Happy Birthday Alec

Last week I got an invitation from Dean Shareski to participate in the construction of a crowd-sourced 40th birthday video for Alec Couros. If you know Alec, then you know that a collaborative project like this is the ideal way to honour such an effective connector-collaborator.

Happy Birthday Alec Couros from shareski on Vimeo.

I can't help but smile at the performances of so many of my favourite tweeps. In merging over 70 video submissions from Alec's friends, Dean did a wonderful job. What viewers may not realize, is that Dean also did an amazing job at scaffolding the exercise for participants.

After gathering volunteers, Dean shared a link to the song, and matched participants to specific lyrics on a 'Thank You for Being a Friend' Google Doc. In stretching the limits of his DropBox account, Dean leveraged DropItToMe to gather clips; and goodness knows what he did from there!


Happy Birthday Alec!
&
Thank You Dean, for orchestrating such a celebratory production!

What We Learned from WWYD?

If you've had a chance to review recent posts on the theme: 'What Would Yoda Do?', you may have noticed some trends in the content we harvested. In the past few days, Ben Hazzard, Kathy Hibbert and myself, have taken some time to consider a host of #wwyd tweets, and we've summarized our findings in the document below.

A number of themes came to light as this crowd-sourced document evolved, and as is regularly the case, we learned as much from the process as we did from the product. We think there is some real Jedi wisdom in the way we were able to leverage social media tools to represent a collective vision of teacher professional development.

Our findings are much easier to read via the 'Fullscreen' option. If you have the time, we'd love to know what you think...

What Would Yoda Do? A Jedi Approach to Professional Development