Tag Archives: Bill Ferriter

Communities and Conversations of the Past

2 Replies

I’ve shared quite a bit of nostalgia about the old days of Twitter, and what a wonderful community it was. I was reminded of this a couple times on LinkedIn today. First was a post by Dean Shareski, shared fully here:

Are online communities still a thing? When I think about the last 2 decades I would argue that Twitter in the early 2010s was the height of educator community engagement. And yet I’d argue that was more network than community. Various mom and pop spaces have come and gone with the intent of creating safe and robust ways for educators to connect. During my tenure at Discovery we tried unsuccessfully to create such a space.
I still see attempts to make this work but I’m not seeing it. This platform currently seems to be the best option but still lacks safety and intimacy to take conversation and learning to the next level.
Maybe online communities are a white whale. What is the best we can hope for in terms of online engagement and community for educators?

I commented:

While I’ve missed the edutwitter era dearly since that time when I engaged in a wonderful community, I also know that even if that era came back, I wouldn’t engage as much now. The engagement then was more raw, more honest… dialogue was sincere and challenges to ideas were met with discourse not anger or defensiveness. Now, as you mention, the safety and intimacy seem to be lacking.
Yet, I saw the shift in community use that was a turning point. It was pretty quick, and it was about our own community engagement. For example, I can remember seeing the move from someone reading a blog post and responding in the comments or on Twitter, to suddenly getting instant retweets that came out faster than it was possible to read the whole blog post. There were people auto posting, and there seemed to be a race to share something first, to be first to engage, but with shallow engagement.
I no longer go to a blog feed reader anymore. I don’t see social media feeds that keep my attention. I see a lot of useless advice: https://daily-ink.davidtruss.com/advice-for-everyone-and-no-one/ … and these kinds of ‘self-help’ posts are why LinkedIn can not be the tool I’m looking for, and yet like you I think it’s the best tool of the lot right now.

I didn’t answer his question, but that’s mostly because I don’t have an answer. I can’t see anything replacing the community I had on Twitter, and yes, I use the term community and not network. We didn’t stick to Twitter, we were on blogs, and other networks like Ning, and connecting on UStream, sharing videos on Blip TV, sharing links on del.icio.us, reading on Google Reader, and tracking our comments on CoComment… all defunct now. It was truly a different time. There was also a different tone to the exchanges as I hinted above. Discourse was rich and now it seems to be shallow… Mostly accolades and praise or very cautious.

Shortly after seeing Dean’s post, I saw William (Bill) M. Ferriter’s post about leaving Twitter, also on LinkedIn:

After close to 20 years on Twitter, I deactivated my account yesterday. It’s an incredibly toxic space where you are just as likely to end up in an argument as you are to think together.
Planning on moving my social interactions around education to LinkedIn.
Hoping to build consistent routines in both posting new ideas and resources here — as well as learning alongside all y’all.
Thanks for having me.

Bill is/was one of those community members that made Twitter great. We conversed many times on Twitter and on our blogs, for at least a couple years before meeting face to face. When we met, I connected with a digital colleague, one of many digital neighbours who I often engaged with more than I did the educators across the hall from my in my school. The friendship was already fully built. I also met Dean face-to-face years after I started learning from him. I’ve read so many of Bill and Dean’s blog posts, tweets, and comments that I think I actually do know more about them than I do some close friends.

Now Bill is off of Twitter and I may leave the site too before the end of the year. I’m left wondering the same things as Dean, “Maybe online communities are a white whale. What is the best we can hope for in terms of online engagement and community for educators?“

Parenting and teaching

This morning I read a tweet from Bill Ferriter (@plugisin):


I have two awesome kids, both currently in university, that approached K-12 school very differently. One was an overachiever who always had to do well… ‘tell me what I need to do to get the best mark’. The other is also bright and wants to do well, but is happy to find her own path there. She’s more likely to put work off, but will be disappointed if she doesn’t do as good as she could.

They both did well in school, but they both had their own struggles as all students do. One such struggle they both had was math. Neither of them enjoyed doing math and we ended up getting tutors for both of them at different times.

It’s a massive shot to my ego getting a math tutor for my daughter in Grade 9 Math when that’s a subject I taught. But I couldn’t help her without tears and frustration. I was always showing it wrong. It took all the patience I had, and that wasn’t enough.

On the flip side, I know that it wasn’t always easy for our kids to be daughters of two educators. We deal with kids all day, and sometimes when we got home, we were kinda ‘done’. We knew every trick in the book, and they didn’t always get away with much that their friends could. I could share more on this, but want to respect the privacy of my kids.

Bill’s tweet, shared above, made me think of two things. First, it’s not always easy being a parent as well as a teacher, while not letting the teacher get in the way of parenting. Secondly, being a parent and watching your child struggle can make you a better teacher… it gives you perspective on how something that you as a teacher might think is simple, can become a huge challenge for a kid at home. It can make you question the value of homework, and it can remind you that kids have struggles that you don’t see at school.

Parenting is a humbling experience, and it can be an experience that makes you a better teacher.

—————

Related: 7 Parenting Tips for Learning at Home ~ Available on YouTube and as a podcast.

I miss the conversations that used to happen on blogs

I can remember blogging and getting 20 to 50 comments that made the post into a conversation… a dialogue that I learned from. That rarely happens anymore. Part of this is that the conversation has moved. For example my Daily-Ink posts generate conversations on LinkedIn, and on Facebook. But I miss rich feedback that made a blog post feel like an engaging conversation. That doesn’t happen much anymore.

What made me bring this up is that I had two people, Brad and Bill, comment on my post about ‘Trying to find the Truth‘, and this conversation reminded me of the kind of commenting that used to happen more frequently.

Twitter conversations are fun, but the richness isn’t there like it is in a longer format blog post and follow up conversation in the comments. Facebook seems to invite compliments like, ‘thanks for sharing’ or ‘I really enjoyed this’, but seldom anything deeper as an add-on to a shared post. LinkedIn seems to have the better conversations coming from blog posts, but they get lost in the stream as opposed to being curated with the blog post.

Perhaps I need to make the effort Aaron Davis does to ‘Read Write Curate‘. Interesting timing that I went to find that link and stumbled on this quote Aaron curated from Bill Ferriter:

Here is Aaron’s full website, Read Write Respond.

Anyway, I’m going to make a commitment to comment more on the blogs I read. If I want to see this kind of conversation more frequently, I should also participate more myself.

Learning Through Failure vs Failing to Learn

We talk a lot about learning through failure, but not a lot about failing to learn. When we fail because of lack of resources, lack of support, lack of knowledge, and/or lack of reflection, it’s just a failure. We do not necessarily learn.

When we talk about learning from failure, we are not actually talking about failure, we are talking about perseverance, and resilience, and tenacity. We are talking about coming up to resistance and unplanned outcomes and working through them to achieve a goal. We are talking about students learning significantly more than if everything went their way.

Who learns more, the person who follows the cookie-cutter curriculum and content-focused assessment, or the student who tries something really original, challenging, and maybe even epic? Even if both paths led to the coveted mark of an ‘A’, which path holds the most promise for deep learning?

We never want students to fail, but we also don’t want them to have such an easy path to success that the learning is forgettable. The struggle that potential failure can create is something that separates learning through failure from failing to learn.

(Image by Bill Ferriter)