#etmooc and #lrnchat: When Communities of Learning Discuss Community—and Produce Results

There was no need this week to read yet another book or article on how to effectively create and nurture great communities. Participating in live online sessions with colleagues in two wonderful communities of learning (#etmooc, using the #etmchat hashtag and a Google+ community for online exchanges, and #lrnchat) provided experiential learning opportunities among those trainer-teacher-learners: participating in discussions to explore what makes our communities attractive or unattractive, and contributing to the conversations in ways that produced immediate results, e.g., a name for a new learning community that is in the early stages of formation in Australia.

The first of the two communities—#etmooc—is relatively young, having grown out of the Educational Technology & Media massive open online course (MOOC) developed by Alec Couros and colleagues earlier this year, while #lrnchat appears to have been in existence at least since early 2009 and is currently facilitated by David Kelly, Clark Quinn, Cammy Bean, and Jane Bozarth.

While #etmooc draws together a worldwide group of trainer-teacher-learners interested in improving their ability to effectively and engagingly incorporate technology into the learning process, #lrnchat has the somewhat broader goal of serving as a community “for people interested in the topic of learning [and] who use the social messaging service Twitter to learn from one another and discuss how to help other people learn”; those first-rate #lrnchat organizers also routinely post session transcripts that in and of themselves are great learning resources for others involved in training-teaching learning.

Participants and discussion topics sometimes, as was the case this week, overlap in #etmchat and #lrnchat sessions in fortuitous ways. Those of us who joined the #etmchat session on Wednesday and then joined #lrnchat on Thursday were able see these two overlapping yet significantly different communities explore (and, in many ways, celebrate) the elements that have made both communities dynamically successful. (Stats posted this afternoon by #lrnchat colleague Bruno Winck, aka @brunowinck, suggest that the one-hour session produced 642 tweets and 264 retweets from a total of 79 participants.)

What was obviously common to both groups was the presence of strong, dedicated, highly-skilled facilitators who kept the conversations flowing, on topic, and open to the largest possible number of participants. There was also an obvious sense of respect and encouragement offered to newcomers as well as to those with long-term involvement—a willingness to listen as well as to contribute, and a commitment to extending the conversation to others not immediately involved. (Retweeting of comments was fairly common in both groups, indicating a commitment to sharing others’ comments rather than trying to dominate any part of the conversation solely through personal observations). What we continually see in both groups is an invitation to engage and a willingness to listen as well as contribute rather than the tendency to create and foster cliques that exists in less effective and less cohesive communities.

A sense of humor and a fair amount of humility also appears to support the high levels of engagement visible in both groups—those who are most inclined to offer the occasional ironic/sarcastic/snarky comment just as quickly turn those comments back on themselves to draw a laugh and make a point that contributes to the overall advancement of discussion—and learning—that both communities foster.

There also is more than a hint in both communities of creating learning objects through the transcripts and conversational excerpts (e.g., through the use of Storify) generated via these discussions. And that’s where some of the most significant results are produced, for embedded in those transcripts and excerpts are links to other learning resources that many of us may not have previously encountered.

Following those links during or after the conversations continues our own personal learning process and, as was the case with #lrnchat yesterday, actually produce something with the potential to last far longer than any single discussion session. One of those unexpectedly productive moments of community-sharing-in-action yesterday came when, from my desk here in San Francisco, I posted a link to a Wikipedia article about third places—that wonderful concept of the places outside of home and work that serve as “the heart of community” and the third places in our lives, as defined and described by Ray Oldenburg in The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (1989). A colleague in Melbourne (Helen Blunden), seeing that link, quickly followed it to familiarize herself with the concept, then realized that “Third Place” would serve nicely as the name for a new learning and development community she is currently forming in Melbourne—which means that when members of #3placemelb (Third Place Melbourne) interact online, they’ll be the latest offshoot of a learning tree with roots in Oldenburg’s book first published in 1989; a well-developed trunk that has branches representing a variety of settings, including libraries; and continues to sprout twigs in online virtual communities such as #etmooc and #lrnchat, blended (onsite-online) settings, and that latest growth in Melbourne—all because great communities seem to beget additional great communities through collaboration rather than competition.

N.B.: The #lrnchat sessions currently take place every Thursday from 8:30-9:30 pm EST/5:30-6:30 PST; #etmchat sessions are generally announced on Twitter via the #etmooc hashtag and are also promoted in the #etmooc Google+ community.

Seeking Social Media Clout While Scoring and Losing Klout

The San Francisco-based online service Klout purports to provide a score that documents how much influence we have through our online use of social media tools. What it actually deliberately does is lower scores if users do not agree to provide access to secondary (demographic) information in their Facebook accounts. This provides a social-media lesson meriting attention: we need to be diligent about determining what online services offer as opposed to what they claim to offer. And we need to make others aware of what we learn to provide a context for the information that businesses like Klout disseminate.

Let’s be explicit about what we’re seeing here. Klout claims to offer a beneficial service: a tool, that if it were accurate, could offer us an insight into the strengths and weaknesses of our online presence and provide impetus for us to improve what we are doing. Because Klout representatives insist on collecting data including date of birth and what we have liked on Facebook—information ostensibly of more use to Klout’s advertisers than to the process of determining the level of influence we have allegedly achieved online—before they will include accurate information about our levels of online interactions in those scores, I’ve joined those who tried Klout, didn’t like what we saw, and have taken steps to shut down our accounts rather that acquiesce to Klout’s clumsy—and ultimately unnecessary—attempt to bargain access to information for a higher Klout score.

Here’s how it works. Once you start using Klout, you and others can view a score that is supposed to document your levels on online interactions and the influence those interactions suggest. Only after you have used Klout for a while do you start receiving email messages that feel like a low-level dose of blackmail: Klout representatives’ insistence that you start allowing Klout to access additional information in your Facebook account, including “your birthday, work history, education history, current city and likes.” The notes explicitly warn that failure to provide access will result in a lower Klout score because the service will not include any of your Facebook activity that Klout should already have been able to access when you initially connected your Klout and Facebook accounts.

There is something more than a bit disingenuous about Klout representatives’ approach to this issue. When I initially added the service to my social media mix, I had no problem using it without having to respond to the sort of one-line agreement that now pops up when Klout directs me to log in to my Klout account via Facebook. (I’ve generally accessed Klout via Twitter.) It was only after using Klout for a few months that I started receiving email messages from Klout informing me that “Recently (emphasis added), our systems haven’t been able to access the Facebook account you’ve linked to Klout. As a result, your Facebook activity is not contributing to your Klout Score right now. You might not have logged into Klout using Facebook in a while. A day after clicking ‘Reconnect’ below, your Facebook activity will contribute to your Klout Score again (emphasis added to confirm that this apparently wasn’t a problem for Klout before now).” The catch is that you can’t “reconnect” without authorizing access to that additional demographic information.

An exchange with a Klout representative yesterday afternoon produced the following inaccurate statement regarding “current permissions”: “The current permissions allow us to access your public profile, friend list, email address, News Feed, birthday, work history, education history, current city and likes.” But that statement contradicts the report that my Facebook activity could no longer be accessed without a new acceptance of what Klout claimed it could already access. Seems to me that Klout’s representatives can’t have it both ways.

What’s interesting about this sort of low-grade online ultimatum is that little of this demographic information is particularly difficult to track down online, but Klout representatives’ admission that the measurement they propose to provide would deliberately be lowered if I didn’t agree to actively provide additional access to information in my Facebook account made me wonder what other “new current permissions” I would be forced to accept down the road. Besides, my Klout score really doesn’t have that much of an impact on what I do; it simply appeared to be another interesting but far-from-essential tool in my efforts to track online successes and failures to improve my ability to reach colleagues, clients, and others who are important to me. Losing Klout will simply provide a bit of additional time to use more credible web analytics tools to make me a more effective user of social media tools.

Another interesting aspect of Klout’s approach is the range of reactions online writers have expressed in discussing the company’s ability—and inability—to accurately document the online clout that matters. At one extreme is the Wired magazine article published in April 2012 suggesting that a low Klout score can have a significantly negative effect on a person’s opportunity to thrive in our competitive business environment—although the writer does undercut that argument with a concluding admission that “folks with the lowest Klout scores…were the people I paid most attention to.” The suggestion that a Klout score affects employment possibilities certainly contributes to the anxiety some users describe regarding perceptions that their online clout, per their Klout score, is lower than it should and needs to be.

A view from the opposite extreme side of these discussions comes through British author Charles Stross’s characterization of Klout as “something that spreads like herpes and…[is] just as hard to get rid of.” His online post on the topic (under the title “Evil social networks”—Stross obviously isn’t taking a subtle approach) asserts that Klout is “flagrantly in violation of UK data protection law” in terms of how it collects and uses data—very strong and troubling words at a time when the term “online privacy” seems to be an oxymoron and a recent New York Times article confirms that National Security Agency employees have for more than a decade been working to “foil basic safeguards of privacy” on the Internet.

The Wikipedia Klout article appears to provide a balanced introduction to Klout, beginning with a description of the methodology used to produce a score, continuing with a summary of criticism leveled against that methodology, and concluding with a series of references for anyone interested in knowing more about the service and how it works.

What strikes me based on the experiences I’ve had is that Klout appears to play upon its users’ anxieties and insecurities. It starts with an appealing offer to help determine how much online influence we have (or, in a more worrisome way, how ineffective our online efforts might be in reaching those important to us), then takes actions that require we provide access to information in other social media accounts if we want our online activity within those accounts to be accurately reflected in our Klout scores—which then raises the question as to why anyone would rely on scores that are admittedly manipulated.

It’s also worth noting that the scoring system itself is not at all intuitive. Its scale of 1 – 100 would, at a glance, seem to imply that a score of 50 would be in the middle of online influence compared to what others have achieved. Online documentation, however, explains that “The average Klout score is around 20 and a [capital-S] Score [sic] of 50 or above puts you in the 95^th percentile of scored users.”

Clout is that valuable commodity that we nurture, maintain, and cherish when we provide something grounded in honest and ethical behavior face to face and online—a commodity that increases as our clients, colleagues, and friends share the work we do and the successes we have. Klout-with a-K is what we’re left with when we agree to support a service that deliberately mismeasures and misrepresents online information if we don’t actively agree to facilitate the gathering of online information that has little to do with capital-C Clout—which is why I’ve decided to lose Klout and share this information with those I help in my role as a social media trainer-teacher-learner.

David Lee King: face2face with Social Media and Social Graces

The fact that Facebook has more than 1 billion registered users doesn’t in any way suggest that there are more than 1 billion skilled users of social media tools worldwide. So a book like David Lee King’s face2face: Using Facebook, Twitter, and Other Social Media Tools to Create Great Customer Connections has the potential to upgrade the social skills—and social graces—of those still struggling to improve their online social interactions at the business level David targets…and at a personal level, too.

David’s ability to communicate engagingly and well—a skill that attracts many of us to his presentations, his blogging, and to the work he does as Digital Services Director at the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library—serves readers well in face2face as he dives right in with on-target advice. He starts by reminding us that we need to be human rather than standoffish and mechanical on the Web. We need to listen; respond professionally and as informally as we can to nurture the levels of interaction that accompany successful engagement via social media tools; and think strategically so that our use of videos, blog articles, and other online postings consistently lead us to productive and positive results.

His honesty also helps us understand both the positive and the negative approaches into which so many of us fall in our use of social media. In telling the story of his online interactions with people at what he calls “the Snarky PR Agency”—omitting the company’s name because “they ended up being very professional”—he describes the agency’s initial spam that raised his ire; openly describes his own snarky online response (a tweet about how the agency “mass spammed me hoping I’d review a kids book. Obviously NEVER read my blog, so why would I read your book?”); and after leading us through the series of exchanges they had, notes that there was a positive result: “We ended up having a nice chat about small businesses discovering and using social media. The PR agency turned the conversation around from a negative one to a positive one” (pp. 130-136).

None of this, however, would mean much if face2face didn’t work from a wonderful foundation: helping us understand how to create and nurture community connections that interweave onsite and online interactions rather than viewing them as unrelated activities. He reminds us that Tweetups—face to face meetings of individuals who originally met via Twitter—and numerous other onsite encounters mean that what starts in Twitter (or Facebook or Google+ or any other online setting) doesn’t need to stay in that setting; those of us who attend conferences and other professional gatherings are abundantly aware of how online interactions seamlessly extend into those face-to-face encounters just as relationships that begin face-to-face in conferences, workshops, and other settings become richer, deeper, and unbelievably sustainable through online extensions of those conversations.

Which brings us to the playful foundation of David’s book—the understated yet implicit redefinition of our concepts of what the term face to face means in our onsite-online world. As we read through David’s sections on “business casual,” “where and how to begin,” “measuring success,” and “applying what we’ve learned,” we can’t help but see that effective use of the tools under discussion make us realize we can just as easily be face to face online as we can in the original sense of the term—when we’re onsite with someone.

My own experiences with onsite and online learners convince me that we’re even struggling to have our language catch up with the evolving nature of our interactions in something as simple as defining the first time we meet someone.” Those who remain inexperienced or uncomfortable with online interactions still don’t think of themselves as having “met” someone until they have their first onsite face-to-face encounter. Yet the immediacy of interactions via Skype, Google+ Hangouts, Blackboard Collaborate learning sessions that are well facilitated, and numerous other tools more and more frequently find that the quality and depth of interactions in those settings help us understand that the definition of meeting someone is shifting subtly and inexorably as more and more of us become comfortable with the idea that we’re living and thriving in an onsite-online world. And works like face2face can only help to make that process smoother for anyone who takes the time to read and absorb all that it offers.

Teaching-Training-Learning with Evolving Tools and Practices

The continuing rapid evolution of our teaching-training-learning tools and roles is sparking some interesting conversations among colleagues in a variety of sectors, and those conversations, increasingly, are helping to create connections and collaborations in what once felt like a terribly siloed learning industry.

ASTD (American Society for Training and Development) Human Capital Community of Practice manager Ann Pace, in a brief column in the May 2013 issue of T+D (Training+Development) magazine, succinctly takes us to the heart of the matter: we’re spending considerably more on social learning than we were a year ago (a 39 percent increase over that 12-month period), and we’re increasingly overtly acknowledging that each of us can serve as a “facilitator and enabler of learning” as we “create the structure that allows [the] shift [from learning occurring at specified times in predetermined locations to being something that is continuous, formal as well as informal, and experiential as well as including teacher-to-learner knowledge transfers] to occur.”

Some refer to this perceived shift as a learning revolution; others of us, as we review the writing of those who preceded us and talk to teacher-trainer-learners in a variety of settings (e.g., K-12, undergraduate, and graduate-level programs; corporate training programs; and learning programs in libraries and healthcare settings), have the sense that this isn’t so much a revolution as a recognition that the best of what we do has always involved the transfer of knowledge from instructor to learner; the acquisition of knowledge by learning facilitators through their interactions with learners; a combination of formal learning opportunities with opportunities that foster informal learning in synchronous and asynchronous settings; and much more.

What Pace helps us see is that incorporating the vast array of social learning and social media tools available to us into what we have always done well significantly expands the learning resources available to us in the overlapping roles we play as teachers, trainers, and learners. And it requires only one additional very short step for us to recognize that the continually-expanding set of tech tools at our disposal (desktop computers, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and, soon, wearable technology including Google Glass devices) and delivery methods (blended learning opportunities, the use of Skype, Google+ Hangouts, live online sessions enabled through products ranging from Blackboard Collaborate to live tweet chats and similar exchanges through chats conducted within Facebook private groups open only to learners within a specific class or community of learning) helps us cope with a world where the need for learning never stops.

There are even obvious, positive signs that we all are continuing to benefit from our expanded ability to reach colleagues through online resources in addition to our continuing attendance at conferences, workshops, and other events designed to facilitate the exchange of information, ideas, and innovations. The tendency many of us have had of allowing ourselves to be locked into learning silos—it is as silly as librarians in academic settings not seeing and learning from what their public library colleagues are doing in training-teaching-learning (and vice versa), or ASTD colleagues in local chapters not being aware of what colleagues in other chapters or at the national level are doing—seems to be diminishing as conversations between colleagues are fostered by organizations such as ASTD, the American Library Association, and the New Media Consortium (NMC),  which gathers colleagues from academic settings, museums, libraries, and corporate learning programs together onsite and online to share resources, spot the metatrends and challenges in teaching-training-learning, and encourage collaborations that benefit a worldwide community of learning.

We see, within that NMC setting, conversations about the shifting roles of educators in academic settings that parallel the comments that Ann Pace made through her T+D column. We realize that the shifts we see in our individual learning sandboxes consistently extend into many other learning sandboxes in many other industries where learning is the key element differentiating those who are successful from those who aren’t. And we see realize that by meeting, collaborating, and then sharing the fruit of those collaborations throughout our extended social communities of learning, we are part of the process of implementing ASTD’s goal—workplace learning and development (staff training) professionals’ goal—of making a world that works better.

Coming Full Circle with Digital Storytelling in #etmooc

After dabbling with digital storytelling last week as part of the work I’m doing as a learner in #etmooc, the Education Technology and Media MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) organized by University of Regina professor of educational and media Alec Couros and several “co-conspirators,” I circled back on the theme in a more focused and serious way. And found myself in far deeper emotional waters than expected—as is often the case with any completely engaging learning experience.

Couros and his colleagues have offered us choices among eight different digital storytelling challenges ranging from simple acts (writing a six-word story and combining it with an emotionally engaging image) to an “ultimate challenge”: “Write a story, and then tell that same story digitally using any number of digital tools and freely available media! For inspiration and story creation guidance, see Alan Levine’s 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story.”

Starting simply, I tackled the six-word stories; saw the emotional depth others were achieving; and went back to the drawing board until I found one that promised to carry me into the level of exploration others had achieved: “Through stories, our departed remain alive.”

One of the departed who remain alive for me is David Moebs, who died from AIDS-related complications in June 1998, yet remains amazingly present. He was a person whose understated generosity made a substantial difference to his friends during his lifetime: at least three different times, he gave substantial amounts of money to friends in need, knowing that the money, if used wisely, would make life-changing differences for them. He had no expectation of receiving anything in return; he simply wanted to take action at the right moment, with people he perceived to be the right people.

It was not a complete surprise to me, therefore, that when I wrote about his spirit of volunteerism and generosity and posted the article online (more than a decade after he left us, in a rudimentary form of digital storytelling long before I ever heard the term), it touched a few people who still carried strong, positive memories that were rooted in his actions.

David Moebs

I was, in preparation for the #etmooc digital storytelling assignment, already going back to unpublished writing I had completed about David. I was also trying to find the appropriate way and tools to give new life to an old story. Video still felt a little beyond me; blogging felt as if it wouldn’t force me to stretch in ways the assignment was designed to make all of us as learners stretch. So I started looking for tools I hadn’t yet explored—Prezi and Vuvox among them—to see if I could revisit David’s story in my ongoing role as a learner. My starting point was to storyboard the effort using PowerPoint: I actually completed a draft that placed the script into the notes field of each slide; incorporated images licensed through Creative Commons and posted on flickr; began moving the images into Prezi and Vuvox; and recorded the script using Audacity.

That’s when I hit the sort of glitch we expect to find while learning: Vuvox wasn’t cooperating, and Prezi didn’t want to take the audio files in the format that Audacity produced and stored them. I did find an online service that would, for a fee, have transformed the recordings into a format compatible with what I had developed visually in Prezi, but I held myself back with a challenge to either locate a free online tool or find a new way to use existing tools that I already had acquired.

The solution proved simple once I returned to PowerPoint. Using the “sound” function that is under the “insert” tab within the program, I was able to easily re-record the individual elements of the script and insert them into each slide—and even pull in an audio clip from YouTube to pull the story together at a multi-media level.

And while I don’t expect to win any awards for innovations in digital storytelling, the entire exercise not only offered a wonderful opportunity to revisit an old friend, but to benefit further from the learning opportunities that #etmooc is producing at a time when so many of us are exploring what MOOCs are and will continue to offer as part of our overall learning environment. 

N.B.: This is the sixth in a series of posts responding to the assignments and explorations fostered through #etmooc. The digital story described in this posting can be viewed online in “Slide Show” mode; to produce the audio, please click on the audio icons on each slide.

#etmooc as an Example of Connected—Rhizomatic—Learning

If you’re discovering that your personal learning network is expanding wonderfully and unpredictably in an almost viny, plant-like manner, you’re already engaged in what Dave Cormier calls rhizomatic learning—a process of learning that mirrors the spreading of rhizomes so there is no center, just a wonderfully ever-expanding network of learning connections rooted in creation, collaboration, and the building of communities of learning.

Cormier has done plenty to help trainer-teacher-learners understand and apply the rhizomatic learning model to our work through his 300-word introduction to the topic, a longer blog posting, a scholarly examination of the subject, and the presentation he recently facilitated as part of #etmooc—the Education Technology and Media MOOC (massive open online course)–organized by University of Regina professor of educational technology and media Alec Couros and several “co-conspirators.” And his work served as a wonderful conclusion to an exploration of connected learning, the first of the five #etmooc topics to be explored in the course.

Highlighting a variety of large themes—including our perceptions regarding the purpose of learning—Cormier leads us to an idea of learning as “preparing for uncertainty.” He suggests that learning, at its broadest level, can be seen as an attempt to prepare learners for a world that doesn’t yet exist, as Michael Wesch and his students documented in their “A Vision of Students Today” video (2007). And we’re not just talking about learners in formal academic settings, either; those of us involved in workplace learning and performance (staff training) efforts face learners who are worried about their inability to keep up with the rate of change in their workplaces, the need to continually learn new technologies and software, and struggle with the evolving role of social media tools in their workplaces.

His #etmooc rhizomatic learning presentation provides a foundation through his “Five Things I Think I Think”:

• The best learning prepares people for dealing with uncertainty.

• The community can be the curriculum since members of the community help define what needs to be learned and also create learning objects—e.g., YouTube videos, blog posts, tweets, postings on Google+—that support learning through collaboration.

• The rhizome is a model for learning for uncertainty.

• Rhizomatic learning works in complex learning situations.

• We need to make students responsible for their own learning.

Cormier, seeing MOOCs as a great medium for rhizomatic learning, offers five steps to succeeding in MOOCs (and, by extension, in rhizomatic learning): orienting yourself to the setting; clearing yourself so others can interact with you; networking; forming clusters with other learners, and focusing on the learning outcomes that are driving you to learn.

“Think,” he suggests, “of the MOOC as a gathering place”—a concept much different than what comes to mind for the average person who has heard about MOOCs and other forms of online learning but has not yet had the experience of seeing how engaging, inspiring, and effective they can be.

Couros himself, noting how much engagement there was in the live chat during Cormier’s presentation, suggested that participation in the rhizomatic learning session reflected our decision to “walk through the same door on the Internet so we could think together,” and Cormier responded by observing that what is created through this sort of interactive MOOC produces the equivalent of a networked textbook in that the content learners create together and share online becomes part of the learning community’s learning resources.

Finishing the module and all that it inspired me to do makes me realize that the learning experience is not complete without a summary of my own rhizomatic connected-learning efforts. My own learning rhizomes spread through the acts of:

• Adding @davecormier and a few others to my Twitter feed

• Finding MaryAnn Reilly’s 10-slide introduction to rhizomatic learning on Slideshare

• Reading Tanya Sasser’s wonderful description about how she applied rhizomatic learning to a first-year composition course

• Realizing, after reading Sasser’s article, that her experiences with that composition class mirrored my own recently with Social Media Basics learners in an online course I wrote and facilitated

• Exploring the Cynefin framework—with its simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic domains—to see how rhizomatic learning helps us deal with complex learning situations

• Writing this piece and others to make more colleagues aware of rhizomatic learning and the value of a well-organized and innovatively-delivered MOOC

“The most interesting stuff is what happens in the complex domain,” Cormier observed, and I’m looking forward to exploring more of that “interesting stuff” as our course moves into digital storytelling for the next two weeks.

N.B.: This is the third in a series of posts responding to the assignments and explorations fostered through #etmooc.

Social Media Basics: Hackers, Heartbreak, and the Need for Digital Literacy

Those of us who use social media tools know that we will eventually have our accounts hacked/hijacked; I see examples of it on a nearly daily basis. That doesn’t mean we have to sink into despair and assume that resistance is futile, but it does mean that we need to take as many precautions as we can to avoid the account-hijackers and have solid backup and recovery plans in place, as I was reminded again a few times this week.

The wake-up call, for me, came when I checked my Twitter account one morning and discovered that spammy direct messages neither of us wrote were going out to many of my followers and a colleague’s followers. Because the hijacker spreading the virus that provided access to our accounts was more annoying than destructive, we were able to quickly re-establish control over our accounts by changing our passwords, but we both recognized that it could have been worse. Much worse. As was made heartachingly clear through compelling, thorough, and chilling descriptions (“How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking” and “How I Resurrected My Digital Life After an Epic Hacking” ) by Wired senior writer Mat Honan about how hackers not only took over his accounts, but also came close to permanently destroying a variety of deeply and uniquely personal files and photographs.

It’s well worth comparing what happened to my colleague and to me with what happened to Honan since we can walk away with not only with extremely useful information but also with a big-picture view of where we need to be going in a world where a relatively small number of incredibly irresponsible people with an alarming lack of social empathy are taking us.

In the situation I faced, the hijacker caught me in a moment of weakness via a scam that has been floating around for at least a year. The tweet that caused the breech arrived at a moment when I had just been involved in a video promoting a lovely project; that tweet came from a close colleague, contained the question “What are you doing in this viddeoo?”, and included a link back to the alleged video. Wanting to be sure she was referring to the video I had helped produce, I clicked on the link, waited for the video to load, and when it didn’t load, sent her a message to confirm that she was referring to the video I had done. Only later did I realize that the reason the video didn’t load was that the act of clicking on the link opened my account to the hijacker/spammer.

Two reminders of what I should and normally would have done upon receiving a questionable message: wondered why a meticulous colleague would have so terribly misspelled the word “video,” and written to her before, not after, clicking on the link

Even better—and a practice a usually follow—would have been to have deleted the initial questionable note that allegedly was from her, contacted her to thank her for the comment (which would have triggered a response alerting both of us that her account had been hijacked and used to send that “viddeoo” message/virus to me); and done a quick online search that would have turned up information about the “viddeoo” scam.

Instead, I spent much of the next day thanking colleagues who cared enough to let me know that my account was generating similarly spammy messages about viddeoos, being grateful that they cared enough to alert me in case I hadn’t been aware of the problem, and rhetorically asking myself what it would take for me to be able once again to balance caution with paranoia in dealing with any message that was in the slightest way out of the ordinary and, therefore, potentially posed a threat to my social media presence.

Which takes us to Mat Honan’s story. As is clear to anyone who reads the Wired articles—and I would highly recommend them to everyone for reasons I’m about to make abundantly clear—Honan does us a tremendous favor by showing how, in the space of a few minutes, he went from being a highly visible and well-respected user of social media to someone whose online and personal life was devastatingly compromised. His iPhone, iPad, MacBook were wiped clean, meaning unique content he had not backed up appeared to be completely irrecoverable. Access to a variety of online resources (banking and file storage, among other things) was tremendously compromised. And, as he explains in a compelling follow-up video interview—also now high on my list of required resources in the digital age—he experienced the sort of emotional toll that an attack like this takes upon any of us.

And here’s where the story takes an even more deeply important turn: once he started openly discussing what had happened to him, one of the perpetrators of the digital attack—a nineteen year old male—contacted Honan and eventually quite openly answered a series of questions that not only established how he and at least one partner (who also contacted Honan) had managed to cause the writer so much grief, but made it abundantly clear how emotionally removed he was from the pain his actions caused. Which goes a long way in answering what had previously appeared to be a maddeningly baffling question for many of us: what are these people thinking? (Let’s let Honan provide that answer, via his articles, rather than trying to poorly capture the disturbing lack of social accountability and connectedness the story provides.)

As I look back on what my colleague and I (and many others) have experienced and think about the intentional harm hackers/hijackers cause, I’m haunted by the pain that clearly shows on Honan’s face in the video interview and the emotional impact the words in his article carry. It makes me think about a theme I consistently see in in tech, training, and educational circles—the need for digital literacy. And it makes me think that digital literacy is not just about knowing how to effectively use digital resources, but also how to responsibly use them. It shocks me that we might literally have to confront people with visceral displays like Honan’s to make them understand what their actions cause—which is what happened with Honan’s 19-year-old hacker once Honan explained the personal losses the hacker had caused. But then again, we all seem to have an incredible ability to at some level distance ourselves from the pain of others until confronted with first-hand experience of that pain, so it appears that our training-teaching-learning efforts needs to start early. Be reinforced regularly. And be vigilantly pursued if we want to limit the possibility of more hacker/hijackers unthinkingly hurting members of the greater extended community of which they—and we—are members.

Libraries, Training, and Continuing Education

Those who still equate libraries with nothing more than printed books—and experience tells me there are plenty of training-teaching-learning colleagues who fall into that category—need to step outside their caves and see what is happening within their onsite-online libraries.

Laura Townsend Kane’s Working in the Virtual Stacks: The New Library & Information Science is just the place to start. Written primarily for those considering a career in libraries and those considering a mid-career change, this book by the assistant director for information services at the University of South Carolina’s School of Medicine Library in Columbia, South Carolina features interviews with more than 30 library insiders’ views of where their industry is going, and it should be of interest to a much wider audience. Whether you are among those who are increasingly using library services and are curious how they work, are already a library insider, or are considering a career in libraries, Kane has something for you.

Working in the Virtual Stacks introduces us to librarians as subject specialists; technology gurus and social networkers; teachers and community liaisons; entrepreneurs; and administrators in the five sections of her book. Even better for those of us involved with libraries as well as with training-teaching-learning within and outside of library land, we find numerous examples of library staff members as lifelong learners and facilitators of learning within the communities they serve—a confirmation of the key teaching-training role Lori Reed and I documented for members of library staff in our own book, Library Learning & Leadership.

We can’t go more than a few pages in this insiders’ view without coming across references to library staff members’ dedication to learning —their own as well as that of the library users they serve onsite and online. There are also numerous examples of library staff members promoting the use of online social media tools not only to complete the work they do but also to reach those in need of their services—just as many of us do in workplace learning and performance (staff training) endeavors outside of libraries. We’ll find library staff members using Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype, Twitter, YouTube, and a variety of other tools that have become every bit as important to library services as the books we’ve come to expect from our libraries in the various formats we seek—including eBooks.

There are library colleagues telling us that we “must also keep up with the field of futurism and trend watching,” as Steven J. Bell, associate university librarian for research and instructional services at Temple University does in the final interview in the book. Or reminding us that blogs, wikis, and instant message services all have roles to play in our training-teaching-learning endeavors, as Meredith Farkas, head of instructional services at the Portland State University Library in Oregon, does. Or how important it is to take every tech-based class available and stay active in social networking, as San Rafael Public Library Acting Director Sarah Houghton says. And how “if we become trend-spotters, we have a good chance of creating the ‘next big thing’” (p. 95), as San Jose State University assistant professor Michael Stephens maintains.

Most importantly of all, there is Kane herself confirming that “the days of sitting for hours at the reference desk, waiting for patrons to approach with questions, are long gone….librarians are expected to keep up with changing technologies” (p. 3)—just like the rest of us. And the best of them are there to help us through the transition in which we are still so deeply immersed in our careers as trainer-teacher-learners.

Finding Our Place in the World, Part 1: The Strength of Association(s)

Traveling extensively, colleagues have suggested, can be a very lonely experience. But I don’t see that at all. In an onsite-online world that offers far more connective tools than any of us will ever be able to adequately explore, we’re never very far from what our varied associations can offer.

While earning an online Master of Library and Information Science degree through the first-rate program offered by the University of North Texas a few years ago and traveling extensively, I thrived on connections with my wonderfully supportive community of learners; all I had to do was log onto our course discussion boards if I wanted to keep up with the latest exchanges of ideas. When I’m on the road now and missing the stimulation of conversation with colleagues who are spread all over the country, I simply make a phone call, send an email, or catch up to those who are online via online chat functions, Skype, Twitter, live (or archived) online discussion sessions, and, as of a few days ago, via Google+.

And as an extended writing-training-consulting project kept me far from home over the past few months, I gained newfound appreciation for what my association with colleagues in the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) means in terms of being part of a tightly knit professional family.

Shortly after arriving onsite in Florida’s Fort Lauderdale/West Palm Beach area from San Francisco in early August, I took the two steps that immediately helped me remain connected with my local and extended community. I obtained my West Palm Beach Public Library card so I could start reading and learning about the local community I was briefly joining, and I asked Florida-based ASTD colleague Jennifer Tomarchio whether there was an active ASTD community there. Jennifer’s response was an invitation to the ASTD South Florida chapter’s upcoming Friday evening social event, and that’s where the fun and extended connections blossomed.

The initial greeting from ASTD members whom I was meeting for the first time was warm and welcoming; I knew I was among peers. But the real value of association in this case became obvious when I looked up and unexpectedly saw two familiar faces: Steve Feinstein and Steve Parkins, whom I had met at national conferences without realizing they were based in South Florida and are currently president and president-elect of the chapter. And it just kept getting better: at the next chapter meeting, I unexpectedly found myself face-to-face with Michael Sabbag, another colleague I absolutely adore from the national association and who, I learned that evening, remains quite active in the South Florida chapter. And when several of us were at ASTD’s Chapter Leaders Conference last month in Arlington (VA) and I was missing my ASTD Mount Diablo colleagues who couldn’t attend the conference this year, my newly established South Florida ASTD family agreed to adopt me (and we tormented the Mount Diablo branch of the family by tweeting the news and a photograph back to them).

I often hear comments about how acquaintances and colleagues can’t afford the cost of joining an association that operates at the level of an ASTD. And although I do, at a visceral level, understand how tightly squeezed the economy has left many of us, I have to agree with my ASTD colleague Ken Steiger, whose response to the comments is “I don’t see how I can afford to not join ASTD.” Whether we pay for our associations, seek them through different means, or, in the best of all worlds, seek them everywhere we can, there’s no denying that if we want to overcome the personal and professional isolation from which so many suffer, we need to take that first step of seeking association. And then becoming active contributors and collaborators within the communities we have joined.

Next: Place in an Onsite-Online World

ALA Annual Conference 2011: Learning With and From Our Colleagues

For those of us whose attendance at conferences is an essential part of our teaching-training-learning, there is an unofficial game that keeps us coming back for more: the game of wondering how quickly we will first run into someone we know.

I have yet to top the time I boarded a shuttle for the ride from my home to San Francisco’s airport and, five minutes later, discovered that the next stop was at a colleague’s home. Which was almost as good as the time that another colleague was on the same flight out of San Francisco even though we were leaving a couple of days before that conference was scheduled to begin. And it began this time when another cherished colleague and I, on our way to the American Library Association’s 2011 Annual Conference here in New Orleans, spotted each other on our way to a connecting flight that had us both in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport and had nearly an hour to catch up on what we had been doing since our last encounter.

The extended game of Catching Up With Colleagues continued yesterday—the day before preconference activities were even underway. After conducting an orientation session for conference volunteers, I saw Peggy Barber, one of my favorite marketing colleagues, not far from the main conference registration desk. Because neither of us had any appointments scheduled—a rare occurrence at events where so much is offered in a relatively brief period of time—she and I were able to have a two-hour lunch that carried us far beyond our usual and all-too-infrequent hello-goodbye exchanges. There’s a level of magic that accompanies each of these unexpected encounters and reminds us why we go to all the expense and inconvenience of traveling all the way across the country. It’s what Frans Johansson describes so lovingly in The Medici Effect: when those of us who do not frequently see each other face to face have those concentrated bursts of face-to-face time, the exchange of information and ideas is as intense and rewarding as any well-run day-long workshop—and often far more productive. From her side of the table, there were thoughtful and thought-provoking observations about how many of us confuse advocacy with marketing and end up ineffectively promoting issues rather than taking to the time to listen long enough to determine what our clients and customers need from us. From my side, there were plenty of stories about what all of us are doing to promote effective learning opportunities in a variety of settings.

And our options for making those wonderful connections seem to be increasing at such a rapid rate that it’s hard to keep up with all that comes our way. But not impossible.

Even though I don’t have a smartphone and therefore am not constantly Big-C Connected at all times, I’ve learned enough from colleagues to check in for conference updates via Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media tools that can serve rather than enslave us if we use them effectively—at our moment of need. I also have learned to arrive onsite before activities are underway so I can see where the essential points of contact are: shuttle stops; information booths; meeting rooms; food courts; the onsite Internet cafés that mean we can leave our laptops behind; and those onsite lounge areas where tired colleagues tend to congregate and talk when they find themselves beyond the capacity to absorb even one more word from all the first-rate presenters we came to hear.

Much of it is serendipitous, and some of us comes from planning. After leaving my lunch-time colleague yesterday, I spent some time alone to absorb a little of what had already come my way. Then joined a small group of workplace learning and performance colleagues from libraries
all over the country. And once again, the magic was a product of the meeting: our conversations went far beyond the routines of our day-to-day work. We meandered through conversations about our more personal pursuits. Talking about the loss of colleagues, friends, and family members who have left us since the last time all of us gathered. The changes and innovations occurring on a daily basis in workplace learning and performance. Our own creative pursuits.

And as Johansson suggests, the rewards are immediate. Visceral. And moving. As I confirmed for myself this morning when I woke up at 5 am and had to move more words from mind to paper so I wouldn’t lose all that our gatherings inspired.