After spending a week being super wired at Discovery Communication’s corporate headquarters, and then another three days in a much less tech-oriented setting, it gave me a great opportunity to think about different kinds of social networks.

First we have online networks. We like these people in part because we have a common interest that is not limited by geography. I have become very close to people I have met and interacted with online, but there is something that changes when you meet folks face-to-face that you have only known online. Sometimes, they are exactly like you expect. Sometimes they do not meet your expectations (for good or ill), but it changes what you know about and how you feel about that person. There is a certain longing most of us have to meet our online friends or professional colleagues in person. I know other people experience it because I hear them going to some effort to meet up whenever it’s possible. So they may be “virtual” but our tendency as humans are to make the real, and face-to-face.

Then, I spent time with the Amish, who eschew most technology from the industrial era, let alone the digital one we now inhabit. They have, however, a very complex social network, and although they are “separate” from their “English” (non-Amish) neighbors, my aunt is a part of that network. How did that happen? How does a non-tech social network work? What did it tell me about how my own networks function?

My aunt has lived in two Amish communities as an adult. When I was in elementary school, she lived in a farmhouse in Western New York in the Conawengo Valley. I visited her the summer between fifth and sixth grade in 1976. It exposed me to a new and different culture. After the Loma Prieta earthquake, her husband (born and raised in the Lake Erie area) wanted to leave California, so they returned to the Eastern United States to Belleville, PA. In both places, she has built ties to the Amish community, who are not always beloved by their neighbors, most of whom come from an Amish background (surnames of Yoder, Peachy, Beachey, etc.) but don’t realize this connection, and are frustrated with Amish “backwardness” and “clannishness”. My aunt builds ties through a system of mutual favors and listening to them. The Amish of Belleville do include some car Amish (ones who have split off from “old order” groups), but most of the high groups, do not. They will accept rides, and a car is quicker than a horse and buggy, so she gives rides.

But, she is more than a taxi service. Many more of the Belleville folks have phones than I recall seeing in Conawengo, but this was a big lesson to me, the advances in technology that the phone brings does not obviate the need for “connectors” like my aunt. People call her because she knows things, or where to find things, and travels about and shares information. So on our trip, she was asked to track down more canning jars and given a price the person was willing to spend. They could have called around themselves, but they knew asking my aunt was probably going to be quicker. How many times do we have a go-to person for information in our own PLN? I know I often operate in that capacity. I know that if I want to find someone online, the first person to ask is Lisa Durff. My aunt is in a position like that in her community.

The other part of this trip was my documentation on my micro-blog (http://mizmercer.tumblr.com) and on Plurk/Twitter. I was putting up posts and pictures about what I was seeing and learning from my cell phone, as we traveled through the valley. People were responding on Plurk and Twitter, and asking questions. My aunt was amazed at everyone’s interest, and that I had people following me, just as I was amazed at the role she played in her community. My new cell made communicating with my community easier, and allowed a conversation to take place as I went along, but both my aunt’s network, and my network have many more things in common than they have differences. The technology is a tool; a great tool, a tool I love, a tool that makes many more things possible, but without the people, it’s just a hunk of plastic, metal, and chips. That story I told was interesting and got a response not because I was using my cell phone but because of the people involved.

Ken Shelton put it best when asked his take-away from the DEN National Institute, “it’s the network.” It’s what I’ve learned from DEN, NECC, and from my aunt and her Amish neighbors. Thanks for the lesson folks!

The important ideas are about building relationships, and building integration between streaming and Web 2.0 to help us learn, and lead to students being engaged and learning.

This was not a great stream due to me be stingy about bandwidth, and lowering the video quality. This was foolish, as the next day’s video of Steve Dembo shows that I could have gone ALL the way up on video and audio quality with no problem.

I’m also featured on a video from the Art Guy, Aaron Smith, on Academic Aesthetic:

My favorite session so far was the one on geo-caching because it was so new to me. Bridget Belardi did a really great job explaining it to us, then taking us on an expedition to find a cache.
Here is our find:

We were taken on a tour of Washington, D.C. Wednesday night that started with sweltering temps and ended with a thunderstorm.

We had to go to the Kennedy Center since it was an indoor tour, but took a soggy trip up to the Lincoln Memorial to cap the evening.

We went to the “Green Screen”, “Chromakey”, or what Discovery calls the Insertion Studio. Mr. Foley (I know the irony of that is not lost on him) who is the cameraman there shared some fantastic tips for successful green screening (which you can do in Adobe Premiere Elements):

1. Avoid corners or edges to prevent shadows, etc. which make the green background 3 dimensional.
2. Light the screen (green background) and subject separately (2+ stop difference). The background should be lighter. They use fluorescents in the studio.
3. There should be 8-10 feet between the background and the subject.

I took some shots for a new project doing a film on cyber-safety; watch how you are presenting yourself.

Tonight, we saw a preview of an upcoming series on comets. The producer, John Grasse, produced The Human Body, Pushing the Limits. We were all pretty tired, and probably were not as thoughtful as we could have been when he kindly offered up a conversation about how to tell non-fiction stories in a way that is appealing and understandable. The comet series (which started with BBC), used the hook of discussing how humans have viewed comets through the ages (anthropomorphizing things).

We’re working on projects on lessons that integrate Discovery Streaming. The projects, including mine, are here.

I’m having a great time, and meeting some great folks. We finished our last night together by finishing up our projects, and playing Wii bowling. I bowled a 175 the first time, but was pretty tired by the last round, and only did 119.

The big issue for me, is that is seems like there are people at a variety of levels at this institute from intermediate to advanced knowledge of technology education. I’m in the later group. Most of the scheduled sessions are about tools I already know how use. What I’m going to do is a larger project on cybersafety, and developing a plan for the PD sessions that I will be doing in August. I’m also going to do a model unit plan about a use of Discovery Streaming that led to kids learning about linear equations and doing a video about them in stop action.

The best part, as always, is meeting in small groups with folks, and sharing what we know, want to know and what we’re doing. I’m going to be posting video interviews on my tumblog: http://mizmercer.edublogs.org.

There has been some talk of getting together before the meeting, which requires some coordination. I shared how I had started a group tweet here. Steve Dembo is pushing hard for using the new kid on the block, Plurk. Being open-minded, I spent some time there yesterday. My partner in this adventure was Amy Cordova. I can’t believe this woman has FOUR children. She also has an “un-smart” phone, but uses txt/sms a lot. This was good because we discovered that you can post via sms to Plurk, but you can’t view or retrieve from Plurk that way (there is a mobified page for phone browsers at http://www.plurk.com/m). ” Hmm,” I thought. I’ve gotten some great cell phone tips from Liz Kolb, one of which is that you can send an RSS feed to JOTT and it will convert the text to voice. So, I went to my Plurk page, selected Friends and my plurks, then clicked on the magic orange RSS lozenge in the address window, to get the feed url. Copy the url, then go into JOTT. At your dashboard, there is a tab on the right labeled “Feeds”, click on it. Click on “add feeds” , paste in the url, and voila, it’s there. To listen, call JOTT, say, “JOTT FEEDS” and then say the feed name. The speech is not to bad for a synthetic model.

My takeaway is that Plurk may not be great for this application. It’s good for sharing links, and much better for conversations than Twitter. OTOH, for logistics in a large group, and staying in touch on the go, I think Twitter will still be a better choice. My own suggestion is that we use Twitter for meeting up, and Plurk for a back-channel.

I’ve used it to build a page for the upcoming DEN National Institute. You can see the page here: http://DENNI.wirenode.mobi on your cell phone.

There is a lot of planning going on about pre-conference site-seeing. Since twitter is good for that I wanted to figure out a way to use that. I only know a few of the folks at all, and only know of one that I currently have in my twitter list. In addition, this is a smaller group than NECC (only 100). I thought of using hashtags, but it doesn’t seem to be working (no updates since 7/10). I considered summize, but it requires that your tweets be on the public timeline, which I and many others do not do. I remembered an app called GroupTweet. It’s a little hard to wrap your head around, but here is the short version…

Set up an account in Twitter for your group. I chose DEN_NI. Then, add it to GroupTweet by giving the twitter account name and password. Then have group members follow and be followed by the group twitter account. Send direct message (”d DEN_NI wash the car”), and it will be sent out to all the groups followers. If you want things private you can check not on public timeline. I wanted to get an RSS feed, so I’ve made it public.

A week from now, I’ll be heading towards the DEN National Institute,which promises to be more intimate than my NECC experience. I don’t know the DEN folks as well as some of my other online networks. I spent some time with them on the Sunday before NECC at Enchanted Spring ranch. It was a lot of fun, and had some great discussions. I’m looking forward to spending more time with Kenneth Shelton, an educator at LAUSD, who works near my old hometown (the San Fernando Valley). I’m hoping to get at least a little tourism in and will end the trip with a detour to my aunt’s near State College in Pennsylvania.