Many things resonated with me. First of all, I really like what he said about "Executive Trading Cards" with the Facebook paradigm. As one of many teachers with a Facebook profile at my work site, I often find myself in these discussions: Should you, or should you NOT, "friend" your students? I'm against friending students for various reasons, but one thing that really does concern me is the Executive Trading Card game. I often get friend requests from students that are not genuine, if you know what I mean. These people are just collecting friends for the sake of it. More important, though, is the game that gets played once I accept a single friend request.... then I have to accept them ALL, or start playing favorites. It's just a line that shouldn't be crossed in a student/mentor relationship. Students can subscribe to my Twitter feed, they can email me anytime they like, but I don't want to get into that friendship playing card game. Too much politics, too little time to navigate it. For the same reason, I have never tried to friend the admins at my school site. Although I do have a good relationship with a few folks, I don't think it would be fair to them or the rest of the staff to go the Facebook route.
The next thing that resonated with me: I am smart and hard-working, so I sometimes get to thinking I should be making much more money than I do. I have really expensive taste in furniture! But when I meet a person like Mr. Lee, I have to admit I don't want to work that hard! It's obvious he loves it, and I love my job, but he really LIVES it 24/7. That's part of the reason I asked him about the possible conflicts when there's no separation between work and personal life in the Twittersphere. I believe I asked if he and his workers have separate Twitter accounts for work and play. Apparently, there is no need for Mr. Lee to have a separate Twitter account because his work at Socialtext is his life. He made it clear what his morning coffee and news revolves around: work. Wow. Now that I think about it, I am somewhat the same way. My reading revolves around work, pretty much everything I do revolves around work. Hmmm. Perhaps Mr. Lee and I aren't so different after all... except he was wearing a really beautiful watch and I sport my The Pirates of Silicon Valley Casio:
Just kidding, I love my Casio!
Next up... using Twitter and other tech to collaborate and find what you're looking for as opposed to sending out the dreaded SPAM-like email to everyone in the organization. This is such a great idea and I sure wish my work-site adopted this paradigm. I could see it saving so much time and effort.
Finally: Wikis in the workplace. This is another great idea my tech department really needs to pursue. I spent hours trying to get my Android phone properly linked with my work Novell Groupwise account, because I couldn't find any of the correct SMTP settings (if they even exist). I know many other people in our organization have gone through the same slog, but I couldn't find the answer on our tech answers web site. Pretty much the only thing I found was a two-page .pdf on recommended file naming conventions (I am not making that up). I tried to make my own tutorial but abandoned it when problems arose with Groupwise again. My final solution: Forward everything to my GMAIL account.
To sum up... special thanks to Ethan for bringing in another amazing guest speaker, and special thanks to our speaker, Mr. Eugene Lee.
Nice post on SocialText. I agree that friending is a big issue. I've found it can lead to an abudance of unimportant posts at times. I don't think I'd friend my students or past students either. (I teach K-1 so unlikely now.)
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