Coming together with all the C’s: a short reflection on #BYOD4L

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So another week of connecting, communicating, curating, collaborating and creating with #BYOD4L has just come to an end.  As ever I find the week just flies by in a whirl of persicopes, tweet chats, googl+-ing and general community sharing and fun.

This year we add a few more C’s into the mix to  extend the conversations a bit and also to reflect evolving practice and use of mobile devices, web services and apps.   So we had connecting and confidence, communication and (digital) capabilities, curation and and copyright, collaboration and community,  creating and celebrating.   I think that these additions really did help.   And once again our community came together in a whirl of sharing based on shared values. It’s really hard so soon after the event to pull anything coherent however a couple of the C’s stood out for me. The first of them being community.

One of the reason I continue to be involved with #BYOD4L is the community spirit it engenders. Over the past three years Neil Withnell, Alex Spiers  and I have evolved into our own wee team/community organising things behind the scenes. We very rarely get the chance to meet in person but we just seem to naturally be able to divide up what needs to be done and support each other in a really collegiate way. There’s no rivalry, no one-man-upship, we just get on with things.

This year we were joined by Debbie Baff – an stalwart of the #BYOD4L community and Suzanne Faulkner a complete newbie to the whole thing. What a joy it was to work with them both.  Debbie is just one of those lovely really open educational practitioners people who always shares and cares.  Suzanne, well what can I say. Talk about embracing all the C’s! She was periscoping every day, often with her students, tweeting and she even wrote that blog post she had been thinking about for such a long time.  We managed to meet up briefly on Friday afternoon and what a joy that was. Although we had never met, it was like meeting a long lost friend.

I think for those of us who have been working and networking online for the last decade and are part of established networks, it’s all  to easy to forget that others aren’t.  Events like #BYOD4l are a great way to jump start that on line networking within a safe. supportive environment and community.

So whilst I know many of us are finding Twitter not quite the same place as it used to be, it still can be a great space to connect. It saddens me that others may not have the same experiences that I have had in terms of connecting, collaborating and community building that I have been so lucky to experience.

During the week I was speaking at an event in London where I met many of my extended online community, including Chrissi Nerantzi (one of the inventors of BYOD4L).  I took the opportunity to do a very unplanned, slightly chaotic persicope from the event with Chrissi and a few others.  It still quite amazes me that just with my phone I can broadcast from anywhere with a decent 3/4G or wifi connection.

The other C that I really need to think about more is curation. On Wednesday night we joined with with #LTHEchat community  to discuss curation and copyright. So many threads to that discussion! The recent-ish news about Storify now moving to a paid for service has certainly help to focus minds in some aspects of curation. I think it’s fair to say many people used storify primarily as a twitter curation tool. I know that’s how it was/is used by #BYOD4L. We do also back up using Tags Explorer too. But the storify interface is/was simple to set up and use. A salutary tale in terms of becoming reliant on free at point of use, and apparently open services.

Personally I am in a slight quandary about my own curation. I have “stuff” all over the place, mainly in the cloud. Maybe I have an over simple faith that I will be able to find said “stuff” whenever I need it. In reality, when I am looking for that link/paper/ref and can’t find it in 5 minutes, I usually just resort to an internet search . . .  Part of me feels that I should try to have a less  chaotic approach to curation, but that doesn’t seem to last very long. My laziness and faith in asking the “lazy web” just keeps getting in the way.

Anyway lots more to think about after the week and hopefully a few more blog posts once my thoughts are a bit more in order.