In a fit of curiosity I took my twitter feed (using Tweetdumpr) and exported all my twitter feeds into a text file. That’s about 1060 updates and I had joined a little over two years ago in May 2007. I thought it would be a great waste of time to take all of my twitter updates and string them together in a narrative style, taking out all the RT and @replies to protect the innocent but leaving content and links intact. What you get…well…is a lot different from my typical blog entries I guess. What began as a nice little bit of introspection turned out to be more disturbing and funny than I thought. So here are some excerpts if you care to read, I picked the funnier ones out here. Not that I am under any impression that anyone will find this interesting, but after graduating, I am in a bit of a “looking back and forward” sort of mood.

Need to test test test! Chrome logo – damn thing looks like a poke-ball. Looks like Pikachu is going to jump out and crash my computer. http://is.gd/2948 pika pika! My lady wants a Pomeranian, thoughts? you’re back online! and she shall be named Madam Tiki! Just to clarify, no we didn’t get a Pom… yet. Off to Las Vegas today Going to METALLICA!!!! with scary-ass bands opening, previewing on MySpace first, lots of blood/religious imagery, maybe we’ll be late. nah, they’re over it now, in fact I got the album free from iTunes with the presale well Diana’s the big fan, not me so much. The things I do for my wife… I love those little video slot machines, don’t know what I’m doing then I win $100!! w00t1! Go Goldfish Dream!! The concert’s in December so I’ve got some time still home again home again jiggety jig Home alone and sick, but kitty don’t care… http://snipurl.com/3q6c3 My wife, an investment broker, is comparing this to 1990 and Milken as far as bloodbath-potential goes… got it…you’re posting okay tired, too tired to stay home. tee-hee On LA time myself and I was late to my job in LA…wrah! left the nicotine gum at home accidentally. Trying to fool myself with Eclipse Mightnight Cool gum. It’s actually working.

Question: If there was no internet, what would you be doing today? If the internet never happened? Social Work probably kitty??! I want to see pictures! Resting long week… aaaahhhh! slow down turbo! yeah, it’s everywhere except SOUTHwest…just expense that too Ugh, still here at work, half hour training swelled to two hours, trying to leave! #fb RT Flutter is the new Twitter: http://tinyurl.com/ces3wo My iPhone playlist went from Raffi to Megadeth…given the day I had, it felt oddly relevant miss sassytwitterpants Lovin the new TweetDeck Hooray for http://sitorsquat.com! have a safe flight! Woo fat dog!! #fb you know it! http://bit.ly/PP84i reads the manual so Marge doesn’t have to! looking forward to a nice 3day weekend. I wish I could be this excited all the time: http://bit.ly/21zlEi Another day downtown, another labor demonstration… http://twitpic.com/327tl hate those damn parrots, they terrify my dog I’m drinking at home Trying to motivate to get to the gym this AM, time to sweat out my angst… yeah yeah on my way Ah, much better #fb hey! can’t wait! room service! feeling like a bloated pig, ugh…Easter gorging, happy though and buy one, get one for $5, don’t forget! new year, new conferences, new courses to build, oi

Better stop it. Taco Tuesday at Pepe’s ftw cute and a little disturbing: http://bit.ly/3AGbYK aww she’s all growns up! just had my first SL meetup with my CTER cohort! great open content post from Cole Camplese: http://tinyurl.com/ao7wud My baby’s getting outfitted for her part in Cold Case today…1950s hottie secretary! rrrroaw! n00b move…upgrading WordPressMU with a plain WordPress zip…fail gone from looking at kittens to chihuahuas, wtf?? yes, as long as you’re working I am going through a Sex Pistols phase myself RT New post on Metblogs, LA Traffic on Twitter http://tinyurl.com/dmeobw just got Total Recall transcription of lectures here, pasted them into Wordle…awesome graphics for class Greg Pahl I am really really trying to give Heroes a chance. bentley exiting freeway! #slowspeedchase what’s in the trunk? is Rihanna in the trunk? who is the mystery sidewalk woman? NBC…not a high-profile suspect okay los angeles…as you were now., move along there’s a guy in the Toyota parking lot calling NBC right now…hey dude, wave!!! KTLA….we won’t speculate, because that is dangerous, but if we were to speculate

I am usually not one to ruminate on and on about information I get at work. Many schools are run like a business, and being on the IT side of things, you get exposed to a lot of the business-y cross-talk and things that don’t necessarily relate to the world of education on the surface. In higher-ed, the two worlds are closer together as we need to prepare our students for the business world and to compete in an economy that ain’t what it used to be. But when you look at K-12, the dissociation between the business world and the world of schools seems much further apart. Or is this changing?

I was handed a white paper recently from IBM recently that echoed a lot of the ideas put forth in our recent readings on 21st century education:

Global CEO Study: IBM White paper exec. summary (register for full version)

Learning for the 21st Century by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills

These two documents are fairly aligned, given the differing focus, but the IBM paper struck me as being very relevant to education. With the emphasis being placed on technology in schools, isn’t our main goal to train students, regardless of age, to be productive, successful, and even innovative in the swelling knowledge economy? Of course the 21st Century Skills is something we’ve seen before…a call to place teaching and learning in the arena of technology to prepare students for jobs that don’t even exist yet, but what does big business actually have to say about it?

Quite a lot really…from the Executive Summary of IBM’s 2008 Global CEO Study:

Hungry for Change: The Enterprise of the Future is capable of changing quickly and successfully. Instead of merely responding to trends, it shapes and leads them. Market and industry shifts are a chance to move ahead of the competition.

Innovative Beyond Customer Imagination: The Enterprise of the Future surpasses the expectations of increasingly demanding customers. Deep collaborative relationships allow it to surprise customers with innovations that make both its customers and its own business more successful.

Globally Integrated: The Enterprise of the Future is integrating to take advantage of today’s global economy. Its business is strategically designed to access the best capabilities, knowledge and assets from wherever they reside in the world and apply them wherever required in the world.

Disruptive By Nature: The Enterprise of the Future radically challenges its business model, disrupting the basis of competition. It shifts the value proposition, overturns traditional delivery approaches and, as soon as opportunities arise, reinvents itself and its entire industry.

Genuine, Not Just Generous: The Enterprise of the Future goes beyond philanthropy and compliance and reflects genuine concern for society in all actions and decisions.

Let’s substitute the word “Student” for “Enterprise of the Future.” Interesting read there, huh? Students today are Hungry for Change. Of course! The are infinitely adaptable to their environment and seek to manipulate it any way they can. Change stimulates and challenges them toward achieving a new mastery and then they eagerly move on to the next thing. Boredom kills a curriculum! They are innovative beyond imagination when given the chance. Students today are resourceful and are the masters of all the new skills: mashing up, remixing, recontextualizing, and finally synthesizing! We need to meet them halfway! The are Globally Integrated and aware. The internet connects everything together and to borrow a page from Friedman’s The World is Flat mantra, they have grown up with this assumption that it was never a disconnected place. We need to utilize this openness as fertile ground for encouraging learning and growth, to teach them how to make new connections and captialize on the “known” ones. And of course we are trying to be Disruptive by Nature! Other than sounding fun, disruption in the positive sense is challenging the known variables, and looking for new solutions…even when the problems haven’t been acknowledged yet. There isn’t anything we can’t at least try to do better, whether it is finding a new route to work or re-telling a story digitally. Finally, they are Genuine, Not Just Generous. I truly believe today’s students are not completely “in it to win it” (unlike the 90′s when everyone in my classes wanted to have an internet start-up). Global concern about human rights and the environment are even closer to home now that we are seeing the effects of global events and politics up close and personal.

We need to work with our students to learn how to critically observe these events and participate to bring about real change. Just because our generation has messed up doesn’t mean they have to also! They are growing up more aware of global issues than any other generation previously, and as educators we need to be ready to swallow our pride as adults who are “new to this” and meet students on their turf, in a rapidly-changing world that will most likely keep changing faster than they would like it to, but are up for any challenge being the social-technical-global citizens that they are.

Yes it sounds dirty…

I read this article this morning in the Wall Street Journal, which is odd…primarily because it was the Wall Street Journal, and decidedly paper-based. But anyhow, the author was writing about Facebook, social networking and all that jazz.

I learned a few things:

• I am an old fart since I am part of Generation X. Pish posh I say, come on, without us there wouldn’t be any angst left around here!
• I need to read more old-fashioned stuff like articles and books sometimes
• …and finally, I don’t have much credibility as far as this “web 2.0″ crap goes. “Why?” you may ask. I don’t have many online followers…

So, I started out in the late nineties making websites. Since then I bounced aroud from dot-com to dot-com and finally landed comfortably in a higher-ed position running the online learning program. But part of this meant updating my swag: resume, CV, eportfolio…what have you. Once I started up in grad school and meeting other professionals I was compelled to throw myself out there on networking sites partly due to school assignments and partly because “everyone else is doing it.”

So, after taking a puff of that joint I now have:

1. A Facebook profile: I don’t know what to think of on this one. I has been great in the sense that it has allowed me to catch up with some long-lost friends, but most of the people that send me requests, I don’t even know really. A lot of them are students of FIDM or prospective students looking for more information on how to join the network…but there isn’t one yet. Most of the rest of the interactions involve electronic food fights and vampire attacks and movie quizzes. But hey, Diana likes it and she can check in on her niece. LC’s my Facebook friend so it can’t be all that bad
2. A Twitter account: This is actually addictive. Twitter lets you microblog in a way that you can post simple little random things about what you are doing right now. Sort of like IM but less intrusive and more subtle but reading Twitter posts shows an interesting worldwide stream-of-consciousness. The best part is that you can update your twitter stream through SMS, IM, Facebook, or just the twitter site. I just need more friends on Twitter…I guess they are called followers…feel free to join up and follow me if you’d like.
3. A profile on LinkedIn: This is a professional networking tool that is nice and comfortable for me since I can control how much information is out on there. People I work with, or have worked with in the past can build connections and maintain them using this tool. I never really paid much attention to this site in the past but I started digging and a lot of my colleagues and coworkers are on this site. I will need to add more to get my 2.0-credibility up.
4. A blog that mostly no one reads.
5. A very lonesome and bored SecondLife avatar named Snaggle Reinsch (basically a likeness of me at sixteen years old — with wings). But this will change once I get around to downloading the application again.

So why all of this new web-2.0-angst now? I have been doing all of this in the past to suit my own interests: designing websites, learning interactions, logo designs, etc…all in a “I made this” mentality. But I have been been slowly incorporating other bits and pieces of interconnectedness here and there. The old adage of “Every idea has been thought of before” has now come full circle on the web and it is time for me to get out of the mode of developing in a bubble. I guess I am relearning everything now and trying to repurpose the tools that are already out there to suit how I live and work…but now also how I relate to others. It started with this blog really. Blogs are still intensely personal for the author, but the headlines are not only read from these pages, but indexed by Google, aggregated and distributed in 20 other formats out there. Not that I think anyone reads this, but they still are vomited out into the ether regardless for anyone to pick up. A vendor I work with for “work-school” (not “school-school”) asked about my cat after Googling me and reading this blog…scary, but an ice-breaker nonetheless.

Are there new rules now? Not yet. “But who are my friends?,” the WSJ article asks. I don’t know, but if I can meet more people and network more, then I say “cool!” The psychology major in me asks how this will eventually trickle back into real life. Is this the updated form of exchanging business cards? How much information is too much? Why do people know more about my cat than me?

Remember my comment about how we Gen-Xers like to bring the angst? This paranoia about how much of myself to throw out there versus how many connections I have on these websites was made worse by watching this video below. I guess as long as there are playgrounds, there will always be someone in a van with dirty pictures and sticky candy canes. Not that I worry about ex-girlfriends stalking me (like I care) but still…