What’s With All The Sharing?

Today I had 15 minutes with the fine folks at the University of Washington-Bothell eLearning Symposium hosted by the Office of Digital Learning, to tell them about some of the things that I do to enable the sharing of pedagogy. I’m hoping that in those 15 minutes I convinced a few to come here and read this post.

Because this is an attempt at telling them why. What’s with all this sharing?

Here are my slides in which I give the choice at the order we’d look at the three topics: The Open Patchbooks, Gettin’ Air Podcast, and The Ontario Extend 9x9x25. With only 15 minutes, I thought it best to focus on the what of things, to have a look at what these sharey places are, and then, if convinced that it’s indeed interesting, they might come here to find more out about why.

I was invited by The Office of Digital Learning‘s own Todd Conaway. Todd could easily give this talk himself, but he likes to enable others to share so he is probably reluctant to take the space. He is one of the big reasons I work the way I do. A few years ago as I began participating in the delightful ds106 I saw Todd out there doing what he does, what he enables others to do, and saw someone I wanted to be more like.

Anyway as I said, I spent the 15 minutes describing these projects. All of which are at their core about sharing. They include my own sharing of course, but my own thoughts are not at the heart of them. I’ve been trying to, like Todd, enable others to bring their ideas into the open mix.

I’m stalling on answering the question of why. I think I figured that I’d just need to start writing and the list of good reasons would emerge.

But the why might be too nebulous for a list. So bear with me, I think I might have a weird analogy here that works to explain what I mean. An analogy that involves zombies. Specifically the World War Z zombies that would make mountains of themselves to reach things together that they could not reach alone. Turns out zombies are in it for the community.

What I mean is that if you were to be so kind as to share some of your thoughts, ideas, wisdom, teaching tips.. anything, in a sharing place like the ones I’ve described, then you’ve left a piece out there that someone can use in the forming of their own mountain (a mountain of ideas this time, not zombies). You can leave pieces of mountain all over the place via blog post, tweet, conversation on a podcast, video chats, etc. You can show people the way to find more of their own mountain by sharing links to other posts, other people. It’s a mountain that we are all working to build while at the same time trying to summit. It’s too difficult to do it alone, so let’s do it together. And what we’ll do is we’ll each get somewhere we couldn’t reach before or we’ll see something from up there we couldn’t see before.

And while you’re offering up pieces of mountain for others, you can connect to theirs as you build yours even higher. After a while, we’re all a bunch of Himalayas. Who would have thunk zombies would make great community builders?

Anyway that’s my reason why I share: so we can all be a part of each other’s zombie mountains. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Photo by Demi-Felicia Vares on Unsplash

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