{"id":249,"date":"2008-12-16T14:33:15","date_gmt":"2008-12-16T14:33:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ivyrun.com\/wordpress\/2008\/12\/16\/surrounded-by-community\/"},"modified":"2008-12-16T14:33:15","modified_gmt":"2008-12-16T14:33:15","slug":"surrounded-by-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/?p=249","title":{"rendered":"Surrounded by Community"},"content":{"rendered":"

I spent most of yesterday online with educators, exploring the meaning of community.\u00a0 Several hours were spent in Elluminate as part of Powerful Learning Practice<\/a>‘s ongoing professional development program.\u00a0 From there, I moved to Second Life for VSTE’s weekly meeting where we explored educational groups.\u00a0 We ended the evening with a snowball fight and, as you can see from the picture below, I dressed for the occasion.\u00a0 (Always wanted to have wings!)<\/p>\n

\"Snapshot_002\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I just felt energized the whole day, having access to all these fellow travelers without having to leave my house!\u00a0 We shared both professional and personally; we learned; we had fun. It was the kind of experience I would wish for learners of all ages.<\/p>\n

Besides being reminded of the power of online community, I learned some specific content.\u00a0 I was introduced to Google notebook, a tool I had not explored before.\u00a0 I installed it and was eager to try it out this morning.\u00a0 So, I logged into Twitter, knowing that someone would have a link to a good article to read.\u00a0 Twitter has increasingly become a big part of my virtual learning community in a way that I could not have imagined when I first joined.\u00a0 I was not disappointed this morning as Will Richardson<\/a> had posted a link to a New Yorker article on teacher quality from Malcolm Gladwell<\/a>. \u00a0 My primary job right now is working with pre-service teachers and identifying good teachers is always a concern.<\/p>\n

I read the article and, as Will suggested, skimmed the football stuff.\u00a0 When I got to the first paragraph that was really about education, I discovered that it had already been highlighted by someone else, using Diigo.\u00a0 I moused over to read the comment and discovered it had been made by Michael Scott<\/a>, who I had just seen last week in Roanoke and who is a member of the VSTE Ning<\/a>.\u00a0 I took a break from reading to add Michael as a friend in Diigo.\u00a0 The next highlight and comment came from Clay Burrell<\/a>, a fellow Twitterer whose blog, Beyond School,<\/a> is always thought provoking.\u00a0 All I could think of is what a small world it was since, according to the Internet World Stats, there are nearly 1.5 billion people online these days.<\/p>\n

I think the lesson here is that online is a real community, as real as the face to face community I enjoyed at last week’s conference in Roanoke.\u00a0 It’s something my non-networked friends just don’t understand.\u00a0 And it isn’t something that happened overnight either.\u00a0 But it is part of my life now, and as I sit at my desk working alone from home on a rainy day, I feel the presence of that community.\u00a0 Thanks to you all!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spent most of yesterday online with educators, exploring the meaning of community.\u00a0 Several hours were spent in Elluminate as part of Powerful Learning Practice‘s ongoing professional development program.\u00a0 From there, I moved to Second Life for VSTE’s weekly meeting where we explored educational groups.\u00a0 We ended the evening with a snowball fight and, as … Continue reading Surrounded by Community<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[133,123,16,73,53,65,102],"tags":[354,145,355,368],"class_list":["post-249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community","category-online-learning","category-second-life","category-social-networking","category-teacher-quality","category-twitter","category-vste","tag-education","tag-online-community","tag-second-life","tag-twitter"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4X3L0-41","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}