The Strength of Weak Ties

You may have seen this go through your Twitter feed recently…

A Twitter Rubric…

And as you might expect, it was retweeted by quite a few people. 

I’m wondering about the need for a Twitter rubric.

To me, this represents an attempt to force fit the use of a dynamic social media tool into a familar, comfortable, and safe structure, the rubric.  Fit, jam, prod and force the tool into something that is articifical and constraining.

Why must a teacher define what represents exemplary use of Twitter for a student?

Exemplary use is using tinyurls to effectively stay within the 140 character limit. 

Seriously?  What if I don’t want to use a URL shortener?  So what if the tweet gets too long.  What about a second tweet?  The last time I checked, tweets were free.

Why do teachers have to own the tool?

If I’m a student, I now have a choice, but the wrong one.  Use the tool as I see fit for my needs, or succumb to the wishes of the teacher who wants me to use it as they have defined it, all in the name of giving the use a grade…

We all know what they’ll do.

But why not give them a real choice?  Maybe they’ll use Twitter, maybe they’ll use Facebook, maybe they’ll use index cards.  Why limit choices?  Why limit how they use a particular tool?  Why be so prescriptive?

I’d rather think that educators would give students a palette to choose from.  You select how you want to represent your ideas, and you describe for me how well they worked, or didn’t work.  Describe for me your growth throughout the learning experience, and the role that the particular tool or tools of your choosing had in that experience. There’s your assessment.

If you haven’t see the work of Dave Cormier, George Siemens, Stephen Downes and Rita Kop in their PLENK2010 course, I highly recommend it.  It’s a refreshing and innovative approach that emphasizes student choice and empowerment in how they choose to learn, and how they choose to represent their understanding.

If connective technologies and networking experiences have taught us anything, they should have taught us about the freedom to connect, engage, and project our ideas, in our own ways.  They should have taught us about how important individual choice can be in learning.

Why don’t we offer the same to our kids?

Posted via email from djakes’ posterous

Retweet.

Taking a tweet in Twitter by someone else and resending it out through your network, often with an RT in front of it.

If you’ve been around Twitter long enough, you know that there was a time when retweets didn’t exist.

Seriously.

And probably many of us long for those days, a time when people in your Twitter network actually shared what they thought, rather than just repurposed someone else’s ideas.

Is your Twitter stream constipated with multiple RT’s of some idea, by the same people?  RT RT RT RT RT RT RT, yeah I get it, OK!!!!!!

Ah, but there are no rules…

But, eventually, you have to have your own ideas, don’t you?  

Retweeting gets you noticed.  Retweeting gets you followers.  Retweeting amplifies your presence on Twitter.  Retweeting associates your name with someone who actually might have an idea…

But habitual retweeting is not a sustainable behavior over time.

You see, original thought is still important.  In fact, original thought is even more important today in the everyone-connected-everyone shares-copy and RTpaste world of digital networks.

Ideas ultimately get you noticed.  Ideas matter.  Your ideas.  

So before you hit the R and T keys, think, what can I offer that is original, what can I offer that reflects what I believe in, what can I offer that challenges or extends the ideas of another?

How can I be original?

Posted via email from djakes’ posterous