How Change Changes You
There was a time when there wasn’t Twitter. There was a whole lot of time in my life before Twitter. In the time since I “got” Twitter, I’ve changed in ways that can not be undone.
Before Twitter, I was a pretty successful learning technologist. I used and evangelized Flash. In a time before you could make a career in ActionScript, my career was ActionScript.
I liked social media. I thought a lot about the implications social media could have on a broader definition of E-Learning. I blogged a lot. I tried lots of betas. If you asked any peers of mine to describe me, they would probably tell you that I was a talented content developer. I never felt comfortable with the designation, but it made sense. I developed content. Lots of content. I was good at it: I had efficiency and preternatural talent for architecture of static and dynamic content. I could focus my attention and teach myself new tools, languages, technologies at lighting pace.
What am I now, after Twitter? Am I still a developer? I don’t write code with any frequency, so much as manipulate code as a need arises. I don’t coach best practices in authoring tools much, even though there’s much I could share. All the things I’ve been known and notable for are not the things I do now. I don’t manage people. I don’t formally lead people.
What Twitter has singularly enabled for me, that no other tool before it has done quite so well, is firstly to connect me to people — lots of people — very much like me in life experiences, professional drive, sense of purpose, sense of humor, etc. That awareness changed me — because before when faced with a challenge, I’d have no recourse but to tackle some kinds of challenges by myself. Once I had a network aligned by multiple shared affinities, I could crowdsource challenge analyis, collect insights and respond with multiple levels of next-actions rather than tackle everything head-on by myself. I became a networked thinker.
Since Twitter, I hardly use Google Reader or any other RSS aggregator to find links worth knowing. I now solely rely on my networks to supply me with the information that relevant, and since my networks are pretty tightly aligned to my collective interests, my information is filtered with an appropriate mix tailored to me: news, a lot of learning information, some general design discoveries and a dash here and there of irreverent humor, with suggestions for new music worth checking out. I have a personalized web.
I’ve sat in now on probably 80 different conferences in the last year. I physically attended less than ten. The context generated by my network as they tweet their conference activities has accelerated my professional growth. I don’t pretend to have a mastery of virtual world creation, user experience design, government transparency efforts or even Flash and Flex anymore — but I have a really good bead on what the buzz is, what the issues are, why things that are going on in these areas are relevant to my work and my life and who I can reach out to if I need more information — not just who I can email; who will reply back with the exact piece of information I need. I can situate myself anywhere.
Twitter was a change for me. As a result of having taken to the tool, I am now changed as a professional. I am changed in how I think. I am changed in how I work. I am changed in how I seek, absorb and process many kinds of information.
There will be another new tool, probably sometime soon given how rapidly things change. I wonder how I will change as a result. I wonder about how people collaborating together, becoming aware of one another, witnessing each other’s changes can accerlate their alignment, share their goals and produce — even innovate — more richly; with more acceleration; with more impact.
That’s my musing for today…
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Great post. Great use of a great tool. thrice great. You have IT. Now we just need the powers that be to get IT. What a great description of the power of twitter.
Thanks, brother. The powers that be eventually get *it*. Whether *it* is Twitter or a wide spate of tools… that’s another question. As long as there is free thought, and free thinkers who wish to connect, what is being forged will not be able to be undone. It may just find different means to (hopefully) improved ends.
Sister actually. Not that it matters in our virtual worlds. Yep, twitter is just another tool. And we need good tools.
Simple.
Thanks for this thoughtful and thought-provoking musing. I agree with you in many ways, and have also found that Twitter works much better as a professional sharing space than Facebook, and that it provides ongoing access to the elearning zeigeist as it permutates. It would be good to hear you you managed to achieve the good alignment of your interests though, as I suspect that others (like myself) would benefit from your experiences.
Well, like all good learning, there’s scaffolding or on-ramps that helped me get on the path.
For example, having a blog presence of any sort helped. Whenever someone wanted to find out about me, there was at least a publicly available body of self works that people could access to get a sense of my “self.” In having the blog, a handful of people like Brian Dusablon, Philip Hutchison and Ethan Estes were more frequent commenters on the blog, so as we all got on Twitter, we could exchange more than the work of writing a blog post, discovering there was a comment and then log in again to reply to a comment. Twitter was an accelerator for some exchange we were already trying to do.
Then, Twitter being used more widely helped as well. I started attending conferences and sought to connect to people who were at the conferences who were also using Twitter to some degree. Having connected in real life, there were some shared experiences that could support further online exchange with some context/history that was shared.
I’ve talked about connecting more with @mobilemind, whom I’ve known for a few years but never really bonded with until we discovered we each had a lot more in common than we thought. Similarly, as @moehlert and I started to bond through Twitter, in and of itself, I started following people he normally exchanged with and found that his friends, too, had much in common with me.
You leverage your interpersonal relationships as social support mechanisms. As long as you reciprocate and respect someone’s desire to keep their network small or quiet, this is exactly what you’re supposed to do.
Aaron – I wonder if we all have an “a-ha” social media technology. Mine was blogging (and blogger). The moment we realize that we can reach a much larger audience. The moment we realize that there are more of us and that we are not as weird or isolated as we initially thought.
Still don’t use Twitter as effectively as you do – but it has enabled me to connect to more folks, get different (and more immediate) information, and synthesize in a way that forces me to get to the kernel of an idea.
In 2002, I build a custom admin system for my website. I wanted to update it daily or weekly like a journal. A year later, Movable Type was available for download and I switched. Blogging was born, and it fulfilled a need I had.
Twitter fulfilled a need I didn’t know I had. I think we have many “a-ha” tools. But even if we don’t, think about what blogging enabled for you, Wendy. What is that awareness that we’re not so alone mean to us?
Aaron – An invitation to dine and sample beer with learning colleagues at a conference last July completely changed the way I think about Twitter. There, I was introduced to #lrnchat, which was the moment that changed everything for me.
Prior to #lrnchat, I thought of Twitter simply as a playground for people with too much time on their hands, who thought far too highly of the value of their own random musings. But once I became networked with a group of learning industry thinkers, I suddenly tapped into a stream of up-to-the-minute news and resources unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced. Twitter has given me food for thought, ideas for building my business, a test bed for my own new ideas, and a place to gather supporting data to back them up. It’s started new conversations – like this one.
I’ve made new friends and reconnected with old acquaintances – and some of those I have quickly grown closer to as we’ve shared ideas and a few laughs. Our own little West Michigan lakeshore enclave isn’t exactly an eLearning hotbed, and I can’t overemphasize the awesome power I found in suddenly being able to crowd source friendships with people who share my background and interests – people who “get it,” and consequently, “get” me.
Okay, so Twitter can also be a major time suck, and a place to hang out to procrastinate in order to avoid doing something less interesting. And like with any new toy, it can be hard to ignore its siren song – as it is with my new “Crackberry,” especially with its Facebook ap. But whereas Facebook is truly an online playground for me and my friends, Twitter has become an encyclopedic index and market research tool.
Cheers!
~cfw
I don’t have many local contacts who use Twitter, so I’m constantly running into the I-had-pastrami-for-lunch mindset. And, I suppose if you dipped into the raw Twitter stream, there’d be a lot more lunch and a lot fewer links to an interview you’d want to read.
I agree in general with the good-tool notion, with this extension: most people don’t want tools. They want what the tools produce. I had no interest in a having a blog–till one day I realized I could use use that tool to solve a problem: my elderly parents got confused by email.
I created a blog just for them. I haven’t sent them email in three and a half years, but from their perspective I write 15 or 20 times a month.