Measuring Teacher Effectiveness, fingerpointing, and community support... my reflection

 



 Measuring teacher effectiveness has gained a lot of press recently and the methods of doing so vary by state. When I think about the fact that principals are in charge of managing and evaluating 30+ staff members a year, my first thought was; What would a business administrator do if he was asked to evaluate that many employees? Not being in that sector I don’t know, but it seems laughable.  I am excited as a Coloradoan to see what our governor has proposed. Is it pe4rfect, no I do not think so, but trying to gain the thoughts and ideas from different perspectives including students is a good first step.

Colorado’s experiment in crafting a new educator evaluation system kicked off Thursday with the first meeting of the 15-member Governor’s Council for Educator Effectiveness.
The council, created by Gov. Bill Ritter as part of the state’s Race to the Top application, is based on the premise that more effective and durable reforms can be achieved through a process representing a broad array of education interests, from the Colorado Education Association to administrators and from school board members to one lone student.

http://www.ednewscolorado.org/2010/03/11/teacher-effectiveness-council-starts-18-month-run

The question I ask I guess is how are we going to engage and create the support of the community at large that right or wrong is soured on our profession at this time?
Seems there are many fingers being pointed at teachers; blame being leveled at us for scores not measuring up around the globe and dropout and literacy rates that are stagnant. This article from earlier this month was met by a variance of cheers and jeers.

A new generation of economists devised statistical methods to measure the “value added” to a student’s performance by almost every factor imaginable: class size versus per-pupil funding versus curriculum. When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html

David Andrade point out in a recent TL blog post that it isn’t one single solution that we need to really take a look and decide if we are doing right by our kids and again, the community involvement is the key.

So, who is responsible for failing students and failing schools?
EVERYONE!
http://www.techlearning.com/blogs/28314

I’m excited to be a part of a professional development team and vision that is looking at measuring teacher effectiveness, measuring online professional development effectiveness and differentiating to meet the varied needs of all of our educators. I hope as we learn more and more about our profession and we continue to look at the ways to facilitate learning and discovery, I hope we stop pointing fingers and start working together to find feasible and productive solutions. I want my kids to go to a school where the teachers are working collaboratively, where student’s learnings and passions are ignited and fed by good instruction and question asking. Our kids are different, our teachers are different, our strategies for measuring that effectiveness must be  adapting as well.

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When professional networking works it is a magical blend of collaboration, productivity and resourcefulness, Big Blue Button Rocks

How completely awesome is this? When professional networking works, it is a magical blend of collaboration, productivity and resourcefulness.

I can cite countless examples where my peers have been there for me in more ways than I can count. Sanding on the shoulders of brilliant minds is not a unique skill, but I am so proud of my network and their tremendous helpfulness and propensity to give in time and resources. It is inspiring! However, this feels different, big blue button is not out there trying to make money at least not yet.) They are an open source platform for videoconferencing solution, which means that they are in it for the right reasons in my opinion

Not even a minute after posting this…

I get this…

To which I respond…

Then minutes later I receive this..

I will certainly share the end results with anyone interested, this could be a tremendously powerful solution for us in online PD!

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Looking at Building a case for Laptops in schools for teachers and/or students? Examples and Research here

My executive director shared these with me today and I wanted to share because it seems to me that many of us are looking at various laptop initiatives and when asked to support their reasoning we can cite a few examples or word of mouth success. These examples and research assessments do a great job of really diving into the data and looking at what works, what didn’t, and then opens up the discussions as to why something did not work. Thank you Debbie, for sharing these:

In Boston Public Schools, we deployed 5,000 teacher MacBooks to all teachers K-12 last year.  The teachers have been placed into cohorts and provided with a variety of APD opportunities.    Boston College has assessed this project and information can be found by going to:  http://www.bc.edu/research/intasc/researchprojects/L4L/L4L.shtml.

In the School District of Philadelphia, all high schools are part of the Classroom for the Future project which has provided each core content teacher and their classroom with a mobile cart of MacBooks.  This project has been driven by the State of PA and has been assessed by Penn State University.  Here is the link to the assessment reporting on the CFF project:  http://cff.psu.edu/public/Home.html

In New York City, the iTeach/iLearn project provided teacher MacBooks and 1:1 student deployment in 21 schools with 12 using Apple.  A quality report from MS 202 can be found at:  http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2006-07/Quality_Review_2007_Q202.pdf.

In Maine, all middle school and high school teachers across the state have been issued MacBook computers.  All middle school students and approximately 50% of all high school students also have MacBooks 24/7.  Quantitative research on a variety of aspects of the Maine initiative can be found at:  http://www.usm.maine.edu/cepare/.  In addition, the Technology and Assessment Study Collaborative at Boston College has completed a number of studies looking at both teachers and students in the Northeast equipped with computers.  Their work can be found by going to:  http://www.bc.edu/research/intasc/.

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"Educator: 'Race to the Top's' 10 false assumptions" article by Marion Brady, (http://bit.ly/ck7WTs) My reflection here

"Race to the Top? National standards for math, science, and other school subjects? The high-powered push to put them in place makes it clear that the politicians, business leaders, and wealthy philanthropists who’ve run America’s education show for the last two decades are as clueless about educating as they’ve always been.
If they weren’t, they’d know that adopting national standards will be counterproductive, and that the "Race to the Top" will fail for the same reason "No Child Left Behind" failed—because it’s based on false assumptions.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/educator-race-to...

This article was written six months ago, but I watched it blow up when I posted it to twitter last week. Partly because we are now down to the "final 16" states and with that many feel jaded, and underappreciated or undervalued.  There is an undercurrent of skepticism when looking at race to the top funding and selection, which makes sense in an environment where it feels like there are winners and losers. I've heard the terms "race to the middle, and race to nowhere" in recent weeks; signs that there are divisive opinions on the entire process. I haven't dug as deep as I would like, but I wonder why certain states weren't chosen, and why Colorado is the most western state.
After reading this article my thoughts are that...

• More work doesn't mean better work.
• How we measure teacher effectiveness, is just as important as measuring student proficiency.
• Teaching kids is more important than teaching curriculum
• Assigning blame for the ills of our schools do little than create a finger pointing circus.
• If we can set aside our own bias and agendas (government, unions, community) we can come together because our goals are the same, we share a vision of creating successful environments, and experiences.
• We continue using terms like incentives, transparency, and accountability, but what does that truly look like? 

With the availability of online pd and teachers looking to apply these learnings in their own settings and labs, why aren't there better examples of measuring teacher effectiveness in place. How do we measure the true value of professional development without losing the ability to meet teachers where they are and deliver learning opportunities just in time, that are relevant and useful?

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Colorado has new standards P-12; how are you sharing this with teachers, looking for witty ideas

Colorado has new standards pre K-12 http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdeassess/UAS/CoAcademicStandards.html

I need some people to help me deliver the highlighted changes and overall key points in a new and media rich manner. I'm thinking video, maybe a glog, or some interactive pieces. If you are doing similar work in your district or if you know someone who is let me know, so that we can avoid replicating each others work. @ScottElias is interested...any other takers? I think quick videos or tutorials (preferably with a little humor) would be a great way to get the message around changes and implementations out to the field.

One suggestion I heard that I like A TON is to mock, or poke fun, at existing commercials, but with an education bent. If you are interested in helping please let me know, or if you just have some witty ideas for shooting the commercials, or specific ones you think are prime fodder for a fauxmercial, I'm all ears.

http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdeassess/UAS/CoAcademicStandards.html
Colorado P-12 Academic Standards
Dance
Drama and Theatre Arts
Comprehensive Health & Physical Education
Mathematics
Music
Reading
Writing and Communicating
Science
Social Studies
Visual Arts
World Languages

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MoodleShare is growing... do you walk the talk of collaboration, sharing and change? Join us...

Moodleshare is young but growing in content by the day as consistent inbound traffic comes from every continent. By design, the project generates no direct financial return for its creators.  According to Mr. Fila,

“The essence of the project is simply to create more awareness of the Moodle movement, in Minnesota, the US and world at large -so as to increase the quality of content taught in schools around the world. I believe that if even 1% of the teachers within the US started Moodling their curriculum, a snowball effect will occur that will forever change the archaic US education system.”

http://tech.mn/news/2010/03/11/moodleshare-aims-to-revolutionize-education-one-class-at-a-time

What does this mean for educators/ It means that our propensity to keep things to ourselves, lock lessons and coursework  down, and close our virtual classroom doors is antiquated. The time for sharing with design and collaboration in mind is now. Is your course or Moodle space the best in your school, district, or state? Maybe, but I bet there is someone that can add to it, make it better and share that with you!

A few of us have started a conversation around crowdsourcing a course and resource bank designed to get people creating more courses in Moodle. You can find that here. It led to the building and set up of a course that can be accessed here.

From Ben Wilkoff, Benjamin Wilkoff –“So, upon Michael's suggestion, I have set up a Moodle course for us to play in. My hope is that we can develop something that we all might be able to use in the future for PD (and that might be a resource for everyone. Here is the link: http://online.dcsdk12.org/moodle/course/view.php?id=6141  You will need to set up an account and enroll in the course. After you have done that, put a note in the buzz and I will promote you to a teacher of the course. 
If you have Moodle backups that you can restore into the course, that would be a great place to start.”

Image courtesy of daveduarte

Please jump in, add to it and help us make this the best resource available. We want to give people credit for their work and we are trying to find some way to do that. Everyone will have full and open access to the backup of this course, so your work will not be lost in the ether, it is yours whether you add to it or not. (but it just makes sense to make it the best possible before “puling your backup” out of the space. For now, the point is that this will be for the betterment for all, and as the article above so succinctly states, “if even 1% of the teachers within the US started Moodling their curriculum, a snowball effect will occur that will forever change the archaic US education system.”

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Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers article: http://bit.ly/9G1raH My thoughts here:

The relative decline of American education at the elementary- and high-school levels has long been a national embarrassment as well as a threat to the nation's future. Once upon a time, American students tested better than any other students in the world. Now, ranked against European schoolchildren, America does about as well as Lithuania, behind at least 10 other nations. Within the United States, the achievement gap between white students and poor and minority students stubbornly persists—and as the population of disadvantaged students grows, overall scores continue to sag.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/234590

Nuggets from the article and my take…

• “often the weakest teachers are relegated to teaching the neediest students, poor minority kids in inner-city schools”

• In Denver, we are no longer requiring schools to "accept involuntary transfers" and these schools also do not have to hire within the district. This is a small step, but a good one IMO.

• “In most states, after two or three years, teachers are given lifetime tenure.”

• This is the problem, tenure is interesting in that it gives us security, but enables mediocrity.

• “KIPP schools don't cherry-pick—they take anyone who will sign a contract to play by the rules, which require some parental involvement”

• You mean parental involvement can be measured? And these measurements show that scores and learning improves when community embraces education. What a concept. :)

• “Many more teachers are overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated. Maybe they'd get more respect if the truly bad teachers were let go.”

• There may be something to this, but it is tough to read all of this and then finally see some acknowledgement at the very end that there are tremendous teachers out there working hard.

This article spells out the ills facing our schools on a grand scale. I often hear my “non-teacher” friends talking about how easy our job is, or that we get summer’s off. I am not sure that the majority of people really understand just how secure our positions are. When the article mentioned the fact that it is nearly impossible to fire teachers that have tenure, they are right and there is something to that. On the other hand, teaching does require an upkeep of licensure and “professional learning” is a big part of that. I am not sure if there is a magic bullet or resolution, but I do wonder if our unions sometimes are our own worst enemy. Public employees need unions and I understand that, but I cringe when I see or hear about mediocre teachers or forced placement of sub standard teachers being moved around, as the article called it “the dance of the lemons."

Seems to me that creative solutions around effectiveness and motivation are keys to improving education; I am always interested to hear what others think about this and if they see tenure, unions, and transfers as a deterrent to improving our schools.   I sense the landscape is changing; we are in the middle of a shift, so there are growing pains. Accountability is going up, does that mean that we will agree with all of the policies and plans that are outlined and executed, probably not, but it’s up to us as educators to become a part of these conversations and continue putting the learning first.

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Open Letter on Behalf of the National Writing Project (cross posted) *Thanks for the nudge Zac

Zac Chase whom I have tremendous admiration for and love the way the man thinks and lives; wrote this blog and has since really connected the network in a way that I haven't seen in awhile. The main point is that funding is being cut for the NWP and that just seems wrong at a time when collaboration, sharing, and professional development are being sought out and celebrated by the Education Secretary. Here's his post, I'll be taking 10-20 minutes tomorrow to call our reps and ask them to push for this if possible. I'm never the type to blindly pass on something but I think all of us in education have an obligation sometimes to really stand up for something that has shown results and celebrates a core subject like writing.

This post is cross-posted here and was written by Mr. Chase.

The Gist:

• The current draft of the federal budget cuts direct funding for the National Writing Project.
• The NWP has been one of the few extremely successful examples of a nationally-networked effort to improve K-12 writing for 36 years.
• We must communicate with Congress to change the budget.

The Whole Story:

Dear Rep. Fattah, Sen. Casey and Sen. Specter:

I write to you on behalf of the National Writing Project. More precisely, I write to you on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of students and teachers the program has transformed over its 36 years.

Under the budget proposed by President Obama, national funding for the NWP would be cut. In a Feb. 1 press release from the U.S. Department of Education, the NWP was lumped in with 5 other projects losing funding because the DOE claims they “duplicate local or state programs or have not had a significant measurable impact.”

As the NWP is unique as a networked writing instruction program with 200+ local sites serving all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, I am left to believe Sec. Duncan is claiming the NWP falls under the category of not having a “significant measurable impact.”

This too is untrue.

A 1987 longitudinal study on the effects of the NWP by Kathy Krendl and Julie Dodd found participating third through twelfth graders showed an increase “in interest in learning about writing, in their level of confidence, and in their association of self-esteen with good writing.

Not only that, the study also found a decrease “in students’ feelings of discomfort about completing writing assignments and in their feelings that they do not write well and that writing is difficult.”

In a 2007 study of the NWP’s Local Site Research Initiative, across nine localities students showed significant or non-significant favorable results in all seven categories.

This should not have been surprising considering the DOE’s own data listed the NWP as exceeding its performance targets in 2001. Indeed participants’ ratings across all categories ranged from 95-88 percent reporting positive impact at their follow-up assessment of the program. This went well above the program’s target of 75 percent in each category.

Were this simply an impassioned plea, I would have hesitated to write. The data speaks for itself, the National Writing Project has offered a significant return on investment in its 36 year history. Federal funding for the NWP must be maintained if we are to continue striving to meet the Project’s goal of “a future where every person is an accomplished writer, engaged learner, and active participant in a digital, interconnected world.”

I thank your for your time and attention to this matter. Please, let me know if I can be of any assistance.

Sincerely,

Zachary Chase

English Teacher

Science Leadership Academy

Philadelphia, PA

 

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Disaster Recovery by Google; where are you backing up your work? And can you take it off the cloud? My thoughts...

"Google Apps customers don't need to worry about any of this for the data they create and store within Google Apps. They get best-in-class disaster recovery for free, no matter their size. Indeed, it's one of the many reasons why the City of Los Angeles decided to go Google."

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/03/disaster-recovery-by-google.html

Online storage is a fascinating frontier for many businesses, individuals and schools. Tracking student work can be a full time job, couple that with the seemingly endless passing of jump drives; and storage solutions are a big deal for teachers. This article speaks to the viability and usability of “the cloud.” Google makes a strong case on why “their” solution is better than “your” solution. If you are comfortable with someone else hosting your digital content, then I have to wholeheartedly agree with much of what was said in this article. Personally, I live on multiple computers every day, so storing things on my computers doesn’t make sense and I’ve lost more jumps than I’d care to admit; this means that “cloud’ saving is vital to my productivity. Google’s solution of offering 1GB for $.25 is pretty awesome in my opinion. This means I can have a 40 GB storage for 10 bucks, that’s a better price than I’ve paid for any jump I’ve owned.

But what about when I need to pull my data off? How can I ensure that I still “own” my stuff? Where does it go if I abandon it? What if there’s a sudden change in terms of service and ALL of my documents go public or worse yet, I have 30 days to remove my stuff because there will no longer be such a thing as Google. J I know it’s stretch…stay with me here…

If any or all of these circumstances come into play then I need to know how to get my stuff off. The Data Liberation Front (an engineering team from Google) works on quick, easy, and painless ways to do this no matter what type of tool or resource you are using.

The Data Liberation Front

"The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. We do this because we believe that you should be able to export any data that you create in (or import into) a product. We help and consult other engineering teams within Google on how to "liberate" their products. This is our mission statement:

Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google's products. Our team's goal is to make it easier to move data in and out.

People usually don't look to see if they can get their data out of a product until they decide one day that they want to leave For this reason, we always encourage people to ask these three questions before starting to use a product that will store their data"

http://www.dataliberation.org

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Ministers want power to change laws on online copyright in future without the need for further legislation

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8549112.stm

Seems to me that more and more countries are struggling with how to regulate the internet. Reevaluating the copyright laws seems to make much more sense than this ridiculous attempt to block those sites that are infringing copyright.

And once again it is Google, Ebay, Facebook and co. coming to the rescue of our digital spaces, ironically touting their plans as an issue of privacy over the end users content. Though their recent track record doesn't quite support this it seems that they are often times standing up for these issues in an open manner.
Quote from the article:
"The government has been defeated in the House of Lords over measures to tackle online piracy after opponents said the plans could hamper digital innovation. Ministers want the power to change laws on online copyright in future without the need for further legislation. The Lords said the "blanket nature" of the clause was "objectionable". But their chosen replacement - giving courts the right to block internet sites which are infringing copyright - has also prompted criticism."
Related Articles:
Web giants unite against Digital Britain copyright plan
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8390623.stm
Is it time to defend our rights? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8544935.stm

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Budget Cuts getting interesting out here in Colorado (article) http://bit.ly/brjgoE and my thoughts;

Quote from story: Around the state, the realities of budget-cutting hit home and hit hard Tuesday night as a number of districts started locking in some of the budget cuts they’ve been ominously talking about for months.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/peasap/ / CC BY 2.0

Ouch! This hurts quite a bit! I am fascinated by the idea that Douglas is choosing to let "schools" determine cuts and budget reductions. I wonder if that includes recommending and supporting freeware and opensource tools to be used in classrooms.
And Pueblo going to four day weeks to save money is a creative solution as well.
We're all going through budget cuts it seems; what are your reflections on this?

Colorado’s status as the only state west of the Mississippi to make the finals in the Race to the Top is “purely coincidence,” U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Thursday.
http://www.ednewscolorado.org/2010/03/05/duncan-answers-questions-about-r2t

Visual Bloom's discussion @crafty184 and @fisher1000 got me thinking...

http://digigogy.blogspot.com/2009/02/digital-blooms-visual.html
I hope @crafty184 doesn’t mind me pulling this comment, but it got me thinking about how we oversimplify sometimes and complicate others. When I have shared this resource with teachers, they fall in love with this image, I think it’s because we like things to be in a nice and neat package. Explaining, discussing, and analyzing Blooms and Instructional Design during PD is enjoyable by some educators but not all, and then couple that with the depth of knowledge discussions and you may clear a room.

So, when some, not all, teachers see this they recognize some web 2.0 tools they are using or have heard about, and they see the Anderson Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy model which still doesn't necessarily connect, design, delivery, and assessment.

I guess my thoughts would be that if you share these images, that it lead to some conversation around what Higher and Lower order Thinking Skills really means and how can we differ and deliver our instruction in ways that lead to application, synthesis, and ownership of learning and knowledge. As Chris has said before, Bloom's is a way of categorizing, we shouldn't make it in to something that it's not. If we want to really dive deeper into design and tech integration, it would be a good idea if we spent some time rediscovering UbD http://ubdeducators.wikispaces.com/ and Multimedia Learning
As always I would love to hear what others think and how they address e-learning design and delivery.
Here is Chris’ comment and the site that sparks this discussion….http://digigogy.blogspot.com/2009/02/digital-blooms-visual.html You can find Chris' blog at www.crucialthought.com

“I think this is a misapplication. Bloom's Taxonomy was never intended for this, and therefore does not fit. Sure, you *can* create using some of those tools, but creating something out of nothing was not the intent of Bloom's Taxonomy (nor the Anderson revision, as you've used here). The taxonomy was designed to categorize test questions.
As in, when one learns about haiku poems, the creating section would require one to write their own haiku. An oversimplified answer, but nonetheless valid because it requires the synthesis of the knowledge learned about what constitutes a haiku.
Me simply creating a wiki and putting digital graffiti on it does not satisfy the requirements of Bloom's, I'm afraid.
Not to say the list of applications isn't useful, but take Bloom out of the picture and just call it a cloud of 2.0 or something.
-Chris Craft"

For more look at Paula White's wiki crowdsourcing the rubrics to align with the tools

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Free-E-Learning Platform Odijoo http://www.odijoo.com/ My thoughts here;

 

http://www.odijoo.com/

   

Hmmm, this is interesting, but I’m not sure if you can call it a free e-learning platform if there's a charge for "seats." The idea of creating a community where you can sell your courses, may lead to the moodle sharing becoming more easily accessible and useful I hope.

How many of us are creating and sharing full courses both for professional and student learning. How can we share better? Do we need a space like odijoo that enables and encourages this? But we can share in Moodle already, it's just not very user friendly.

http://moodle.yeovil.ac.uk/moodledev/file.php/1/moodlenetwork/Community.png

 

I think the more important question or issue is what does your LMS do for you?

Are we trying to make them into more than a great space to turn in assignments and have organized discussions via forum or discussion board? Should we be trying to make our LMS' into something they aren't?

http://www.psdgraphics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/check-and-cross-icons.jpg

 

Are we making our e-learning more dynamic via multimedia, video, audio, and animation? Or are we building Online PD using old models and poor design? Are we working together enough to maximize our time and courses?

 

Odijoo free eLearning Platform - create, deliver and monetize online courses with Odijoo

Odijoo is a free web-based eLearning platform that allows users to sign up for free and create online courses, share online courses and monetize online courses from their own online space.

Ideas for schools & teachers to use to save money! via tech learning (http://bit.ly/9JTo2d) my thoughts...here

Everyone in education knows that money is always a problem. We never have enough for our classrooms. But, there are ways around that. Free stuff means that you can allocate your limited funding to things you can't get free.

http://www.techlearning.com/blogs/27896

When budgets crunch and money gets tight, in education we go to the taxpayers and government and ask for more money to do our job well. Have we spent enough time and thought reflecting on the ways that we spend that money though? Are we accountable to ourselves enough?

It seems that there are stories and investigative reports via media reports that find cracks and holes in how we spend money. Do we set ourselves up for failure when we lack transparency in our budgets? These are some ways to save some real money in education. Now, anyone who knows me knows I think there are always "free" alternatives to doing something. But, I don't begrudge an organization for spending money well, for the right reasons, I just think we should really reflect on how we spend and ask the tough questions around copy costs, textbooks, technology, and expensive curriculum programs that require annual replacement.

Images via rysac1 and borman818

Flickr CC

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Innocentive, which connects small businesses with problem solvers via the web

Innocentive, connects small businesses with problem solvers via the web. Whoever solves the problem gets cash for solving that problem.

An example from the web site involved a small oil company in Alaska that had a problem with its oil pipes freezing in cold temperatures. After the company posted its problem online, a construction developer solved the problem in hours because his construction sites had the same problem with freezing concrete pipes. The solution was to vibrate the pipes to keep them from freezing. After drawing a proposal and calculating a few other technicalities, he submitted his answer and received $20,000.
http://www.eschoolnews.com/2010/01/18/what-every-21st-century-educator-should-know/2/?_login=0f196a24b6?_login=0f196a24b6

Is there a place for students to go to that connects them to real problem solvers. I don’t mean Dr. Math, eHow, or any other homework helpers site, but real people doing real stuff that connects them? That would be a pretty useful network for kids, it would be similarly to how I and many other peers use twitter I think for coalescing the social and professional spaces of our lives.

What structure would need to be in place before his could be used? Would it be a redundant space, that already has outlets via facebook and twitter?

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