Outputs: Showing What you Know

Not too long ago, I got an appointment with a new doctor, showed up, and was asked to wait in his office for several minutes before he could see me. I noticed that he had many objects in his office that were meant to reassure patients that “he knows his stuff”– his med school diploma and professional awards hung proudly above a bookshelf packed full of thick medical textbooks and antique decorative doctor’s instruments. As I looked closer, I saw that the med school textbooks were dated from the early 1980s and looked like they hadn’t been opened (or dusted) in years. The last of his professional awards was received last century, as the fading ink read 1996 on the yellowing paper. It made me wonder if this doctor was keeping his skills current or if he’s just been going through the motions since the mid- ’90s. Are those antique doctor’s instruments just for decoration or does he still use those?!? I grew more doubtful as my eyes scanned the dinghy artifacts. I realized that even though he had all these symbols of learning, there was no way for me to see what he really knows. I’m just expected to see those items and trust that he learned everything he needed to know to keep me healthy.

Your resume (or your school transcript) isn’t too different from that doctor’s office– they tell others where you got your experience and when, but they don’t show what you really learned from those experiences. This is why many educators are recommending students compile ePortfolios, a culmination of their best work over the course of their educational careers. With an ePortfolio, people can actually look at the very best work you have produced and they can see the quality of thinking for themselves. You can use an ePortfolio to continually develop your ideas over time and engage others in a public discussion about the things you are interested in learning. As you may imagine, this is also good practice for professionals who have left formal education, so they can demonstrate that their understanding of their field is current, complete, and sophisticated. If that doctor had a blog discussing new developments in medicine or showing off the articles he reads, it would have gone a long way towards reassuring me that I would be in good hands under his care.

A personal blog is the perfect tool for an ePortfolio because it allows you to easily post almost any kind of work that you do– writing, videos, audio, photos and more. This gives your readers a clear picture of what you’re working on so they can see for themselves the quality of your work. Blogs also feature tools to help you organize your writing by categories, tags, and pages so your readers can easily find content that interests them. A blog can also be a place where your other outputs– like twitter tweets, bookmarks, RSS feeds, and flickr photos– all come together to demonstrate your many learning pursuits.

Make it Easy

Many of the tools we use for getting new information allow us to create a digital “trail” for others to follow without any extra effort. Google Reader, which we discussed last time, has a Share button that allows you to publish interesting posts to your followers as you read. Articles you share go up onto a special public page (here’s mine) which has its own RSS feed so you can feed your shared links into other tools. MY Google Reader list feeds into a widget on the right hand side of TedCurran.net so people can see what I’ve been reading. I also use the sidebar of my blog to show off my most recent twitter tweet, my Diigo bookmark collection, and the podcasts I listen to. I share these because the people who appreciate my writing would probably also appreciate the other articles I’ve been reading on similar subjects. By reading through and picking out the “best of the best” among my inputs, I’m sharing my perspective on what’s important with my readers without actually doing all that writing and reviewing myself. This helps me provide a valuable experience to my readers in a way that doesn’t add extra work for me.

I recommend this method to small business owners working in competitive fields (I do a little web design on the side) so they can demonstrate their expertise to potential clients. It also becomes a tool to educate your ongoing clients around issues that will help them get more out of the services you provide.

I did this as a classroom teacher too– I used a tool called Google Notebook (RIP) to clip little snippets of information that I would find as I was researching new lessons or units for my students. Sometimes I would clip articles expressly for them to read as assignments, but other times I would just add interesting readings to the feed for them to explore independently. Often they were readings that had informed my understanding of our projects but that I couldn’t find a way to work into the flow of our daily assignments. (If you’re interested in this sort of workflow, I’d recommend using Diigo for Educators nowadays).

Using these little tricks means that showing what you know does not require doing a lot of extra work– if you can’t find the time to write periodic blog posts, think about just sharing a steady stream of interesting articles with your chosen audience. Next, I’ll talk about another tool that helps make showing what you know easy.

Shareaholic

Shareaholic is a great little browser plugin for most major browsers that makes it easy to share webpages on almost any social network you can think of. If you’re like me you have different types of friends on each social network– professional contacts on LinkedIn, close friends and family on Facebook, work colleagues on Diigo, and those people who still only do email– and Shareaholic makes it easy to share content on whichever “output” works for you. This way, you can create several different “channels” of information that can be customized to the different audiences and social networks that make up your Personal Learning Network.

Engaging with Your Networks

One mistake that many people make with social media is that they try to use it as  a megaphone– to post in as many different social networks as possible in the hopes of reaching more people.  Tools like Shareaholic and another favorite, Ping.fm, make it easy to blast your tweets into every social network at the same time, but I was surprised to find that this doesn’t translate into increased traffic. The same way you shouldn’t trust SEO gurus who will promise to get you to the top of Google searches in a week, you simply can’t game social networks to promote your content. The Internet has a way of rewarding content that is actually relevant and useful to people, so you have to put in the work to find out how your ideas fit into the larger conversation.
The best way to get people to pay attention to your blog is to genuinely engage in conversations with other people. Most of the traffic that comes into my blog now comes from comments I’ve made on other people’s posts– posts that are on the same topic as mine, where my blog can serve as part of the larger conversation on this topic. Finding like-minded people who are writing and tweeting about your topics of interest and asking questions, sharing ideas, and moving ideas forward is at the heart of building your Personal Learning Network. It has the added benefit of driving web traffic towards your work– traffic that you can then figure out how to turn into dollars and cents.

Please Share Back Your Experiences!

I have been very heartened and grateful at the way Part I of this post has spread across Twitter and the personal blogs of many of my own heroes on this subject. I’d love to hear your reactions as you try these techniques or compare my ideas to your own ways of managing your PLN. Feel free to use the comments below (which can cross-post to your favorite social networks as well).

Related articles

• Using Twitter and Other Social Media for Professional Development (shawnurban.wordpress.com)
• Cultivate your Personal Learning Network (downes.ca)
• Professional Learning Network Plans (maysayparn.wordpress.com)
• The importance of choice: Reflections on ePortfolios (ictenhancedlearningandteaching.wordpress.com)
• Teaching and Learning with Technology Blog: E-portfolios for Learning (teachlearntechblog.blogspot.com)
• Strategies for renewing eLearning environments – Melbourne University (slideshare.net)

John Ward, RIP

This post discusses how to build your own Personal (or Professional) Learning Network. Instead of starting by telling you which tools to use, I want to talk about why you would do this in the first place….

This is a photo of my high school math teacher, Coach John Ward, who recently passed away after a long career of distinguished service at Bishop Diego High School in Santa Barbara. He took me from being a hopelessly poor math student to a very capable one in three years of instruction, despite my deep and abiding dislike of the subject. He did this by consistently providing me with high quality materials, challenging problems to solve, and then expecting me to put in the work– or “plug and chug” as he would say.

Think of your favorite teachers over the years– they presented you with challenging, thought-provoking material and then asked you to think about it, question it, master the skills, and respond in a thoughtful way. By the time we’re in college, we get used to writing thoughtful essays about challenging ideas several times a week. When we leave formal education, many of us get out of this familiar rhythm, and instead focus on “getting things done”. When we’re in this frenzied state, we are not taking the time to reflect on new information and experiences we get from our work.

The process of taking information in, meshing it with what you know, and breathing it out again forms something of a “learning loop” that fits with a Constructivist idea (ed theory, sorry laypeople) of what high quality learning looks like.

You can think of building your own Personal Learning Network as an attempt to create this “learning loop” for yourself using the tools at your disposal. Instead of a bunch of teachers selecting challenging information for you, the Internet gives you access to a world of bloggers, tweeters, speakers, photographers, videographers, and colleagues who will teach you anything you want for nothing more than the price of your time and attention. All they ask of you is to think about it, question it, master the skills, and respond in a thoughtful way. You can participate in this conversation by writing your own blog, tweeting, organizing sources, speaking, and teaching others in the way that works best for you. This is all part of what we educators call “Life-Wide Learning”, where you are continuously gaining knowledge and building skills that help you stay professionally competitive, personally empowered, and connected with a community of people who share your interests– even after you leave formal education.

A Game of Inputs and Outputs

You can think of building your PLN as a game of Inputs and Outputs. You need to find and organize information that will teach you, challenge your ideas, and help you stay on top of interesting new developments in your areas of interest. You also need to get in the habit of “adding value” to the information that comes in to you in whatever way works for you. That could mean writing your reactions to an interesting article you read, making lists of bookmarks you find to make it easier for others to find relevant information, video yourself demonstrating a skill you learned, or sharing resources with people you think could benefit from them. What you do is as unique as your skills and interests are, but the focus should be on sharing your learning with others who could benefit from it. Though this practice can benefit you and your business, think of it as doing well by doing good first. Most people don’t like being marketed to, but everybody likes getting free, relevant information about things they care about.

My Inputs and Outputs

To give you an idea of what my PLN looks like, I included an incomplete list of my inputs and outputs. Take a look. Next, I’ll show you how information flows from my inputs, through my brain, and out my outputs.

Inputs

• Social Media
  • Google Reader
  • Podcasts
  • Blogs
  • Google Alerts
  • Twitter
  • Recommendation Engines
    • GReader Recommendations
    • Twitter Recommendations
• IRL (“in real life”)
  • Meetups
  • In-Person Connections
  • Conferences & Trade Shows
  • Professional Organizations
  • Events/Parties

• Outputs
  • Your Blog
  • Tumblelog/ Buzz
  • Status Updates
  • Bookmark!
  • Videoblogging
  • SlideShare
  • Present in Conferences or Trade Shows
  • Podcasts

Inputs and Outputs: A Workflow

Inputs

A first step towards forming a PLN is to start getting good quality information flowing in to you in an organized way so you can easily consume it at your convenience. My favorite tool for this job is Google’s free RSS reader, titled simple “Google Reader“. Reader allows me to collect RSS feeds (think of them as real-time updates from several different news sites, blogs, and other continuously updated websites) in a simple digest format. It enables me to quickly scan over headlines about anything I’m interested in, read what I feel like reading, and skip the rest. It takes the place of a newspaper for me– in fact, it’s a paperless newspaper where I’m the managing editor who decides what I’ll see! You can choose to include a mixture of “established” news sites (like the New York Times or the BBC) alongside updates from less established sites like your neighborhood activities committee, an industry-insider blog, or vegandad.blogspot.com. You can also organize them into folders like I have so you can switch between your many interests quickly.

Over the years I have collected RSS feeds from major thought leaders, news blogs, and even wiki site updates about information in my field, and this makes sure that if it’s happening in education technology, I’ll see an update in my Reader. I can honestly say that the time I have spent building my Reader into a well-rounded reflection of my interests has made me a more marketable and able worker, and a more empowered individual.

Enough sales pitch– let’s get started!

1. Get a Google Account.
2. Go to Google Reader.
3. follow the steps in the video “Welcome to Google Reader“.

After those steps, you should have a Google Reader with at least a few feeds in it. You might also want to check out these celebrity GReader reading lists by popular bloggers and intelligentsia types that you can simply add to your Reader.

From this point, you can be on the lookout for RSS feeds on your favorite websites, blogs and wikis. The RSS symbol

will appear in your browser’s address bar whenever you are on a website that features RSS feeds. Just click it and it will help you add updates from that page to your Google Reader!

Podcasts

Podcasts are basically RSS-powered blogs which contain audio and video files and are usually consumed on an iPod or smartphone. They are another very important part of my information intake every week. Just like my blogs, I line them up in a podcast player for when I’m ready to hear them (driving, walking the dog, etc.) and I don’t worry about it if I miss them. It’s like a DVR for interesting audio and video shows on a whole range of topics.

Most people subscribe to podcasts in iTunes, and then let iTunes sync the media to their player. I recently discovered that my Android phone’s Google Listen podcast player can actually use a Google Reader folder as its podcast subscriptions folder and download podcasts over the air! Here’s my list of favorite podcasts– all organized by Google Reader. If you prefer listening to news rather than reading it (or a mix of both), check into the top 50 podcasts on PodCast Alley.

Twitter

Twitter is another very valuable place where I can queue up challenging and entertaining ideas from the world’s best and brightest until I’m ready to read them. Some people dismiss Twitter as a frivolous medium– saying “it’s only people talking about what they had for lunch”. I’ve found it to be a vibrant community of smart people in my field giving real-time updates and discussions about newsworthy links, reactions to the news, and thoughtful quotes.

If you’re interested in Twitter, don’t concern yourself with what you’ll write first. Unfortunately, people do tend to write about lunch before they’ve had a chance to see what can be done in Twitter. The best thing to do with Twitter (at first) is to search it. Ask Twitter what’s going on with a topic you care about, and I think you’ll be surprised to find a compelling mix of formal and informal perspectives that you can’t find anywhere else. I watched Obama’s 2008 election on Twitter, and I saw a mix of people from all over the world giving their reactions to that historic event.

As you start to find people whose perspectives and voices you get some benefit from, follow them. It’s a great way to form relationships with people you can learn a lot from. (It might also inspire you to contribute your own voice to the conversation!)

Twitter organizes conversations around topic tags called #hashtags. You can make any word into a hashtag by adding a pound sign to the beginning. Twitter turns these into links to all of the postings on that topic. Website Whatthetrend.com can help you find conversation topics that are relevant to your interests.

To learn more about Twitter, check out the great Twitter Guide Book from Mashable.

It’s worth noting that Google Buzz, the Twitter-like thingy from Google, can subscribe you to updates from your friends in Twitter and/or Google Reader so you can see both in one stream. After you get to this point, take a look in Google Buzz and see if it shows a good mix of news for you.

Next Step: Outputs

In Part II of this post, I will discuss the “Outputs” stage, where you can show off your learning and use it to connect with other like-minded individuals.

Related articles

• Using Twitter and Other Social Media for Professional Development (shawnurban.wordpress.com)
• Twitterers To Follow (gfulibrarian.wordpress.com)
• Professional Learning Network Plans (maysayparn.wordpress.com)
• Personal Learning Networks (An Excerpt) (weblogg-ed.com)
• Tearing Down Your Classroom Walls (freetech4teachers.com)
• The Downtime Learner theory (deangroom.wordpress.com)

Image by John and Keturah via Flickr

When you’re looking for work, keeping up with the online job listings is a job in itself. This tutorial will teach you how to automate your job search so you can quickly scan through lots of fresh, relevant job ads every day.

The Big Picture

We are going to put in a series of 5-10 different job search queries into our favorite job boards. The search results they return will have an RSS feed, enabling us to “subscribe” to the search results in a feed reader. After that, all we have to do is open the feed reader, and it will “re-search” all those sites and line up the freshest results in one list for us. From that point, you can just scan quickly down headlines, picking out your dream job. If this sounds too complicated, stay tuned– it’s easy.

You will need:
1) Your favorite RSS reader (I recommend Google Reader)
2) A few RSS-enabled job search websites (I used CraigsList and SimplyHired.com)

Step 1: Creating Good Search Queries

Let’s go to SimplyHired.com and type in a search for the perfect job we’re looking for.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

SimplyHired will return a list of search results fitting our query. This list is “RSS-enabled”, meaning you can subscribe to it in any feed reader (like Google Reader). Just right click ( or Ctrl+click for Mac) on “View RSS Feed” and select “Copy Link Location”.

Copy Link Location

Then you can paste that RSS feed URL into Google Reader’s “Add Subscription” button, and it will “subscribe” you to those search results.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

This means that you will have a long list of headlines for all the relevant job ads.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Step 2: REPEAT with different search results!

If I go back and repeat the process, typing similar search queries, such as “Computer Educator” or “Multimedia Teacher”, I can get several different feeds of good job results all aggregated in a list in my Google Reader.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Step 3: Easily Scan through as Many Job Listings as You Can  Handle– Even via iPhone!

Now, I have a folder of job searches I’ve subscribed to, so all I have to do is open the “Job Search” folder and I can scan through an aggregated, multi-threaded list of fresh job search results on my smartphonewhile I’m walking my dog in the morning.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

My method for keeping on top of them is to “Star” the ones that look promising while I’m scanning through, then follow up on the “Starred” ones later. That list of starred entries becomes my “application to-do” list.

Do you have a better way of scanning job ads? Discuss it in the comments!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Twitter Lists 2 RSS. Does what it says on the tin. (thenextweb.com)
• Google Reader now sorts your feeds “by magic” (downloadsquad.com)
• Real-time search – the missing piece (webnomena.com)
• Google Reader sneaks in a couple of awesome updates (thenextweb.com)
• Sharing items in Google Reader (en.onsoftware.com)
• Do you qualify for the unemployment extensions? (thepoint.com)
• The Jobless Rate for People Like You (neatorama.com)
• White House: 650,000 jobs created or saved (msnbc.msn.com)
• At the Movies critics now at the unemployment line (tvsquad.com)
• “Lawmakers were wrong to repeal the Depression-era Glass- Steagall Act in 1999, Reed said. At the…” (rafer.tumblr.com)
• Wage confusion sets back program for weatherization (theolympian.com)
• Volcker: Depression-era bank rules were better (dailyfinance.com)
• Breakingviews.com: American Wages Out of Balance (nytimes.com)
• A Depression-era lesson for bringing back jobs (timesunion.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Everyone loves Firefox because there are so many great user-created Add-Ons that make your web browser into much, much more. Add-ons allow you to customize your browser to make tasks easier. This extra performance comes at a slight cost; the more add-ons you pile on, the more sluggishly your (formerly fast) browser becomes. Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a few different copies of Firefox– each optimized for your various tasks? Sadly, you can only run one instance of Firefox at a time. Or at least– one instance of Firefox NAMED “Firefox”. Over the years, some enterprising upstarts have taken the Firefox codebase and built new browsers on top of it.

Flock browser is geared for Web 2.0 addicts. It automatically logs into your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Gmail– the list is enormous and ever-growing. Suffice it to say that if there ever was a browser meant for fun (not work), Flock is it.

Another Firefox-powered browser, Wyzo, is optimized for the rabid BitTorrent downloader. It has BitTorrent built in, along with an enhanced download manager, CoolIris, and some other nice updates to the original Firefox recipe.

While each browser has its own intended strengths out of the box, you can also outfit each one with the Firefox add-ons that help you get all your tasks done quickly and easily. What I’ve done is just one way to approach this, but it shows you what can be done.

Firefox

Firefox itself has become my work browser. I have to manage my (Google Apps for your Domain) email, calendars, school blog sites, to-dos, and plan lesson presentations (which for me, involves scanning through lots of photos online so I can illustrate what I want to say). My Firefox is optimized for this task with a few plugins which support these tasks:

• Xoopit for Gmail– shows you a list of all of the files, photos, videos, and attachments in your Gmail, visually
• Greasemonkey– enables me to run Better Gmail 2, Better GCal, and Better GReader from the geniuses at Lifehacker
• CoolIris- an incredible addition to any browser that allows you to see photos in a beautiful 3D interface
• XMarks- to sync my bookmarks and stored passwords between browsers and computers
• Zemanta- offers suggestions for license-safe media to add into emails and blog posts, great for SEO on blogs
• Google Gears- so I can access all these online services even when I’m offline
• ScribeFire– a blogging client inside your web browser. Perfect for dragging, dropping, commenting, and publishing from the window you work in. Also helps with SEO and works with all major blogging services

On a final note, another great reason to have several different browser is that logging into a Google service as one user basically dominates your whole browser. When I log into Firefox with my work Google Apps account, it gets very confused and buggy when I try to use my personal Gmail for online services. Better to have one browser for work, and one for play. Speaking of play…

Flock

Flock has become the official browser of my personal life. I love its sidebar which gives me at-a-glance views of my Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube peeps while I browse. I log in with my own personal Gmail and Yahoo email accounts so I can access Flickr, Blogger, YouTube, and GoogleEverything easily. It’s the browser I turn on when I want to do my own thing.

• Xoopit for Gmail– especially good here for scanning through videos, photos, and files people have sent me– serves as a photo album
• Feedly- A beautiful new front-end redesign for Google Reader that allows you to catch up on all your RSS news while easily sharing it with your peeps
• Greasemonkey– I love Facebook Fixer, AutoPoke, and Remove All Facebook Ads
• Mozilla Ubiquity: This gives me access to my Ping.fm status updater, rememberthemilk tasks, and any bookmarklet that I can dream up with a quick key combination
• CoolIris- an incredible addition to any browser that allows you to see video and photos in a beautiful 3D interface– here it’s a great way to scan through YouTube in a very pleasing interface
• XMarks- to sync my bookmarks and stored passwords between browsers and computers

Wyzo

I just added Wyzo to become my dedicated web design/ developer browser. Not necessarily because of anything inherent in Wyzo’s makeup, just because I needed another iteration of Firefox to fill up with all the great tools people have developed to make Firefox an awesome WYSIWYG code editor. This way, I can open up Wyzo the way someone else might open DreamWeaver.

• Firebug: huge tool for seeing the code behind websites, editing the XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and debugging
• Web Developer ToolBar: seems similar to Firebug but with TONS of features. It’s new to me– will learn more.
• ScribeFire– a blogging client inside your web browser. Perfect for dragging, dropping, commenting, and publishing from the window you work in. Also helps with SEO and works with all major blogging services
• ColorZilla- a little dropper tool that allows you to pick up a color and see its hex code.
• FireFTP- Free FTP in your browser. Goodbye, Dreamweaver!
• Zemanta- offers suggestions for license-safe media to add into emails and blog posts, great for SEO on blogs

So this is just one geek’s idea about how to transform the various flavors of Firefox into useful tools for your many web browsing needs. As more and more of our computing moves from the desktop onto the interwebs, we will need to have different tools to suit the different tasks we do online. Another way to do this is to create Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) with Fluid or Prism– creating little “single use” apps that do one thing really well. But that’s a lesson for another day.

When I click into one student’s blog feed, it looks like this:

I can look at all of her posts in the Netvibes interface, and then I can click over to her blog if I want to leave her comments.

This week, we will be getting familiar with the grading rubric used to grade students’ work, and they will be applying it to one another’s work. They will be using this interface to give each other comments (constructive, I hope!) Wish me luck!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Fast-Growing Curation Service Posterous Now Publishing Real-Time Feeds (readwriteweb.com)
• Twitter/RSS (fiveyearstoolate.wordpress.com)
• Sharing items in Google Reader (en.onsoftware.com)
• Google Dashboard: One Service to Rule Them All (webmonkey.com)
• Customize Blogger Title and URL (tekunik.blogspot.com)