Education Rambler

This week, we’re fortunate to have Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach working with us.  The crux of what we’re learning about is not so much about technology, but the power of technology to create networks of people so that they can share ideas and information.  In the age of 21st Century Skills, global awareness, communication, and collaboration are all important skills and themes to develop and be aware of.  Web 2.0 tools help to foster those networks and build bridges across vast distances.

During our week with Sheryl, one of the things that struck me was the idea that Sheryl is like the guy on the Verizon Wireless commericals.  (No, Sheryl doesn’t walk around asking “Can you hear me now?  Can you hear me now?”).  I’m sure you’ve seen the commercials where the Verizon guy–or a Verizon customer–is walking around with their phone and a vast network of people following him.  The idea is that wherever you go, your network follows.  In Sheryl’s case this is definitely true.

I think in education we’re all accustomed to having consultants come in and do work with groups of educators.  Sometimes it’s a keynote, and sometimes it’s a few days of intensive workshop work.  In nearly every case to this point, my experience has been that national and international consultants have brought their information with them, but they don’t necessarily share their network.  Last week, I was inspired by how Sheryl chose to share her network.

In the five days that she worked with us, we had several conversations with people outside of walls of the room.  Sheryl tapped into her network in several ways and invited a wide variety of experts to share information with the participants in the room.  Sheryl modeled global awareness, communication, and collaboration in a true 21st century direction.  In the five days she exposed us to the following great models of using Web 2.0 tools to share her network with us:

• Skype:  To connect with a single open-source specialist.
• Plurk and Twitter: To announce that we were inviting people to our UStream and Elluminate Sessions and to ask questions to the network such as “How do you define creativity?”  “What web 2.0 examples do you have for a 4-12 music teacher?” etc. etc.
• UStream: To broadcast to folks on Plurk and Twitter who were not in our physical space.
• Elluminate: To speak with consultants from all over the United States as well as Canada and New Zealand.
• Elluminate: To speak with a panel of high school and college students about how they use technology and how they think technology could have been used in K-12 and also college.

The important piece of all of this was that it wasn’t about the technology.  The technology is not the network.  People make up the network.  The technology is simply a tool and a catalyst for creating networks.  The technolgy makes it easy for the collaboration and communication to happen among such a wide array of people, but I had never seen someone model it so well and so consistently.  It drove home the fact that building a network of professional contacts is critical to success in the 21st century, and was glad to see it modeled rather than just outlined in a PowerPoint.

For me, I think it means I’ll continue to nurture my network and to expand it.