Stephen's Untold Stories

Late last night I took a break from studying and I saw on Twitter that a fellow educator who has been working in Hong Kong was asking for someone to Skype in and discuss his or her experience with the K12 Online Conference. I thought I’d take a chance and see if I might participate, and within ten minutes I was speaking with him and his participants live in his classroom in Hong Kong. I was online with them for maybe six or seven minutes, and I must say it was a very rewarding experience.

He was able to get someone from the other side of the world to participate in his class with no notice within minutes using tools that are completely free. It’s a little overwhelming to think how far we’ve come with using technology in education. Of course we still have many miles to go, but I was very glad to take part in a truly global learning experience.

The NFL must be taking lessons from a lot of school districts with this level of paranoia.

Last week, Chad Ochocinco revealed his plan to circumvent NFL rules and tweet during games. This afternoon, the NFL informed teams of its social media policy, and it appears Ochocinco’s plot to hand signal a fan in the stands and have him or her update his account for him is now squashed, along with lots of other player and media activities.

As it pertains to Ochocinco, the rule that would seemingly keep him from tweeting reads: “No updates are permitted to be posted by the individual himself or anyone representing him during this prohibited time on his personal Twitter (Twitter), Facebook (Facebook) or any other social media account.”

The prohibited time is not only during the contest, but also 90 minutes before and after the game. It applies to not only players, but coaches, team personnel, and officials. Beyond that, the media is also being put on warning about in-game social media activity:

“Longstanding policies prohibiting play-by-play descriptions of NFL games in progress apply fully to Twitter and other social media platforms. Internet sites may not post detailed information that approximates play-by-play during a game. While a game is in progress, any forms of accounts of the game must be sufficiently time-delayed and limited in amount (e.g., score updates with detail given only in quarterly game updates) so that the accredited organization’s game coverage cannot be used as a substitute for, or otherwise approximate, authorized play-by-play accounts.”

Read the rest here.

One of the best blog posts I’ve read in quite some time.

The internet is a series of connected tools. It’s time to start treating it like that.

No more talking about Facebook. No more explaining Twitter. No more asking about connecting on LinkedIn.

Just talk. Collaborate. Learn. Listen.

We have daily, nearly real time access to the greatest trove of information ever known, yet all we seem to do is talk about who’s using which network, and how to do so.

Link to complete post.

Thanks to Hoke for pointing this one out. I’ve already added his RSS feed.

Pretty good stuff here.

Astronaut Mark Polanksy is Twittering from the Space Shuttle.

http://twitter.com/Astro_127

I don’t care if you have a Twitter account yourself, or even if you hate Twitter. This might change your mind.

I would have to say that they certainly helped. Pretty impressive story.

Earlier last week, New York Times reporter David Rohde escaped from a Taliban prison. He had been a Taliban hostage for the last seven months, but the general public had absolutely no clue. In a joint effort by The New York Times and Wikipedia, the story was kept quiet until his daring escape.

In November 2008, Rohde was captured and held hostage by the Taliban, along with a local reporter, Tahir Ludin, and their driver, Asadullah Mangal. But until he managed to escape, most of the general public had absolutely no clue. To prevent Rohde’s value in the eyes of his captors from rising, the New York Times kept more than 35 major news organizations from reporting on the story. They believed that the publicity from reporting his capture would inflate the value of Rohde’s life, increasing the difficulty of negotiating for Rohde’s release. Keeping 35 news organizations quiet was actually not the hard part – but staving off Wikipedia users from publishing the news? That was a bit trickier.

Through an elaborate and ongoing battle between Wikipedia editors and an anonymous contributor from Florida, the New York Times and the Wikipedia Foundation managed to keep the story quiet. For seven months, Wikipedia editors were in a constant back-and-forth with this user to delete news of Rohde’s capture off of the site. They were unable to contact the user directly, as s/he was anonymously posting on Wikipedia, and thus could not explain to the user why they were trying to keep the news quiet. Infuriated, the user threw insults at the editors who were deleting his addition, and blindly continued their futile fight.

All of this ended when Rohde and Ludin managed to climb over a wall and escape the Taliban’s clenches. In an interesting twist, the driver chose to join the Taliban and thus stayed behind, according to Rohde. This is a truly inspiring story, and the efforts of the Wikipedia editors and the New York Times are beyond laudable. In a recent tweet, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said that preventing the news from breaking may have saved his life. Regardless of the merits of this comment, it made Rohde’s escape more likely, and was a downright impressive feat of coordination by all parties involved.

Link to article.

I’ve posted a couple of times recently about how I’ve finally started to “get” Twitter. Here is yet another reason I’m really starting to love this tool.

If you aren’t on twitter, you really should be. Not because it allows you to keep up with the daily goings-on of Khloe Kardashian (although it does!), but because we are seeing for the first time what happens when a government that needs to control information to survive can’t control information. Iranians are using twitter to organize, to share information, and even to discuss which routes to take to rallies to avoid confrontations with the police. Although foreign journalists have mostly been kicked out of Iran, we’re still able to get pictures like this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this.

The regime has more sophisticated ways of stopping the flow of information, but so far at least the Iranians on twitter have stayed remarkably organized, and they’ve found ways to vet information. When false rumors have spread, they’ve been quickly debunked.

So, yeah. Twitter is not about what you had for breakfast, or Khloe Kardashian, or me. It’s about evening the playing field.

Link to article

I’m not sure it will cause a great deal of change, but I’m starting to enjoy it more these days.

The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your “followers,” and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It’s not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, “If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal.”

I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom ’90s when he was launching Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams was launching a communications platform that limited you to a couple of sentences at most. What was next? Software that let you send a single punctuation mark to describe your mood?

And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this “ambient awareness”: by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don’t think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.

Read the rest here.

The more I use Twitter, the more I like it.

• http://technologizer.com/2009/05/11/ten-twitter-mythconceptions

Maybe my favorite one:

Mythconception #3: People who tweet what they had for breakfast are wasting your time.

Reality: Maybe–but only the first time they do it. After that, it’s your own dang fault for continuing to follow someone who you find boring. Twitter, unlike a crowded airplane, is not a place where anyone is forced to listen to someone else blather; you’ve got complete control over whose tweets you do and don’t read.

If you want to see what I had for breakfast (J/K) check me out at http://twitter.com/stephenksu

Great article by Tony Vincent.

• http://azk12.org/blog/archives/46-10-Things-Teachers-Should-Know-to-Get-Started-with-Twitter.html

I’m not aware of any districts in Georgia that are doing this. I hope that will soon change.

Lee’s Summit R-7 (MO) School District is atwitter over Twitter. A trial period had been proposed through the summer, but after more than a dozen people found the district on the social networking site, officials decided to launch the initiative immediately. Posts are usually about recent awards or links to the district site. It will not be used to announce school closings or other district emergencies.

http://www.schoolcio.com/ShowArticle/17074