After watching Dean Shareski's video, Sharing: The Moral Imperative, I have done a lot of thinking about sharing in the context of education. In his video, Shareski makes the argument that sharing effective teaching practices, particularly online, is not only necessary, but it is our moral obligation as educators. This idea of sharing is not at all unique to the field of education. Many in the tech industry are believers in "open source" programming, the idea that source code should be laid bare for everyone to see and edit so that the industry can grow and prosper more effectively. Athletes share lifetimes of learned techniques via coaching to advance their sports. Throughout history, the sharing of ideas across cultures has advanced progress and growth for entire civilizations! Generally speaking, sharing information spurs progress. Sharing ideas with one another is the very core of education, and effective educational practices are the cornerstone of any successful community.
We as educators share information with our students every day. We get paid to do that. Many of us probably even participate in staff meetings and collaborate with other staff members at our respective schools, sharing techniques with one another and reviewing effective research practices so that they can be implemented school wide. I do this every week. Most of us have gone to school and spent countless hours learning about effective education practices and sharing with other students in the process. But for some reason, as I read across countless articles that talked about the importance of sharing in the field of education, I couldn't help but feel turned off by some of the rhetoric being used. Though I mostly agree with his premise, I even found myself rolling my eyes during Shareski's video a few times! Does this make me a bad person? A bad teacher? I don't think so.
The truth of the matter is, I am a very effective sharer. I teach and share all the time, every day actually. Although I am an educator, the place that I find myself sharing the most is in my Pokemon career. That's right! I play the Pokemon Trading Card Game competitively. I travel to tournaments all over the country, and even compete in the World Championships every year. I have accomplished a great deal in my five years with the game so far, and have become a well known figure within the community. After my first big regional win, I started writing articles for PokeBeach, a renown Pokemon news website. I created competitive articles where I disclosed all of my best techniques so that the community could read and learn from my experiences. I participated on message boards, responded to direct messages, the whole deal! In the past few months, however, I have transitioned away from sharing through writing, and started my own YouTube channel. My channel, Derium's Competitive Pokemon, has over 20,000 subscribers, which is fairly impressive considering I have only been creating content for two months. I have started promoting my brand through Facebook and Twitter, where I can instantly target thousands of people with the same interests. In fact, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are the three ways that I communicate and stay relevant in the Pokemon Trading Card Game. Absolutely everything that I need to know about the competitive game at any given point in time can be traced to either of those three resources. The primary online gathering space for the Pokemon community, however, is none other than Facebook. There are a couple of groups on Facebook that are moderated by people involved in the community that can be seen as the "hive mind" of the Pokemon Trading Card Game. Between these two groups, there are nearly 30,000 people joined, sharing their ideas about the game at any given point in time, any day of the week. Quite frankly, if you want to be involved in competitive play, your first step is to join these Facebook groups and start reading around.
Just last week, I made post about social media in education here on my blog. I think that social media, while sometimes a distraction, can be an excellent tool for communication and productivity. I use social media to connect with thousands of Pokemon players every day! My question is, why can't this community exist for education? (At the time of writing this, I stopped what I was doing, made my way over to Facebook, and conducted a search for "Special Education." Turns out, there are two groups with over 10,000 members each for Special Education! I requested to join both and I am currently awaiting administration approval.)
I think that I may have been turned off by the sharing rhetoric I was reading about because I don't like blogging, and everyone here seems to be very much about blogging. Blogging is, in my opinion, the most tedious and annoying way to share information! I feel like I am just sputtering nonsense out into the internet with no direct audience and no direct purpose! Not to mention, these posts are long! They take forever to write, and for what?
In my opinion, I think that moderated groups on social media are the future of networking and idea sharing. People talk about not having time for blogs, and unlike the sources I cited above, I think that those who don't have time to blog are completely justified. This stuff takes way too long and is far too impractical for the majority of people to keep up with - honestly! Most teachers in their 20s are not going to upkeep blogs where they talk about and share their ideas. I think that the idea of blogs is just a little outdated and inefficient. Trying to convince teachers to creep around on other people's blogs looking for useful information is also a lost cause. Young people today do not like to spend time tirelessly googling things and searching through articles and blogs. This, in my opinion, seems like a largely inefficient way to research and connect. A realistic proposal, however, might be for all educators to hop on Facebook, which they already have and use every day, and look for a group of relevant educators on there that they can connect and share ideas with. I cannot speak for the education community on Facebook as of yet, since I have not been approved to the groups that I have tried to connect with, but my hope is that I can find a community of educators on there that I can seamlessly connect and share ideas with on a regular basis!
Overall, I agree that sharing, especially among educators, should be constant. Education is not a competition, we are all in it, hopefully, for the betterment of society and the world we live in! For that reason, we should always be trying to improve our community of educators by sharing ideas with one another. The most efficient and realistic way to make global idea sharing a reality is by utilizing social media, like Facebook. I think we will be hard pressed to get most educators to upkeep blogs, but Facebook provides an immense and ubiquitous platform for people to connect with a targeted audience on. And hey, you know what's cool about a focused Facebook group? You can even share your blog posts there if you want to!
Thanks for reading,
-Andrew Mahone
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