Separating your personal from professional online lives

I read an article today about an interesting topic, the writer was articulate and knowledgeable about online education. I decided this is someone worth following on Twitter (a decision I don't make lightly as you are about to see). As soon as Twitter pulled up her info I clicked Follow, before the feed even finished loading. Twitter shows you the most current postings by someone when you pull up their profile but my system was slow in loading the stream.

As I scrolled down I quickly saw this was not someone I wanted showing up in my professional Twitter stream. The messages went something like this:

• Article about online learning and MOOC's at ...
• Oh, honey I miss you so much, hurry back.
• So sad you are leaving on your trip.
• Article about math education and parent involvement at ...
• Kissy, kissy what a nice morning we had, and we only fight about the little things.

All the personal messages to this person's significant other were mixed in with professional messages. The professional tweets were things I really might have found interesting but the ratio of personal to professional was much too high. In fact it was more personal than professional from what I could see, maybe 2:1 personal kissy, kissy messages.

My Twitter feed is my professional face, my brand, my forum to the eLearning and education worlds. Colleagues and students can count on mostly professional tweets with the occasional personal commentary. The ratio of my personal to professional messages is about 1:100. I think my followers can handle scrolling past the very occasional sports comment or shared recipe.

I have separate Facebook accounts for personal and professional uses as well, not so much because what I share on the personal side needs to be secret. I just don't think my professional colleagues care about my grandchildrens' antics. Those colleagues who are also friends of mine have been invited to both accounts. Students and most colleagues are only invited to the professional account. I also have separate blogs. There is this blog for professional writing (which needs to happen more often) and a personal blog for recipes, hobbies, and sharing personal angst.

What it really comes down to is respect for other peoples' time. My students and general colleagues don't have time to scroll through all my personal thoughts and shared images to find the gems about eLearning. I respect their time, and I respect my time enough to divest myself of folks on Twitter who don't understand the need to separate personal from professional streams. Needless to say, I unfollowed the person within minutes of following her.

Up to All of Us - collecting the knowledge

My daughter @meganbowe helped the brilliant Aaron Silvers organize the Up To All of Us "unconference" which was held this past weekend. It was by invitation only. Just a small brain trust of very smart people were invited.

Here are some of the writing and resources which came out of the #utaou meetings. I followed along all weekend via the Twitter hashtag. Anything which includes meeting locations such as "at the firepit" or "by the creek" had to have been an awesome experience! I am envious!

Most of the people have something to do with instructional design but I will let Jay Cross explain this in the blog posting which is the first link

Great explanation of what they learned/how/worked on/why from @jaycross http://www.jaycross.com/wp/2012/02/the-designers-toolkit/

Storify - collection of tweets from #utaou from @chambo_online http://storify.com/chambo_online/the-unconference-of-uptoallof-us

Backchannel resources curated by the wonderful @LnDDave http://davidkelly.me/2012/02/up-to-all-of-us-backchannel-collected-resources-utaou/

Thinking in Twitter bytes and connectivism

Lately I have been finding myself thinking in Twitter bytes (bites?). My thoughts are coming composed in +/- 140 characters. Sometimes this concerns me, is this an aging brain faltering into fractured thoughts?

This morning I awoke with a CCK11 based realization that this is a connection between myself and the tools I use (Facebook for personal uses and Twitter for professional purposes). On both tools I must edit myself into small bites of information or insight. The part of the connectivism theory where I was stuck yesterday was the concept of learning as connections with technology, and within technology. The AM epiphany was the connection between myself and the tools. Aha this is an example of a connection with technology.

But is it?

Is it really a connection between myself and the tech, or myself and the creators of the Twitter interface? People created Twitter. People set the program to reject messages of <140 characters. On Twitter I am not connecting with the tool, I am using the tool to connect (or try to connect) with other people.

So which is it... my morning Aha! was that the Twitter bytes being composed in my head were a connection with technology but I keep coming back to people. People created the software being used, people use the software to connect with each other. My connectivism ignorance is still the idea of connections with technology, and technology connecting with itself.

Hmmm More coffee please!

Circles

I feel like the world runs in circles of late, or perhaps it is just my online world. Someone posts a link, I retweet it on Twitter, then suddenly someone new is following me. I posted a message about a web design class I am auditing and suddenly a web designer group was following me. Goodness, it was just one post, and if you read it, I am just taking a class. I am certainly not a web designer.

The other day I created a podcast with an audio version of a course announcement. Nothing exciting and it was clearly labeled Precourse Welcome (wow, sounds fascinating!) yet within a few hours someone had found it and wanted to be my 'friend' on the podcast site. How does someone find a podcast called Precourse Welcome and decide it is so appealing they want to be a friend... Sorry "Uncle Sid" but I didn't think this was a close enough tie to form a relationship with you!

When I do find something worthy of sharing then I go through my own little set of circles to share with all. A few family and many of my co-workers are on Twitter so I tweet the find. Then if it is a good one, I share on Facebook where more family and friends will see it. Of course there are some family and friends who... *gasp* are not on Twitter or Facebook... So I email it or text it to those folks or make a phone call... good grief!

Sometimes the communication circle feels a bit more like a noose than a group hug! Remember in the old days, you wrote a letter, put it in the mailbox. It took days, maybe weeks to update people and share news. Now, if I am without my phone for an hour and don't answer a text immediately I get messages like,

• Are you all right?
  
• Do I need to come check on you?
  
• Where have you been?
  
• Are you getting a massage?
  
• Are you mad at me?
  
• Where ARE you!?"

Outside my circle of well-meaning/caring friends and family with whom I am connected on a minute-by-minute basis, today's communication methods are even more dizzying. Today's finds were Cloudworks and Google Wave (which isn't even available yet but I am signed up for it.) I have more ways to communicate with people than I can keep track of, and everyday there are more to try out. I have been trying to keep my Delicious account up-to-date. My rationale is I can send students to it to look for resources, but the honest-to-goodness truth is, I need it to keep track of all these sites for myself!

I had set up my new Acer purchased in July so it would keep track of all my login information in Firefox. However, the Acer had serious issues and had to be returned to Costco... who handed me over $600 in cash no questions asked BTW! Once again I had to go through all the circular motions of setting up a machine. Updating Windows... restart... more updates... restart... download AVG anti-virus... download new updates... restart. ARGH! And then I had to start saving my logins all over again. I don't even pretend to remember them all now, I can't! This is just another area where I have become ignorant, I knew the logins at one time... but I can't keep them all in my head any longer.

My head just keeps spinning and I continue to be ignorant! Till later!

P.S. Stay tuned, I have more to say about paper constipation. That idea garnered some interesting examples to share with others!

Knowing how little I know

This blog is called Transparent Ignorance because the more I learn, the more I realize I am quite ignorant. I intend to make my ignorance transparent for all to share in this blog. After all, if I am still learning, you must be as well! We all are!
Wisdom is not the domain of the old, or the brilliant. Wisdom resides in those who are willing to look forward, admit they know nothing (or very little) and continue moving forward into the unknown. I don't claim to have such wisdom, but I am willing to seek it!
One of my areas of ignorance is the tool Twitter. FTULM (for the uninitiated like me) Twitter is essentially text messaging to a group of people. I have been text messaging, avidly, for years but Twitter was not in my repertoire despite the best efforts of friends. Frankly, I couldn't see how my personal text messages to individuals would be of interest to a group of people.
Nonetheless, I admitted my ignorance and dove into Twitter this week. One of my intended uses is group messages/announcements in my online courses. I don't know if this will work, I invited a current group of students to 'follow' me on Twitter. FTULM you sign up to get the messages sent by someone on Twitter, these messages are known as tweets. None of my current students has signed up to receive my tweets as of yet. Ah well, it is an experiment, and as all scientists and researchers know, most experiments fail. But we learn from failure, and become less ignorant in the process.