The Power and Amplified Reach of Sharing

image licensed under Creative Commons by Darren Kuropatwa

What a powerful quote by Chris Lehmann! What a stunning image by Darren Kuropatwa!

It speaks directly to the urgency in education to make SHARING part of the literacy fluency (think>experience >reflect>create>share> )
The heart of the quote connects me to Dean Shareski’s K-12 Online conference keynote titled “Sharing, the Moral Imperative” [ as Educators].

When I first started teaching, I was accused of bragging to my colleagues as I shared a “Mock Application for a Foreign Exchange Year” package that I had created for my 8th grade Spanish students. I was told by a colleague, that “this is NOT done here at the school. Teachers keep their material to themselves in order not to brag”. I was told to keep that in mind before I ever thought of bringing something I had created up again. If I would have followed her advice, Langwitches Blog would have never existed! So, please don’t take the following as “bragging”. It is truly not meant as such, but to illustrate a point: The power of a network and the reach it can have.

In preparation to a workshop, I will be facilitating about Twitter at the integratED conference in San Francisco, I uploaded a slide deck to SlideShare. I then tweeted the link to the slides.

I watched in amazement, as the views climbed from 3000 to 6000 in the first few hours after the upload. Then 12000, 20000 and now after 48 hours over 30000 views. These numbers sound insane to me. Here I am working in my home office, taking pictures of a blue little bird in my backyard… and a few hours later thousands and thousands of people have seen them. The power of sharing and the amplified reach of sharing is real!

Let’s connect this “feeling of amplified reach” back to Chris Lehmann’s quote from above:

It is no longer enough to do powerful work if no one sees it.

What if I would have not uploaded the slides? What if I would not have tweeted it out? What if I would have “limited the slides” to the people attending my workshop in San Francisco next week?

Sharing does not seem to come natural to many. Sharing is even a “cultural thing”. The existence or  comfort level of sharing varies according to countries, cultures, even among generations.

How do we promote a culture of sharing in education? How do we make it the “natural thing” to do next? How do we bring the ones on board, who feel they have nothing to share? How do we approach the “relatively new” subject of amplified sharing?

So many questions…

If the power of collaboration and sharing as an educator is of interest to you, take a look at Alec Couros‘ blog post “The Story of an Idea“ and several blog posts here on Langwitches linked from “What Do You Have to Lose?“.

I am “sharing” the Twitter workshop slide deck below.