Leading From The Heart

by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.

Tag: social network

  • Twitter is replacing my feed reader

    Luc Latulippe's twitter birdsThese twitter birds were created by Luc Latulippe and are available as a free download on his site. Click the image to go there.

    Really. I am afraid to hit my feed reader. In the past if I missed a day or two I’d be overwhelmed with the amount of information that fed into my system once I clicked update. And now it’s been ages since I’ve checked my feed reader. I see the link to it right now on my desktop panel and I consistently, consciously, studiously ignore it.

    I now read blog posts as I see them announced on twitter, either by the authors themselves – ‘New blog post tweet, tweet, tweet…’ or, more emphatically (not quite the word I am looking for but it will do until I find it), by others referring those in their network to ‘Read a great post about … tweet, tweet, tweet’.

    I trust this process way more than the feed reading process. I trust Marcy and Miss Teacha and Linda and Mike and Jacques and Jose and Kevin and John and…. there are so many people who refer me to good posts all the time.

    The point is I trust this process over the arbitrary new post count next to the blog title in my reader. I trust this process to point me towards cutting edge, or sometimes just plain amusing, blog posts by people both in and on the edges of my learning network. The post has been read and subsequently reviewed (via the existence of the tweet) by someone I trust to have discriminating judgement or taste or however you want to dice it on subjects educational, or musical, or artistic, or doggy. It is a people centered process. I trust the process because I trust the people who keep it going.

    So bye bye feed reader – and the overwhelming nature of it for me, how unnecessary. As long as twitter remains relevant as a space for communication that is how I will get updates on what to read. It suits me just fine.

  • The Experience Project

    I just this moment discovered this project through facebook – in one of those ads that usually annoy the crap out of me in the left hand column (they annoy me because a) they are usually about finding an adult friend or signing up for some kind of scammy looking deal; and b) when I am at home on my weak little 512mb of ram machine they slow down the page loading process). This time though my eye quickly snagged on the idea of teacher stories that was in the headline, so I clicked.

    My click brought me to a page with this header image:

    First browse makes me like it – a site dedicated to sharing inspirational stories about teachers and teaching is a good thing in my books. Any time we share stories that touch our deep cores about what matters most to us as people we are one step (or maybe, actually, a million steps) closer to creating more of those kinds of experiences.

    Once I scanned through the first page I was drawn by ‘The Experience Project’ logo, I like the font, the colours – simple blues (not so sure about the anxious little character at the front, though).

    Took me a few moments to find out how to get to the project main page (maybe they need a link that is more obvious…) but once I did I was glad I got there.

    I definitely need to explore this some more, but Chalk it Up seems to be but one element of the Experience Project – a social networking site dedicated to sharing the stories that make up our most positive experiences.

    Pretty cool stuff. I’m thinking this kind of thing can be a great way to collect and preserve stories shared during an appreciative change process in an organization.

    I’m going to join and find out some more about it.

    Maybe you can too.

    If you do, I am harmonicagoldfish :)