I realized something tonight as I read the story of how Virginia Tech professor John Boyer landed a Skype interview for his World Regions class with Aung Sun Suu Kyi, leader of the democratic movement in Burma – I don’t give near enough credit to Skype as a disruptive educational technology.

I’ve helped faculty use it for just this kind of activity – bring in a guest from a distance as a guest speaker, and not thought twice about it. I’ve read stories of teachers who have used it to bring sick kids into class so they don’t fall behind. People are using it to connect with native language speakers to learn another language.

All this for free in a package that most grandparents use to speak with their grand-kids.

Maybe it’s because Skype has reached that point where it has become boring which, according to Shirky, is now the point where the conversation becomes interesting. Which is to say, once we stop our fascination with the technology itself and it becomes first mundane and then invisible, then and only then do we begin to see the change it has on society. Maybe Skype is at that point.

Tomorrow John Boyer is introducing his students to Aung Sun Suu Kyi. Want to see a group of motivated students? Check out the last 30 seconds of Boyer’s video request to Aung Sun Suu Kyi, posted on YouTube.

But it doesn’t have to be someone world famous to make it relevant for students. For Camosun College video instructor Andy Bryce, it was a former grad of the Applied Communication Program who now works for CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada.

Which begs the question, who do your students want to see in your class?

Photo: sign of the times by Doug Symington used under Creative Commons license.

Something is happening at my institution. I seem to be connecting with more of our faculty on Facebook and Twitter. Interest in blogging among faculty is growing, and every week I am hearing of another faculty person starting to blog or tweet.

What is both interesting and encouraging is the topic of conversation in these spaces. They are talking about teaching and learning. They are sharing links and resources. They are connecting with each other and talking about their craft. They are developing their PLN’s, and it is very cool to see happening.

One striking example of what I am seeing occurred recently where I took part in a conversation on Facebook with an instructor who posted the following status update:

How do I measure student engagement in my classroom? How would I evaluate them if I decide not to use exams anymore?

There was a great response from his colleagues and a rich discussion ensued. But then something interesting happened. It wasn’t just other faculty who were responding. There were staff, his friends, his Dean — and students. Students who he was FB friends with weighed in with their opinions on what kind of strategies they thought would engage them. His students were responding to his question, and posting their responses to what others were suggesting.  Talk about a rich formative evaluation, done completely informally and naturally, prompted by a simple question posted as a status update.

I am not sure what is going on. Perhaps we are reaching a tipping point where there are enough people now engaged with social networks that  where this type of interaction is possible. Perhaps it is because we have a new Dean in Arts and Science. He blogs. He tweets. He connects with his faculty in Facebook. And I think he is setting the tone for his School. Perhaps his presence in these social spaces, talking about both professional and personal things, is making it somehow more inviting for his faculty. I’m not sure. But whatever the reasons, it is great to see and be able to take part in these conversations without having to wait for a once a year conference, or a chance hallway encounter.

Yesterday at 2pm I had my first interview for my thesis. I was planning on taking a late lunch and doing it over my lunch hour. Naturally, I have been nervous about this new phase in my thesis beginning. This was the guts of it – collecting the data. Do I have the right questions? Will Skype work? All those niggling little things that keep you up at night and make you wring your hands all day.

The office was quiet. I was the only person providing D2L support. Our 3 ID’s were working on the other campus, and our regular D2L admin was taking a holiday day. I was holding down the fort, providing support and admin functions for our LMS.

At 1:15, I was just about to begin setting up my computer in our meeting room for the 2pm Skype interview. I wanted to test everything out well ahead of time. I saw an instructor walk into our office area. He came over to me and reported that D2L was slow, and he had a group of students writing a test in the lab next door. I popped onto D2L to take a look and it was slow. And getting slower. Suddenly an email popped into the support inbox. Were we having problems with D2L because this person could not log on. Then another. And another. Students began coming into the office, reporting problems with D2l. The Learning Commons was full. D2L was going down. I was alone, and in 30 minutes I had to do my first interview for my research. Anyone reading this who has ever done research, especially research that involves long form interviews, knows how tough it can be to line up a participant. I did not want to reschedule. I began to feel a pit forming in my stomach.

A quick call to my team leader at the other campus confirmed they were having problems, too. She immediately got it. She knew what was coming up for me in 30 minutes, and what it meant for my own personal development – my first thesis interview. And how did she handle it? She told me to walk away.

She told me to go for a walk, clear my head and get into a good space for my interview. She talked me down from my rising panic, and told me that what I needed to do at that moment was focus on my research. Our entire LMS was falling apart (not a usual occurrence I have to say. Of all the criticisms one may have of D2l, reliability is not one we often face), I was the only person around, and she was telling me to put my research first. I felt like a tremendous weight had been lifted, and I literally got some kind of warm chemical rush up my back as I heard her voice at the other end of the phone telling me to go and prep for my interview.

So I did. I walked away. Went outside. came back 10 minutes later, went into the meeting room and set up my computer. I closed the door. It felt a bit like that NFB film The Big Snit, where thermonuclear war is a-raging just outside the door of the house. But I went ahead and shut it out and did my interview. And it went very well.

Later when I emerged I found out D2L had come back fully online around 2:20, and all was quiet. My team leader had triaged the emails in our support email box while I was busy. All was well. Some co-workers had come back into the office and were hanging Christmas decorations. Sanity had been restored. And I was reminded once again that, when it comes to work, I am incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by supportive, caring people. Years of working in commercial media has meant I have worked for a lot of horrible bosses in my time. I can’t begin to express how my team leaders actions yesterday made me feel, other than to say it spurred me to spend the morning writing this post, as a small way of thanking her for what she did yesterday.

Thanks, Susan.

to:

I made the change because I am taking part in the prostate cancer fundraiser Movember, and thought that people who have donated to support me should see exactly what it was they got for their money.

Well, the change prompted one of the most enjoyable and interesting days I have had on Twitter. I was at work, laughing out loud in the office at the banter going back and forth, triggered by my sudden moustached resemblance to a circa 1977 Burt Reynolds.

But mixed in with all the frivolity was something else. First, people who I had never connected one on one on Twitter with were sending me messages, and engaging in conversation. It sparked this blog post (and another one from Helen Keegan as we are sharing our thoughts on this subject as a bit of a blog-off), and a deeper realization of just how important these little symbols of us are and what messages they send about us to others in our network.

Lately I have struggled with how to represent myself online. Little Clint has been my primary online avatar for years. It has become my calling card. It’s my gravatar when I post comments on blogs and leave my mark around the net. It’s how I have always identified myself on Twitter, and was my default Facebook avatar for years. The little guy has become my online stake in virtual ground; something of a marker for others in my network, which is part of the reason why I struggle with changing it. As Helen said in her tweet,

it’s difficult coz consistency (icon) easily tied to ID/reputation, yet in reality ID can be so fluid…

For all intents and purposes, Little Clint (in all his 8 year old retro hipster cuteness)  is me. When someone in my network comes across something on the web that I have already left my mark on, it is a signal to them that someone else from their network – someone they presumably trust – has been there.

Case in point, last week I visited the site Academia.edu for the first time. Had never been there, somehow stumbled across it from some link somewhere. What was the first thing I saw on the page? Well, because I was logged into Facebook, and because Academia.edu is integrated with Facebook Connect, I was greeted by the smiling avatars of two people from my FB network – two people in my circle of trust who I recognized immediately. Now, this doesn’t mean I see their images on this website as a personal endorsement, but it was certainly enough for me to determine that this site was something I might want to dig into a bit.

As more and more services become integrated with the Internet Holy Trinity (Twitter, Facebook and Google), a simple change in avatar on one social network service can have ripple effects far down the line.

Over time, we all change. Our physical appearance, the way we think about things, who we are is constantly in motion, sometimes from day to day. So why shouldn’t our avatars change to reflect who we are at that moment in time? Why shouldn’t we be able to use whatever symbol or photo or image to represent us? But when we are in an environment where trust and reputation are hard to establish, do we run the risk of weakening those signals of trust to our network by undertaking the simple act of changing our avatar?

I do love Lil Clint, but I don’t know if he really represents who I am. This is especially noticeable when I go to a conference where I am going to meet people in my network f2f for the first time.  I often think I should buy a bunch of t-shirts with that avatar plastered on it, and wear it on the first day of a conference just so people can attach that image to me.  Like the importance of using your own name on social networks, I am beginning to think it is time to retire Little Clint.

But I wonder what I might lose by suddenly abandoning him and replacing him with a more generic photo of myself. Little Clint is pretty distinctive. Big Clint is just another face in the crowd. It’s not those that I have strong ties with in my network that I think about. They’ll catch it. But will those who I have weak ties with even recognize that I am the same person? Will they connect the two? Will they even care?

Maybe I worry too much. After all, changing my avatar this week did result in some great new connections and a couple of gut-busting howls. But I wonder how many people in my various connected networks are now wondering who this new face is, and is it someone they can trust?

The title, in case you are wondering, comes from the American version of The Office and is in reference to this scene. Maybe Dwight was right?

The faculty and projects I picked used Skype, Twitter, YouTube and Posterous as the tools. Scope of the projects ranged from fairly small and discrete (using Skype to bring in a virtual guest speaker) to fairly ambitious (using YouTube as a platform for student created video projects, which involved 5 sections of Nursing students).

This was the first time I used Prezi as a presentation tool and enjoyed having a reason to use it. Before doing the presentation, I tweeted out asking for potential gotcha’s on using Prezi and got some good tips back, including to go easy on the zoom and pan as it can be nausea inducing on the big screen to have things continually spinning and flying from corner to corner, and to download a hard copy of the Prezi to my local machine along with any external resources I might have embedded in the Prezi, like YouTube videos. The one tip I can add to that from my own experience is to test the presentation on a projector beforehand as the projector will tend to lower the screen resolution and could change your layout when displayed on the big screen as a result. I noticed that spacing of my text was altered from the widescreen view I had on my laptop to the narrow projector view when plugged into the overhead projector.