Engaging personally

It has been a busy week online in my world. As you can see from my visual I have also been exerting some very positive influence on my 7 year old son, we will work on the spelling next week. But, back to me....

Twitter

I have been using Twitter a bit more and am actually finding it to be a nice quick reference to what people are up to (reading & thinking about, rather than what they are eating for lunch). Now is the challenge of collating a list of people to follow then keeping up with them.


I participated in the Twitter discussion on Thurs evening with Sarah, Folke and Matty Bee, there were also other participants one of whom suggested to develop a successful online network you need to..."engage personally, contribute meaningfully, pay attention, listen a lot, be consistent". I think I will take this advice on board & make an attempt to be more consistent with connecting & keeping up with all the forums that I now have to monitor, Twitter, FB, Wikis blogs, email (blah yuck!) and posting to my blog.
I can see that Twitter will become one of my favourite places to go to see what others are up to, it can be quick and easy or I can get lost in the plethora of further reading references that people add. I have learned how to reply, retweet and use a hashtag to get involved in a 'stream' and I even used Twitter to comment on Mattybee's blog (at least I think I did). I can see that Twitter will be a good way to "orchestrate serendipity" as Rachel Happe explains in her article '5 ways to orchestrate serendipity'.

[Blog update as at 19th Sep] I have stumbled across a helpful preso on Slideshare re: Twitter basics by Heidi Miller [contributing meaningfully]. I tried to email the FO2010 group from Slideshare but was not very successful so I tweeted it. Then I followed Heidi on Twitter [engaging personally]

I also joined in this mornings #FO2010 group discussion in Twitter and it was interesting that some participants (including myself) were not showing up in the stream of comments/tweets. We are learning so much about the perils of experiencing technical difficulties. I am not sure if I will be initiating any Tweet streams or twit chats (need to get used to the lingo) any time soon but I will certainly use Twitter to keep in touch with a wide audience of learning professionals.


e-Gems Elluminate session Wed

I involved myself in an e-gems session held in Elluminate facilitated by Melanie Worral on the topic of Instructional Design. Rather than just exit the session and perhaps read a few references that were provided (lurk, lurk) I also opted to follow Melanie on Twitter ... this is me 'engaging personally'.


It was interesting to note that during the session Melanie engaged participants in a whiteboard brainstorm session/discussion which was very successful, however later in the session when she attempted to pass the mic to engage us all in a verbal discussion there was silence, so Melanie threw up another blank slide & we again typed our comments; there was hardly a white space on the board when we finished...note to facilitator: always have a plan B.


PLENK2010

I have also commenced another course called Personal Learnning Environments, Network and Knowledge 2010 [PLENK2010]. Yet another ball to juggle and I have committed to another blog for this course, I forsee a lot of cross-referencing to this blog & vice versa.


I have noticed that I am becoming more 'open' to sharing of myself online. For my first post on PLENK2010 I added an image of myself..a little bit conceited, perhaps, however there is no way I would have posted a real image of myself 2 months ago. I am enjoying interacting with new people online and part of my interest is putting a face to the name..it's the human thing. Again this is me engaging personally.