Gerald W. Aungst

Over the past week, I feel like I’ve dived head­first into the deep end of the pool, only to come up for air and dis­cover I’m actu­ally in the mid­dle of the Pacific.

About a month ago, I joined ISTE, and dis­cov­ered that they had an online pres­ence not just on the web, but also in Sec­ond Life. I signed up for a free account there and barely got into it, but quickly got lost and gave up. Last week, I decided to give Sec­ond Life a sec­ond shot, and jumped directly to the ISTE head­quar­ters there. I soon ran into a most friendly per­son there, Lyrah Lane (as she is known in SL), and we got chat­ting about school and edu­ca­tion, and it wasn’t long before I learned that ISTE was about to hold its annual con­ven­tion, the National Edu­ca­tional Com­put­ing Con­fer­ence (NECC) in San Anto­nio, Texas. Sev­eral other peo­ple I met in SL asked me, “Are you going to NECC? Are you going to be in San Anto­nio?” My response was always, “I wish!”

So I went through the week­end meet­ing peo­ple from all over the coun­try, get­ting to know each other, talk­ing about some of the pos­si­bil­i­ties of col­lab­o­rat­ing and net­work­ing with SL, and explor­ing a bit. I was con­stantly being given infor­ma­tion about places to visit in SL to meet other edu­ca­tors and get involved in col­lab­o­ra­tive projects and par­tic­i­pate in pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment and I couldn’t keep up with it all.

Just when I felt like I couldn’t han­dle any more and I needed to come up for air, I got a mes­sage on Mon­day from another one of my new SL friends and col­leagues, Pene­lope Drucker (again, not her real life name). She was co-​​presenter for a ses­sion at NECC which was going to take place both in real life and in Sec­ond Life. She needed a core group of SL par­tic­i­pants who were pre­pared to dis­cuss the topic because she had no way of know­ing who would be there either in San Anto­nio or in the SL venue. So in less than 24 hours, I needed to get up to speed on the National Edu­ca­tional Tech­nol­ogy Stan­dards for Admin­is­tra­tors (NETS-​​A). The panel dis­cus­sion was specif­i­cally to talk about how SL could strengthen and deep­eng the refresh process which would be revis­ing and updat­ing those stan­dards over the next year.

OK, I thought to myself, what am I going to be able to con­tribute to this dis­cus­sion? How am I, a “new­bie” to both ISTE and SL, going to have any­thing con­struc­tive to add to a con­ver­sa­tion about revis­ing the national tech­nol­ogy standards?

(As an aside, when I told my wife I was doing this panel dis­cus­sion in San Anto­nio, she nearly fainted—but that’s a story for another day.)

Once the meet­ing got going, though, the incred­i­ble power and pos­si­bil­i­ties of SL as a pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment medium began to open up for me. In the past, dis­cus­sions like this were highly exclu­sive: only peo­ple who were moti­vated and finan­cially able to travel around the coun­try were able to par­tic­i­pate in national con­fer­ences, and even then, these kinds of round­ta­bles were unlikely to be able to include many points of view from many dif­fer­ent peo­ple. Now, how­ever, even some­one like me who is “just” a teacher—someone with some valu­able expe­ri­ence and valid ideas, but who doesn’t have the cre­den­tials and con­nec­tions to mat­ter at the national level—can par­tic­i­pate on equal foot­ing with national lead­ers and have his voice con­tribute to the conversation.

Even more, SL now becomes not just a meet­ing place but an ongo­ing, per­ma­nent res­i­dence for us. The rela­tion­ships that were forged this week dur­ing NECC don’t end with the clos­ing keynote. We don’t shake hands as we check out of the hotel and say, “It was great to meet you, keep in touch, here’s my phone num­ber and my email address,” and then hope that there’s enough moti­va­tion to make the effort to write on a reg­u­lar basis. I know from expe­ri­ence that while email is a great tool for com­mu­ni­cat­ing and stay­ing in con­tact with peo­ple at a dis­tance, it is lousy for main­tain­ing dis­tance collaboration.

Peo­ple tend to col­lab­o­rate most with the peo­ple they run into on a daily basis, the ones with whom they work and play. I know for a fact that there are sev­eral peo­ple I met at NECC this week I will main­tain con­tact with, not just because I want to, but because I’m almost guar­an­teed to run into them on a fairly reg­u­lar basis in SL. It won’t take a con­scious effort on my part to remem­ber to email them—they’ll just be there, and we can have an ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion about the projects we’re work­ing on, we can prob­lem solve together, share ideas, and socialize.

My pro­fes­sional cir­cle grew this week—by only a few peo­ple, granted, but I can tell already that some­thing pro­duc­tive will come from these relationships.

I’m head­ing into the week­end still totally over­whelmed with new infor­ma­tion to seek out, process, and absorb, with another large project to add to my sum­mer plan­ning list, but I’m not going into it alone. I have like-​​minded col­leagues in SL. We will bounce ideas off each other, brain­storm, debate, and gen­er­ate excit­ing new ways of teach­ing stu­dents and each other.

I’m over­whelmed, but I’m ener­gized about where this can go.