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

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…

How sad and how web 2.0y of me to do this, but I thought it would be a nice experiment. Attending the Educause conference in Seattle right now and sitting in on a session about faculty training in learning management systems…most likely annoying the person sitting next to me with my tictacky typing. How many people are reading over my shoulder right now?

The sessions opened with a great keynote from Doris Kearns Goodwin about Abraham Lincoln of all people. But she used him as an example of great qualities of a leader that I took to heart. She was an amazing speaker and I was actually sad that the keynote ended so soon.

I plan to try to relax from our school’s big deployment of Sakai and transitioning our faculty and students (and the ever-trusty eLearning Team) to the new platform. What I like about going with an open source system like Sakai is the community of developers, educators, and people like me that hover in between. I want to meet some of these people and swap stories and business cards. I’ll post updates to this as the conference progresses.

The top floor of the Sheraton is a beautiful place to hold a meeting. Awesome view, no smoke from the LA fires up here, though my thoughts are with my coworkers affected by the fires (as well as educational technology, just in case my boss is reading this!).

This hits home for all educators and ed-techs. It is one thing to roll out IT solutions for students, but measuring effectiveness and efficiency is important to its success, and it must be done effectively in order to make sure that it makes sense for the school and ultimately the students. People (in the general sense, mind you) get all hot and bothered about accountability and results, and unfortunately a lot of decisions about pedagogy and infrastructure are not made or influenced by people on the front lines with students and teachers. I feel more attention needs to be paid to changing with the times and the students…and all too often in-fighting and politics play to much of a role in how decisions are made. These decisions can be about what curriculum to offer students, what textbook to use, what ERP solution is needed, whatever. At the end of the day, the student needs to learn something and the institution needs to prove that it actually taught the student reliably. Where I work, this isn’t that much of an issue, but I see murmurings of it and I experience it even more when talking to my counterparts at other schools here at Educause. I hope I am not over-simplifying things by saying that everyone should get over themselves.

I see the benefits of blogging in the education space, but not with what Blogger has to offer. Thinking back on the required readings for my CTER course, there are concerns about the privacy of such blogs. Namely our generation’s mistrust of anything big and corporate, and wanting freedom within limits; and the younger generation’s willingness to post anything and everything they want without filter…I wonder if there will ever be a balance. But then again, as that article pointed out, it’s the adults setting the bad example.

The thing I like about my own blog and software is I can’t tune to a fine detail what I want and don’t want the outside world to see. Some users need to log in. I don’t usually allow comments on my blogs, someone has to sign up for an account with my permission and then they can post if they want. No one has…they usually just call me.

I wish the open source arena supported SIMPLE interfaces like this. It makes it super easy to get out of the box all the quicker. But I guess if you want control and governance, then you need to work or it a bit. My own blog is based on Drupal, but there are other softwares like: WordPress, Expressions Engine, Moveable Type. Other blog tools are available in LMS’s themselves: Moodle has a tool I believe, as does Sakai and others. There is a solution out there for everyone I think. I am still working my own solution out here.

Image courtesy of Craphound via Boing Boing.