I recently attended a provocative session at Educon. For those who don’t know Educon is an annual education Conference held at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia each year on the week before the Super Bowl. It is a conference of discussion as opposed to a conference of presentation. Each of the sessions is a facilitated discussion that involves the participants.
It was in one such session that #Edchat received what I thought was an unwarranted criticism from one of the participants in the session.
For those who may be new to social media scheduled chats take place on Twitter on various topics in education throughout the week. Each is hosted and moderated by an educator who has an interest in the topic of discussion. This real-time chat is conducted through the use of hash tags (#Edchat), which curate all the tweets, so that the chat can be followed without interference from other tweets on the stream. One would simply create a column to follow the specific hash tag and all other tweets would be filtered out so that only hash-tagged tweets would appear in that column. I gave a complete description of education Chats in this post: Chats: What are they and why do we need them?
The Edchat criticism came in a discussion that I attended on The Privileged Voices in Education; facilitated by two people I greatly admire Jose Vilson, and Audrey Watters. I attended that particular session in need of making myself more aware of how I might be unknowingly offending and even demeaning people, as I address things from a position of privilege as a white, heterosexual, male educator. Those are all factors that have been brought to my attention lately, specifically because I have a voice in social media, and I haven’t been aware of my privilege in our very diverse culture. This need for awareness comes with the added responsibility of being an educator. I was unaware of my micro-aggression. As I consulted Wikipedia for specifics I found Micro-aggression: “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color ” I need to reflect on that discussion more before attempting to delve deeper in a later post. A follow-up post on this is my intention.
Of course the Edchat criticism came during this particular educator’s comments within this larger more important discussion, so I did not feel it appropriate to respond to him at the time. It was later however, that it occurred to me that we, as educators, are also privileged and must be aware of the less educated or informed. The comment about Edchat was not horrible. It was not even offensive. As a founder of Edchat, I am always listening to educators’ comments. Of course it doesn’t help, when a comment is made about Edchat in a room full of educators, and that a half-dozen, or so, immediately turn to me to see if I will respond. It reminds me of a group of kids gathered to watch a fight afterschool.
This educator said he was introduced to Edchat nine months ago and he felt that Twitter, and Edchat specifically was not the right place to have education discussions. He felt that 140-character format was insufficient for discussion. That was when it occurred to me that he might be speaking from a position of privilege as an educator who is exposed to education discourse. He certainly is an educator who was afforded an opportunity to attend a $200 conference in Philadelphia. His experience is not that of educators in other regions of America and even further from those of educators outside America. Who was he, to make the judgment for other people who an education chat had little, or no value? Opportunity to freely discuss issues in education does not take place in every school globally. Education chats are global, and they offer a glimpse, yes, just a glimpse, of only some of the things that concern educators. It is also mainly an American point of view for most of the chats probably dominated by a northeast influence. Additionally, I have no idea how many people of color are involved. I might assume that not as many as we should have. For anyone to consider all of this and feel that their experience outweighs all others in a judgment on the worth of a chat, may be a little too much, but, the again, I have already made too much of even this.
These twitter chats and even blog posts are not the deep discussions needed for us to make all the right decisions in education, or even our personal lives. They are however starting points. They are flags, signposts, billboards, and bulletin boards to concerns that educators have. They are forerunners and precursors to the needed deeper discussions. Please don’t criticize Chats like Edchat for not being the needed deep discussion. They were never intended to be that. They were set up to create awareness for the community. The very deep discussion that was taking place at Educon was in great part a result of the tweets and chats of social media as explained by the facilitators. We should remember that sometimes a chat is just a chat.
I am growing weary of self-righteous indignation toward those who are trying to make a difference! Keep on keeping on, Tom! We need your voice now more than ever!!
Have a great day! Message sent from my iPhone.
I wonder why folks who prefer one method of communication and collaboration would feel the need to criticize another’s preferred method? Shouldn’t we all enthusiastically embrace the fact that educators are finding one another, listening, thinking, engaging, and learning? Whenever and however we break down the walls that isolate educators we should celebrate with a unified cheer!
Interesting to consider that twitter is why many of us were even at Educon. The edchat happens twice per day so as to accommodate the need for meaningful conversations during moments of convenience for all.
I took his statement as more “it’s not for me” than “it’s not for all”…although now that I typed that…maybe that’s what he WAS saying. At any rate…his opinion is still his opinion.
However, the throngs of educators that cloud the edu-twitterspace for edchat say differently.
As for the lack of people of color, I don’t think that it’s an “edchat” problem per se. It’s consistent throughout in terms of people of color who actively connect via twitter. It’s a problem of conversations of interest. It’s a problem of constantly being left out and it’s a problem of “I can’t relate to that enough to dedicate my time to doing it”.
No, 140 characters can’t do some conversations justice. Like Audrey, I too have taken them off-line and into email but the space is needed for the conversations to start.
Now, let’s see how we can engage more to find the value in participating.
I have heard this criticism several times in recent weeks. Often it is followed by a criticism that twitter chats lack depth to create real change. As someone who has organized and hosted many chats I may be biased, but my response, respectfully, to those with this criticism go like this:
Chats are places for people to connect with those who are in similar need of growth. It is a starting point for the like-minded to connect and those with dissimilar ideas to engage and compare thoughts. Most importantly however, chats are a jumping off point.
The greatest growth happens not as you are tweeting but in the hours afterward as your further pursue thoughts and ideas of interest. The real power is the connections and friendships across the country that support you as an educator. These friendships arise in all of the places where we risk going beyond the 140 characters of twitter. The limits of twitter and education chats are only really limits if you let them stop you.
So respectfully, for me, twitter represents the removal of local limitations not the imposition of them. How else would I have found this blog and connected with this community?
Hi Tom,
I believe I made the comment in question. I’d like to explain the context of the remark a little further.
First off, some errata: I’m not an educator, at least not in the classroom. I’m a software developer working in EdTech, and it was for that reason I attended EduCon, to learn more about current discussions and thinking about technology, pedagogy, and professional development.
I’m truly sorry if my comment was offensive or even upsetting. I was specifically interested in that session because this is also an ongoing discussion in the hacker community as well, and much of it occurs on Twitter, and most of it is unproductive or even counter-productive. I was expressing my initial reaction to the use of Twitter for #edchat, from the perspective of a developer who thinks in terms of tooling and use-cases.
I think #edchat is a great resource, in which educators find both utility and community, and I fully support it. I doubt I phrased that comment well, but I was trying to point out how the setting, context, and mechanism of delicate and emotionally charged discussions on topics like privilege are much better suited to the type of forum we had at EduCon than to Twitter.
That session was (IMHO) a huge success; it was civil, exploratory, enlightening, and inspiring. It also gave me a lot of ideas I want to take back to the hacker community to try to help elevate the level of discourse on this important topic.
As for my own privilege: I’m white, male, and I work in an industry that affords a number of privileges ranging from compensation to flexibility and a deep understanding of computation and software that is relatively inaccessible to most people. So I have a lot of privilege, and like everyone, need to check it constantly. Also like everyone, I don’t always succeed in this. It’s an ongoing process.
Also, as a developer, I know firsthand what it’s like to hear your work criticized or dismissed, whether intentionally or not. It wasn’t my intention to do either, but I apologize if I phrased it in a way that gave rise to that interpretation.
I look forward to your follow-up post; I’m working on my own reflection on EduCon in general and that session in particular, and this post has given me even more to consider. I’ll be sure to share it with you when I’m done.
[…] – Read this post by Tom Whitby. Thanks to Tom and all the other folks who dropped by. That […]
I am incredibly privileged person. I live in the United States of America in 2014. I am a white woman. I am well educated. I am heterosexual — with a bonus that my current partner is a white male full-bearded technologist.
All that makes my being a freelance writer (even though economically me myself I live on the edge of precarity) a lot easier financially.
I was raised middle class. My granddad owned a small, local grocery store. People need to eat, so we did okay — that is until the mid-1980s when corporate grocery stores were able to come in to our small town and offer lower prices. You know, “economies of scale” and such.
We closed the grocery store in 1986. My dad, an alcoholic, never recovered. Things got ugly. Really ugly. My mom, an immigrant to this country (well, she’s English), held things together.
I was the smart kid and then I was the bad kid. And so my mom sent me away to boarding school in England when I was 16.
My story is a complicated story.
All of our stories are.
I got pregnant very young. I was a dropout. A high school dropout. A college dropout. A PhD dropout. Again and again and again. (I should note: I have an International Baccalaureate diploma. I graduated with honors with a four-year degree. I have a Master’s Degree. I’ve been published in academic journals. And stuff.)
I taught college composition for several years. Then I taught literature and film. And then, in 2005, I became a widow.
“Privilege” isn’t an easy discussion to have. “Privilege” operates in clear-cut ways most obviously when we talk about race and nationality and class and gender and sexual identity. And then things break down in ways that complicate everything.
I understand that it’s not easy to speak up and speak out. I get that people are uncomfortable when others do speak up and speak out. I get that some people cannot speak up and speak out. That’s privilege.
Here are a couple of things that those of us with privilege can do:
We can shut up. We can listen. We can recognize that that this conversation is and isn’t about us. We can let other voices be heard. We can sit with what we perceive to be insult before we become insulted and enraged. We can sit and sit and sit and think. We can choose to steer the conversation away from areas in which we wield power and we can let the conversation go elsewhere. We can make allies. We can have their back. We can take great risks — real risks — in doing so. We can be small and quiet so that others can amplified as a result. We can listen. We can learn. We can recognize that our perspective is just one perspective and the fact that it gets to be the dominant perspective isn’t because we’re smart or right but because of an unearned recognition. Because privilege.
We can choose to not derail important conversations about privilege by making this about our hurt feelings, *even if our feelings might be hurt*.
We can seek to unpack our privilege — and really, we must do just that.
And we can take this conversation to forums other than Twitter — face to face conversations, emails, and so on — where we can love and support and educate one another. And it’s okay if we do that. It doesn’t mean Twitter is bad or blog comments or bad. It just means that there’s a lot of learning to be had, in a lot of ways, in a lot of places.
Yours in struggle.
~Audrey
I wasn’t at Educon but I have to say that reading this post and the comments has made me think harder and deeper about issues such as privilege and the shortcomings of connectedness online than anything I’ve read in a long long time.
140 characters is all educators have time to read and enough to know there are other innovators out there. Thank goodness for students Educational Reform is moving forward! Keep found what you are doing!
Tom,
What I like best about #Edchat, and chats in general, is the opportunity it gives all educators to speak. Sometimes, it is the only forum we have. It unites like-minded people, and through discussion and discourse, provides opportunities for longer, deeper conversations. It also provides opportunities to get to know people on a deeper level, and form edufriends that wouldn’t otherwise occur. Some of my most trusted colleagues in education are global, and have come from conversations begun on Twitter. I relish these opportunities to connect. We can have surface level discussions, in more than 140 characters, in person, too, can we not?
[…] I recently attended a provocative session at Educon. For those who don’t know Educon is an annual education Conference held at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia each year on the week before the Super Bowl. […]
Hey Tom,
Again, this is a good example of why judging the ways that others use social spaces is pointless. There’s no one right answer to whether chats are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ simply because good and bad are determined by individuals.
While I don’t participate in live chats because I find it difficult to learn from a fast-flowing stream of posts, that doesn’t mean it’s a style of learning without any value. For others who are more skilled at keep up, the pace of the stream is just right.
That’s what personalization is all about: Finding tools that make it possible for an individual to learn when, how and where they want.
Any of this make sense?
Bill
[…] A post by Tom Whitby about #Educhat encouraged me to think about the role of facilitators in online communication. Tom proposes that: […]
Since it seems the comment that spurred this interesting and insightful discussion seems not, after all, the criticism it appeared to be, perhaps we can continue probing the tangential issues related to the marvelous phenom of Twitter chats, with an eye to protecting, improving and extending their effectiveness.
As I’ve watched the educator focused Twitter chats evolve, I’ve noted the unsurprising and natural tendency for them to become (inadvertently) exclusive. As with any group, the more they get together, the more likely some will come to dominate, and like minded folks gravitate to each other. Some would call that cliques, but I hoped to find a word that less negative connotation than clique; I was unsuccessful. Try to shed any negative reaction to the word clique as you consider my points about the natural tendency for humans to gravitate toward familiarity, and to elevate some to celebrity status.
ALL of the longer standing Twitter chats that I’m familiar with (education related) have evolved into groups in which people conduct the kind of cross talk, insider-joking, cross referencing convo that indicates familiarity and even friendship. For those directly involved, that’s a warm and cozy and collegial experience. For those on the outside, not so much.
There’s no right or wrong about that; it’s just something to consider if Twitter chats for educators will continue to be the democratizing influence – one of them, anyway – that they can be, all inclusive, completely democratic, encouraging to all who would join in but might not if it appears to be a group of friends gathering, one that leaves new participants from feeling encouraged to participate or to hold back and earn creds to become a full “member.”
There’s an interesting social dynamic that’s neither good nor bad. I’m just encouraging introspection about the issues involved with humans on social media and how we might steer the evolution so that we don’t end up with just another exclusive form of professional development.
[…] Sometimes a chat is just a chat Tom Whitby, 27 January 2014 […]
[…] Sometimes a Chat Is Just a Chat […]
Chats lead to great topics and life-long learning. The blogs and Twitter feeds I follow have become my continued education as a leader. I am amazed and inspired daily through social media. Tom, please remember that all pioneers are questioned and challenged by those who feel they know better. Your voice is a must in our connected educators community and I am grateful for your hard work and dedication. Thank you for all that you do!