and thinking about the subject. I hope the chat helps participants learn a little more about creativity.

For nearly ten years I have been using Twitter as my preferred tool for connecting with others and building a learning network. Whilst Twitter chats have their naysayers and their limitations, I still find them (and Twitter) a powerful and consistent way to organise a community, connect and learn from others interested in a topic.

When

#creativitychat will run every Saturday morning 7am-9am Melbourne time.

The inaugural chat is Saturday 29th Oct. Times below.

  • Melbourne / Saturday 29th October 2016 / 7am-9am
  • Auckland / Saturday 29th October 2016 / 9am-11am
  • San Francisco / Friday 28th October 2016 / 1pm-3pm
  • New York / Friday 28th October 2016 / 4pm-6pm
  • London / Friday 28th October 2016 / 9pm-11pm
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Have a look at this Worldtimebuddy link to add the event to your calendar.

I have decided to go for a longer chat because most chats I have experienced are just getting warmed up by the time their scheduled time finishes. With a couple of hours we give ourselves the best chance for meaningful dialogue.

Saturday morning in Australia, are you mad? Maybe a little, and certainly my younger self would have preferred a later time. This allows for family plans to still carry on and not to eat into a weekday evening after a long day of work either.

This is an international chat. I have always been lucky to have been connected to people on Twitter from across the world and so I wanted to go for a time that worked for the majority. Everyone will have a preference, I know, and which ever time I chose people would miss out. I think this gives us the chance to be able to share hemispherically diverse understandings of creativity.

What

Content

  • Weekly topics related to creativity.
  • Crowd-sourced set of questions and provocations, moderated (by me) into a short list.
  • Please send me a direct message on Twitter with your question or provocation suggestions.

#creativitychat / 0001 / Nailing jelly to a tree? Seeking a common understanding of creativity.

My background is in primary education and so I have a learning focus when I think about creativity. However there is so much to learn from others. I am keen for #creativitychat to have diverse participants.

We should encourage a broad representation from different fields. The chat should be a gathering of anyone thinking about how creativity impacts on our (professional) life.

Chat Structure

  • 10 minutes for introductions
  • 100 minutes for reaction and dialogue about provocations and questions
  • Maybe some time to share next steps, what actions are we going to take? What have we learned during the chat? “As a result of the chat I am…”
  • 10 minutes for networking and sharing our own projects and blogs etc.
  • Close with the next week’s topic

I have been inspired by the #agchat founder Michele Payn-Knoper who outlined some of her lessons from running a Twitter chat over the last seven years. Thanks to Simon Owens for the great guide on running a chat, which outlines Michele’s thoughts. Highly recommended if you are looking to start something too.

A call to action

  • Check out your diary for the times above and consider joining me. There will only be one shot at being part of the first!
  • Share a tweet using the hashtag #creativitychat to encourage others to get involved.
  • Join and participate in the chat.
  • Direct message me on Twitter with your questions or provocations related to the chat topic (0001 = defining creativity)
  • Leave a comment inline or otherwise with any ideas or suggestions related to the questions I still have. I need your help.

More to consider

  • What is the most efficient way to archive the chat? Should we archive it? How much do people really use a chat archive?
  • I like the way readers can comment, highlight, and engage with content on Medium. Perhaps a summary post with questions / provocations and a curated set of tweets to continue the conversation.
  • How could we incorporate a slow chat element during the week, to allow others to participate?
  • What new ideas are we bringing to the Twitter chat arena? How are we helping to advance this way of learning and connecting? How might we connect Twitter with other tools to extend what we can do and mitigate against some of the known weaknesses?
  • Need to probably use the @creativitychat handle eventually. I have contacted the current account owners.
  • Find a merry band of buddies who can help moderate and facilitate.
  • Do we need some web property to gather resources, guidelines and ideas about the chat?
  • Develop some chat protocols and rules of engagement.

Education Suffers from a Lack of Knowledge Urgency

28 Days of Writing, Learning, TwitterPublished on2 Comments on Education Suffers from a Lack of Knowledge Urgency

Knowledge Urgency

Dave Binks, a headteacher you would happily call a leader, was one of the first principals I worked with. He gave me the space and time to enjoy my teaching, to innovate and explore the untrodden path. To take risks and to fail.

Many years later I moved on and became a deputy headteacher myself and I really struggled. I had some of the hardest most challenging times in my working life. I struggled to find that balance between management and teaching and was having to compromise the quality of what I was doing – just to get it done!

I didn’t have access to the knowledge and ideas I needed in those moments when I needed it the most. How I wished I could have browsed Dave’s brain.

A Lack of Knowledge Urgency

We have a lack of knowledge urgency in our profession – we don’t feel the sting of wasted ideas or the importance of capturing and sharing our knowledge and experience, it simply is not in the front of our minds. There are over 430,000 teachers in the UK and in Australia just over 250,000 according to 2011 figures. But only a tiny fraction share ideas using Twitter.

On average in England over the last 25 years there have been around 15,000 teachers retiring from the profession every year. People like Dave who take their expertise and skill with them.  That equates to nearly 525,000 years worth of teaching experience laying quiet and dormant on the back 9 of golf courses and between the aisles of garden centres. This saddens me.

This great body of latent knowledge going missing, but also the lack of urgency from current teachers to capture and share what they know. Let me give you an example of what I mean by knowledge urgency:

In 1972 the Imperial War Museum established the Department for Sound Records and began in earnest to archive and collate oral histories of those involved in conflicts and especially those involved in the First and Second world wars. It is a striking and extensive archive of over 56,000 hours worth of historical records. The urgency to capture this knowledge is clearly linked to the passing of the generations involved.

These pieces of knowledge are lengthy to produce and take time and deep thought to capture. Social technology has begun to reshape the timeframe needed to share our expertise all we need is a simple device and we can tweet and blog our experiences on the go.

Ross Selkirk Taylor was a British Army driver during the second world war and his pocket diary was his record of his experiences. Since then his grandson has begun tweeting his written diary entries, but in 1940 they were private to him and had no immediate impact on those around him. The postal service was often the sole means with which to share his experiences whilst away from home and that was heavily censored. The ranks of other army drivers could not learn from his published experiences and connect with him to learn. (Despite some hunting the original @DriverRoss account is no longer active.)

Twitter perfectly encapsulates the fragmentation of our knowledge and I think it has a direct impact on the frequency of sharing – the likelihood that people, teachers, openly share an idea or publish their thinking is increased if the scale is smaller.

Share What You Know

As teachers we need to be more open about our work and quickly realise that the whole profession can benefit from our collective expertise – we mustn’t become silos of knowledge ourselves. Nor do we want our knowledge and experience, our stories and ideas to lie dormant, our knowledge needs to live on and impact those around us, to be contextual and be flexible enough to improve the lives of as many people we can.

The phrase “Pearls of wisdom” is often attributed to this poem by James Russell Lowell.

These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred, Each softly lucent as a rounded moon; The diver Omar plucked them from their bed, Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.

I love the delicate description of the pearls of thought – “softly lucent as a rounded moon” – we need to ensure we treasure the jewels of knowledge we have – and continue to pluck them from their seabed and do more to share them with other teachers, display and publish them, string them on threads, and help everyone bathe in their moonlit glow.

#ukedchat Assessment Special

Assessment, TwitterPublished on1 Comment on #ukedchat Assessment Special

ukedchat logoI am delighted to finally have the opportunity to take the moderator’s hotseat for this week’s #ukedchat – in which we will be running a special discussion all about assessment.

UKedchat is a Twitter based discussion group that meet every Thursday evening between 8-9pm GMT. It is a fantastic example of narrowing the use of Twitter to allow educators to discuss a specific topic, and I am excited to be moderating this week’s session.

If you have never taken part in a discussion, no fear! Just take a look at this handy information about how to get involved. Everyone is welcome. Explore some of the previous discussion sessions on the summary blog.

Assessment is such a broad issue that I grappled and struggled to come to terms with as a teacher, in this week’s conversation I hope that you will join me in exploring this rich topic.

We will be looking at the wider pressures of an ageing assessment agenda; how summative assessment may blinker our understanding of success; why failing is good and also tips and ideas for implementing formative assessment in the classroom.

So join me @tombarrett on Twitter for the #ukedchat Assessment Special on Thursday 20th October 2011, 8-9pm GMT.

Can teachers stand idle any longer?

Blogging, Networks, Social Media, TwitterPublished onUpdated on11 Comments on Can teachers stand idle any longer?

In last Friday’s Times Educational Supplement an article I had written was published about the use of social networking in schools. It seems to me that we are getting to a point where children in schools are experiencing a hidden social curriculum that we are no longer part of, this is especially the case for their use of social networking. In my own words:

Social networking should be taught more widely and in more depth in schools. No longer are we able to stick our heads in the sand about these communication tools. Nor should educators distance themselves from using them.

The paragraphs that were missing from the piece went as follows:

This is not simply about how much time students spend learning about social networking in GCSE ICT. This is an issue for every subject and teacher, a system wide issue, a social issue that needs the whole school to act, and it won’t just take the one or two teachers who use Twitter or write a blog to do it.

Those of us who are willing should take steps to develop a more supportive and positive ethos around the role of social networking in learning, school and society. Those who are unwilling need to get out of the way, because where we continue to remain idle we further disadvantage our students.

“Teach it, don’t fight it” was published in the TES magazine on 16 September, 2011