 Greetings, everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you all here today. We have a great trio of guests on a really exciting topic. I'm really looking forward to a conversation. I think as long as the Future Trends Forum has been around, we've been using social media in different ways, both directly to share information about our program and also to gather guests and to gather participants. But also we've had sessions about it. How do you use Twitter, for example, in the academic world? Our guests here are going to join us to give us a kind of catch-up on what's going on in this fall 2023, especially as the big social media site of Twitter seems to be, as they say, increasingly problematic. Some academics have been leaving it. Some are staying. What goes into that decision? If someone leaves, where do they go? I'm absolutely delighted with our trio of guests, wonderful people. I'm going to bring them up one by one and give them a chance to introduce themselves. I'm going to do so in our customary Future Trends Forum way. Let's begin with Karen Costa. Hello, Karen. Hi, everyone. Hi. I'm excited to be here. I have no idea what happens after Twitter. I quit last week. That's why I'm here, to figure that out. Well, that's what we'll do together. Karen, where are you today? Where have we found you? Well, I live in Massachusetts. I'm about an hour west of Boston. I've been working in higher ed since 2001. I teach online. I do a lot of faculty development work. And I used to spend a lot of time on Twitter talking about higher ed and faculty development, trauma-aware teaching, online learning, living as somebody with ADHD, late diagnosed, all of those things. And now I don't know where I'm going to do that talking. So I'm going to find out. Well, let's bash this out. Thank you, Karen. I'm so glad you can join us. Let's bring out some more people, because we also have my colleague, co-conspirator, co-teacher, and all kinds of things are one of our dear Canadian friends, Lee Scaler of Basset. Hello, Lee. Lee, are you muted? Yes, you are muted. No. No, we still can't hear you. Okay. Well, do you fiddle with that for a second? I'll circle back to you. Let me bring up your other colleague. And this is a colleague who I have to say proves the rule that if you're going to be a guest on the Future Trans Forum, it really helps to have fantastic facial hair. Let me welcome to the forum, Thomas J. Tobin. Hello, Tom. Hello, Brian. I'm grateful to be here with everybody today. Thank you. Where are you today? Are you in Pennsylvania? Yes, that's right. I'm coming to you from my home office in State College, Pennsylvania. So I'm just down the street from Wesson, actually. Excellent. Excellent. We have a strong Northeastern vibe going on today. Tom, the way we ask people to introduce themselves in the forum is to describe what they're going to be working on for the next year. And for you, as far as I can tell, that means writing 12 books, organizing 600 seminars, and probably leading a small country to victory. Brian, why don't you correct my vision here? The vision is correct. The numbers are just wrong. I'm actually going to be writing two different books. One of them's called Universal Design for Learning at Scale. And I'm grateful that Greg Britton from John Hopkins University Press is on here, because two of my co-authors and I are going to be sending him probably this week the proposal for a second edition of Evaluating Online Teaching called Evaluating Teaching in the Digital Era. So I'm really looking forward to that. As for leading countries, not so much. But yeah, a lot of travel coming up, and I'm grateful to be working with lots of colleges and universities and keeping my ear in what comes next. Well, excellent. We're really, really glad to host you. And a shout out to Greg Britton, the hardest-working, strongly publishing editor in the education business. Now, let's see if we can bring back Lee. More importantly, let's see if we can hear her as well as see her. Lee, how are you doing? Can you hear me now? Perfectly. Not being able to hear me is a rarely something that people complain about when it comes to me. I'm a stellar upset. No, I know. I'm surprised you can't hear me from the room of requirement. We're on the same floor in the same building here at Georgetown University. So I am best known on social media as ready writing. I've written extensively about using social media about how I wouldn't have the job and career that I have without Twitter and social media. And I've been, you know, just a really proponent of using social media for personal learning networks, networked learning. I know most of you here in the audience and recognize your names because of Twitter. Yeah, largely Twitter and then leading over to other social media. And I'm really interested to in this question of what's next. Well, excellent. Excellent. I'm really glad to see you. And yes, by the way, Lee and I are about maybe 60 feet away from each other right now. We're separated by a beautiful open atrium. And so I'm really glad to see you. But here, let me arrange things. So it looks a little bit, a little bit more fun. Let me get everybody up together like this. Friends, if you're new to the Future Transform, I'm going to ask our guests a couple of questions to get their thinking out in the air and to get things rolling. But then I'm going to try and get out of the way to make room for your questions and your comments. So as our guests start to start to talk, please think about what you'd like to ask them. If you'd like to ask them to think about which platforms they recommend or practices or what's going on. Again, the form here is a bit like Soiling Green. It's made out of people. It's made out of all of you. And we'd love to hear your thoughts. So to begin, I guess I want to ask, I don't want to put the question of what's wrong with Twitter. I'd like to ask outside of Twitter, where are you folks looking? Where are you playing? Where are you exploring? Where do you think academic Twitter might be added? Are we talking threads? Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Blue Sky? What do you think? Not threads. I'll start there. And I'm on Blue Sky. One of the reasons I quit Twitter was I figured I should try out, give Blue Sky more attention before I came on here to talk about what's next. And so it's your fault, Brian, that I quit Twitter. So I gave Blue Sky a try last week. And what I found was just going on and posting regularly, this is an old school social media lesson. But for me, reciprocity, you get out of it what you put into it. And I started to get out of it what I was putting into it. And each morning I would have fewer engagements, far, far fewer engagements on Twitter than on Blue Sky. And that Twitter had been dying for me engagement-wise for a long time. And there was some really nice engagement and meeting new people and old friends on Blue Sky. So I think I'm going to give that a shot and maybe put a little more energy into LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a little weird for me. I kind of feel like Big Bird at the business meeting meme on LinkedIn. But everyone's very nice there. It's just not where I can be my fully weird self. And I think I can be a little bit weirder on Blue Sky. So that's my current plan. Nice. Nice. Let's share it for weirdness. And just remember, before everyone else goes, weird Twitter has long been a thing. So how about you, Tom? What do you think? I'm struck by something Chris Aldrich just mentioned in the chat. He says, all the platforms that Brian just mentioned are broadly, corporately controlled. Haven't we learned our lessons in doing that? And it allows me to post a little something in the chat from our good friend Anna Cook, who is one of the designers at Microsoft now in the accessibility space. And she says that the problem with any social media trying to replace Twitter is that none of them have tried to significantly change the fundamental issues with the platform. The recipe is too similar. And yes, some things have been changed, but it was an opportunity to do so much better and still could be. So when I'm thinking about Twitter, so for example, my accounts, right? So I don't have an account on Threads, Counter, Diaspora, T2, Tumblr, Clubhouse, Discord, Reddit, TikTok, WT social, Substack, Notes, or Spill. But I do have an account on Mastodon where 80 people are connected. I have an account on Blue Sky, which is rocketing up all the time. Instagram, which used to be my personal account. Facebook, which used to be just my personal account. LinkedIn, which was always just professional flu fluff law. And then Twitter and X. But the challenge is, for me, a lot of folks are heading over to Blue Sky because it is more like what Twitter used to be. And that vibe of sort of weird Blue Sky is getting there. So because it's an invitation-only platform, the challenge is how do we scale that up quickly? Because right now, for me, Twitter is still the place where I'm connected to the greatest number of all of you. And so if people are saying, oh, Twitter is dying a slow death, it's going to be a really slow death until and unless there's momentum somewhere else. This is a whole series of great points. You've mentioned features. You've mentioned corporate ownership or otherwise. You've mentioned the question audience. And Karen, I want to make sure that you... She mentioned one of the great lessons of social media as well as the blog is here, which is to keep engaging and not treat it passively. This is wonderful stuff. Lee, what do you have to add? Where are you thinking of heading? Well, I... So in preparation for this too, I have not yet left Twitter in part because all of the hockey riders that I follow that I have on a list are all still there and haven't migrated to other places. So if I want to get my Montreal Canadians and NHL hockey news, then Twitter is still the best place where I have this curated list where everybody is. I feel like this is what... It's almost like a moment... This is like a small example, but I don't know if people remember Grantland. Grantland was this great sports and pop culture website and they shut it down and all of the riders dispersed. And so it was trying to recreate the SS feed or a Twitter list of everyone who was at Grantland so I could keep connected with all of these great riders that I had. Well, I spent... So I spent the morning... There's a plug-in that you can get for Chrome that will... That will move through your contact list and try to find those people on Blue Sky. So it's basically just scraping the Twitter list, your Twitter contact list, and then connecting that through an API to Blue Sky trying to find the people who are there. And of course I don't remember the name and I'll have to call it up on my browser. But it's limited capability. Skybridge. Skybridge, thank you. But it's limited availability. It's not that reliable. Like people that I knew who are on Blue Sky, who I also followed on Twitter, it didn't pull up the right names or it didn't find anybody. But it also took me three hours because it only scrapes as far down as a screen and then you have to refresh the screen. And when you follow over 9,000 people, that's a lot of refreshing and scrolling down the screen. So I'm rebuilding. I think that my weirdness, my Twitter weirdness will probably move over to Blue Sky. But you were asking before why people changed and it's not just the invitations to get it scaled up quickly. It's the amount of labor involved in rebuilding something that made that in my case was 12 years in the making. Yes. And for disability communities, for other marginalized communities, what they don't have is time. And so we can complain about the data practices and the Nazis and Elon Musk all we want. But if this is the place that is easiest, that takes the least amount of time and effort and spoons. Until it's gone, I know that a lot of these communities are staying there for the sole reason of just the sheer amount of time that they have invested in their networks and the sheer amount of time that they would, over a long period of time, saying, well, now I'd have to do this in a really short period of time. I don't have that energy, the capacity, the bandwidth where I know I can still come to Twitter and easily find my people and find my tribe. So that's a lot of the sort of counter narrative to, it's a bit of a privilege to be able to pick up and move to a different platform, which I think a lot of us around here do have, but it still took me a lot of time, right? And it's still not rebuilt. And on the other hand, I saw a lot of, well, as I was scrolling through, because it kind of makes you scroll through and there's something about reflecting on your social media network, that it is a moment of reflection. It is a moment to say, do I still need to be following all those people? Do I still want all these people following me? What was I doing with 10,000 followers? So it's sort of this chance to also reflect and review what it is that today in 2023, am I trying to accomplish on a platform like Blue Sky versus what I was trying to accomplish in 2010, right? 13 years later, we are all not the same people using social media in the same ways. And so then it becomes a moment to say, well, am I using it for in 2023? And what am I looking for from it? First of all, thank you, Lee. You've touched on also so many good things, both you and Karen, and this is another great social media practice, which is how our wrangle refers to as pruning or gardening social media to go over and say, why am I following these people? And what am I getting out of this? And also I just wanted to make sure that you had Canada represented here. Very nice, thank you. Brian, can I, there's something I'm just dying to say. Is that one of the things that's come up for me to this question of what are you going to do after Twitter is to go offline a bit more. So I don't know if, and somebody in the chat was talking about that, but I'm seeing a lot of people say, I'm not going to replace it. I think a lot of people in this space, if you're like me, for many years prior to the current owner on Twitter, I was actively debating if I was going to quit because I felt like it was taking too much of my time I was really conflicted about it. It felt like an addiction at times. And it was also for, you know, as somebody with a disability and ADHD, Twitter was also a lifeline. So it was very much, and it is for many marginalized folks. It was very much a both and, but somebody in the chat said, what are you going to do if you're not, how are you going to connect with people if you're not on Twitter? I'm taking a pottery class at a craft center at the, you know, local city craft center. I'm getting out and seeing friends more. I text people. I call people. I email people. The three of you all have my email. A lot of you in the chat have my email. I'm surviving. So I, you know, the end, I don't really want to replace it. I'm hope I'm kind of grateful to the current owner for, you know, driving me away. Finally, it's probably for the best in the long run. And I think we all, you know, if I may bring up climate action, something near and dear to your heart, maybe a little less time online and a little more time in the natural world could do us some good. Karen, I'm so glad you said this. I was really hoping we get to that point. So, you know, one way of thinking about this is as a substitution, you know, so instead of Twitter, we're going to be using Instagram or whatever. But instead of a substitution, we have a reduction or a transformation. So taking those hours every day or every week on Twitter and then putting them into something offline. I would love to hear what people think about this in the chat and questions. Speaking of which, something has come up in the chat. That's a brilliant question. And I just lost the person who asked it. I want to say Daniel Lawrence. When we're saying if a platform is good or useful, what do we mean by that? What's the goodness that we're looking for in a social media platform? I mean, I think it depends. Right? Like, it is... I was looking... When I first got on Twitter, I was looking to connect to people. I was looking to actually start a small business. And, you know, it turned into that that's not what I found. But I did find community. I found a new career. I found really interesting people. I found out I had ADHD and so it was perfectly wired for something like Twitter. Like, there was a lot of things that I went into... And I think we all did when Twitter and the social media started very naively. Right? Let's see what this place is about. And it was initially like a bunch of weirdos. Right? And it's funny to me that so many of the people that I connected with early on in Twitter and as I went through, became very close with on Twitter, all ended up being diagnosis neurodivergent in one way or the other. Almost all of them. And I don't think that that was particularly surprising given our personalities, given how we used Twitter, given all of these various circumstances. Even our age bracket, we were all Gen X as well. Like, that's something that people tend to forget that, you know, Gen X made Twitter big. It was mostly Gen X users. So now am I looking for the same thing in a social media platform? I'm looking to stay connected. I'm looking to keep learning to keep bumping up. One of the things I loved about Twitter that I didn't know I needed was bumping up against so many different ideas and disciplines and experts in all kinds of different fields that I wouldn't have encountered otherwise. I find just my LinkedIn network is helping a little bit with that. I find a lot of the professional articles, materials, research that people would use to share on Twitter on there. But also, you know, a place to vent about when, you know, my mother's in town or, you know, when I'm live tweeting or whatever it is, hockey games. You know, so it's a lot of different things and I think a lot of it now ends up being distributed across networks where you're getting certain things from certain networks but it's not necessarily, I don't think you're going to be able to get it all from one network the way we all got Twitter if that makes, if that makes sense. I think we're smarter now about it for better or worse. And that kind of, that, Lee, as you're talking to the question of what's the value that we're looking for, it's kind of the three C's. It's community, it's creativity, and it's crazy. And when we think about community, I posted into the chat a quote from Robert Wolfe who ended up on Blue Sky a couple of months ago and he said, I feel like this place is the summer cottage you thought you might visit a few times a year only to end up living there full time when your house burns down. And that metaphor of Twitter as the house having burned down, the metaphor is of Twitter as home, a place where you feel that you can be your authentic self. You don't have to mask for others. You don't have to put on the social niceties for others. You can just kind of let it all fly and let it go however it is. That sense of safety is what seems to be missing in the new iteration that is X. And that sense of, you know, that you're not going to be persecuted or you're not going to have 17 bots come in on you and start posting weird stuff on your feed. But then I go back to my friend, Ralu Pacheco Vega, who's sticking it out on Twitter as well and I'll probably be there as well until they turn the lights off. But he talks about why it's hard to shift. And he says that several things need to be said about social media for academics. He says, obviously social media platforms are time consuming and you should be in the spaces where you want to be. To Karen's point about, you know, taking a pottery class or investing your time where you feel it's valuable. But Ralu goes on to say, network effects and scalability remain powerful elements that will keep some or even many people on this platform and will not facilitate their migration. So if we think that way, I'd love to open the question up to all of you as well. How fast do we want to recreate what Lee just mentioned took us years to build? Is that a reasonable expectation? I'd love to hear your ideas in the chat or if you'd like to come on stage or use the question feature. We'd love to open up the conversation in that way. Please. Good question. Before folks start peraging us with answers, Karen, what would you like to add? What is the goodness that you're looking for? Yeah, we've talked about this weird Twitter and Twitter as a space for neurodivergent folks. I just started talking about having a diagnosis of ADHD on Twitter without putting much thought into it. And then people were saying to me, you're so brave for speaking about ADHD. And I was like, I did. It just, it kind of happened organically. That's a loss for me. And it's certainly not something I'm talking about a lot on LinkedIn a little bit, but in a different context. And I'm kind of still looking for that space. So I'm looking for a neurodivergent affirming space. And if anybody wants to create one, I think there's an opportunity for that. I will join and follow and promote it. I think Lee was talking about these, like I forget the term you used, but like more focused spaces. I'm seeing that as well. So you all know I love Adrian Marie Brown's work. Small is all. So I think maybe we're going to see smaller, more focused communities and a neurodivergent affirming space would be one that I would be eager to have. The other thing I'm missing about Twitter being off for a whole week is I realized Twitter was my professional Rolodex. So somebody asked me in the past two days like for names, for recommendations for this and for that. And I went, oh, sure, let me grab that. And I went to go to Twitter that I would search for my name and their name or my name and a key term. And that is how, you know, one of the things I like to do in higher ed, one of my misfit roles is to connect people and to know who does this and know who does that and to make these kind of weird connections. And I was like completely at a loss. Like, oh my gosh, who do I recommend for this? So the good news is I kind of panic for 30 seconds. And then I was like, why don't you just think about it? And I did. And it kind of hurt my brain a little bit. And then I remembered who those people were. And I Googled them and found them. And it took me like two extra minutes, but maybe those are parts of my brain that weren't getting used and now are. So, yeah, I, you know, that's one though that I'm missing a little bit, that sort of professional Rolodex where everybody is, that I'm not finding in other spaces and the weird neurodivergent affirming space. Those are losses for me that would be goodness, perhaps in other places. And a follow on to that sense of community. I'm noticing in the chat, people are posting their blue sky invitation codes. So people are feeling the community here, the sense of safety here. And to answer a quick question, no, you can't use a code more than once. So if you see one and it doesn't work, we'll move down the list. Well, this forum is definitely a good space for this. Please go ahead. I was just going to talk about these safe spaces is that I, again, I talk about my kids all the time and drives them nuts, but they are really huge discord users. And that is their safe space where there are neurodivergent ones. There are mental health ones. There are all kinds of discord. The way I describe discord, if you don't know what it is, is if the gamers got a whole to slack. And that's exactly, I mean, if the gamers did get a whole to slack, it was developed for gamers to communicate, but you can set up closed discord communities. And, you know, you have, you can be a moderator, you can decide who a mod is, you can decide who is allowed in, you can set your own rules. You know, and it's been really fascinating to watch them negotiate these things. Really empowering kinds of ways. There's still all the drama that comes with being teenagers, but like there's this really interesting dynamic, but for me, I guess, I guess the openness of Twitter was something that was always really appealing to me where I get the importance of more closed spaces, but at the same time, like there was just this, anyone could find you on Twitter and you could find anyone on Twitter. And there was just, and again, there's the hashtags where you would find people and connect. There's just something about that. I mean, it's still missing a blue sky because there's no hashtag. So it's really hard to like find like-minded people. I mean, that was the first thing they told you on Twitter, find your hashtag and you'd find it and then you just go through and see and follow and, you know, we'd follow you. And so, you know, I think there is something about that openness, that again, you're probably all way too naive about that I would miss on a place like Discord or in a place like Slack or even on this place by, even on Blue Sky. I wonder if we should have a special session on messaging apps, WhatsApp and Telegram. Thank you, Lee. Thank you for adding to that. Let me throw the floor open to questions because they already come in and I want to make sure all of you get a chance to ask and all of you get a chance to answer. So this is a question that comes in from Karen Belgnane. What is appropriate? What functions or features do you feel will be most important for a new community space? So if I may, Karen, I think in part people have been answering what they valued and still value in Twitter and other social spaces. But I'm curious if I can just twist this a little bit. What would you like to see that isn't already there? What would you like to see besides no Elon Musk? Yes, one of the pros of leaving is trying to divest from billionaires. But as somebody was reminding us, Jack owns Blue Sky. I don't, yeah, so it's really, it's hard to get away from the billionaires. It's hard to answer that because my brain is a little foggy on this because there's the Twitter of last week when I left and then there's the Twitter of six months ago and so many of the accessibility features were being gutted over the past six months. So that was a huge loss and continues to be a huge loss. And I don't know, I don't know that Blue Sky and LinkedIn have prioritized that as the pre-current owner Twitter folks had. But for me, I'm always one who, and I think, I don't want to speak for Tom and Lee, but I sense they would agree with me that we want to design from the margins and make sure that inclusivity and accessibility for all, watching, you know, Twitter had done some cool things with all text and they had an accessibility team that had been put in place right before the current order took over and that whole staff was fired or many of them and that was gutted. So that would be really important for me is to listen to the folks who are at the margins and making sure their needs are met and making sure our accessibility is at the forefront. I know a lot of folks that feel that Blue Sky is like, the invite codes, I'm sure there's a reason for that, but it doesn't, you know, really send a message of inclusivity. So that's a problem. Thank you. Thank you, Karen. Tom, Lee, did you want to add more to that? Absolutely. My feature list, some of which exists in various places, but it's five things. Voice, choice, agency, safety, belonging. You have to have a voice that you feel that other people respect. You have to have choice about where you go, with whom you interact. Safety, you have to feel that you're not going to be attacked even when, and perhaps especially when you're in conversations where there's contention and disagreement. Agency, you have to feel like you can act for your own good and the good of the community that's around you and a sense of belonging. You have to find your tribe and whatever weird there is, you can probably find a few of them. So voice, choice, agency, safety, belonging. Thank you. That's a great slogan. That's a great idea. Thank you. And Lee, did you want to add? Yeah, mine's less catchy. Just, I shared this in the chat because I remember writing this and I said when did I write this? Of course it was seven years ago, so ages ago. When the choice was made to change Twitter from just a straight timeline to an algorithmically curated timeline. So showing you what you want and it's even worse now. It's really even worse now. I would love to just go back to most recent on top, scroll down to find stuff that's older. But the other thing, and I think this is something and I don't know if it's a feature or if it's just something that we really have to keep in mind as we build for the next one is that not only did Twitter become a lifeline for communities to connect with one another, it became a lifeline for government and other important organizations to communicate important information to us. Right? And you know, entire government agencies, and I know people have studied this, have units that are all about just making sure that correct information and timely information goes out to the right people on social media at the time. And you know, we just had the telephone test yesterday. So maybe this is a good time where all of our phones went off in the afternoon quite loudly. And you know, for for a little bit though, you know, Twitter served that purpose. I mean, we sort of saw news happen, got information faster. People who needed information got information faster, like what we're doing here and like sharing blue sky codes, but it's like tweeting where people have electricity, tweeting where people are safe, tweeting where the waters have proceeded, tweeting where how to get aid, mutual aid, that it became this really important public good, right? We can talk about does this mean that it should be a government you know, a public utility or anything like that. I think that becomes another question. But but again, there is some there, that's why saying all these features kind of collided in one space to be able to do that. And I don't know if that could be replicated or if I said like it's just things are just going to get broken off and and and and live on different apps and live in different platforms and live in different digital spaces that are also and the one thing that'll connect them is our smartphone, right? Like that'll live on our smartphone but in 27 different apps. That may be really may be. Thank you. Thank you for adding that as well. A great question, by the way. Thank you, Ken. We have another question that follows along this line in a really specific way and maybe this is another request for a discord here, but this is our good friend Steve Ehrman. He asks what I want is a social network composed almost entirely of academics who want to improve education participants should see relevant messages with a minimum of non-relevant messages avoid information flooding. What do you think? What do you think? Would you even be the change you wish to see in the world and that you should start that and I will join it because I want that too. Me too. I tend to go where it's to you guys. And I didn't I didn't invite Stephen to come on over to Academic Blue Sky. One of the challenges with Mastodon was everyone could put a server up and our friend Josh Eiler put on was one of the founders of SOTOL dot Mastodon standing for teaching and learning and all you know six of us joined it and it was meant to be exactly the thing that Stephen is referring to here the organic community building that happens on a network platform seems to be happening over on Blue Sky less because Blue Sky is itself a community of academics but because of the the echo chamber effect of I follow people with whom I'm already connected in other spaces and then they get me to see other people who are doing the work and this is actually one of the reasons why my experience of Twitter up until very recently had not been that of seeing all the crazy because I was connected only and purposefully to academic colleagues and so for example I never would have run across Nicole listen at the University of Michigan she studies black social media spaces Dana Boyd at Microsoft who is a big advocate for the accessible and disability advocacy community Andre Brock over at the University of Iowa he studies urban and hip hop communities or Meredith Clark at Northeastern or Chris Gilliard a friend of the forum at Maycom Community College doing his hyper visible about the surveillance culture of technology and I was able to reach out to all of those folks through connections on the various social media that I've got so to Steven's point most of the spaces where you go can be the thing you want if you are curating with an open mindset toward it so and I'm saying that sadly so Lee saved me on this one I think I mean it's part of the like how do you again over 12 years of Twitter there is just a lot of happenstance that happens in terms of finding people right like the same thing and if you know again like you said well six of us joined right this space and then became the six of us and that might be really useful but it's more than how do you I love the noise of Twitter I don't want a quiet space where all anybody is talking about is making higher education better right I do want that space I want that conversation and I want to know about people's cats and dogs and breakfast and kids and commutes to work and all of that kind of stuff because that's the thing that builds community right those are the things that get that you get to know that gets you invested that gets where people are I don't think it's noise and junk I think you know when people are like oh Instagram is just people's breakfast pictures so what right that is part of their lives and just part of their day we are beyond just our professional selves you know I want that space where Chris Gillier and I talk about surveillance but also complain about how bad our two hockey teams are right and or you know when and so like I just I understand and I know and I'm a part of closed communities and closed spaces and I really like those but I want I love the noise and I know it's not for everyone and I know Twitter isn't for everyone either but I love the noise of Twitter and that's the thing that I'm going to miss is that all of a sudden if everybody is only talking about their very narrow focus of their academic lives or their professional lives then like then we should just all be all linked it yeah well said then we should just all be all linked it these are very very different purposes I mean you want the immersive city everything going on versus the small group but I don't want to react I want to add another question to the mix here and this is from Chris Aldrich and I was hoping you would ask this what does the indie web or the older blogosphere need to have to become more individually controlled space for this sort of communication and it gives us a link to the indie web for education and Chris I'm going to try to put that in the chat as well I don't know if I trust higher education to do any better job with this than the corporations or the government well and maybe that's just my cynical hat right now but the institution of higher education has not shown itself to be inclusive as institutions individuals yes as institutions we are still exclusionary we are still we still put up walls and fences and gates we are still mired in surveillance capitalism we are mired in big attack you know I have you know I want my institution to stay out of trying to run communities and social media like I just said and so I think it's individuals and it's collectives I think we can look to our professional organizations I think we can look to our unions if we have those and look to those other spaces to be able to create something something different because again I just I do not trust the administrators the institution of higher education to have our best interests when it comes to or the community's best interest when it comes to creating some sort of platform digital platform I'm loving what I hope I'm loving what I hope is the irony in John Hollenbeck's comment he says we need an assistant vice provost of social media what do you mean higher ed can't help yes that's John that's definitely John which educators can't do well Lee says Karen did you want to add to that I just keep coming back to you know Lee was talking about it and Liz Gross is here and chatting about like this desire to have a space where we can be our whole selves so we can talk about higher ed and that the red socks suck and how we feel about Taylor Swift and social activism and I guess I'm kind of thinking like isn't that like what relationships are for I don't know you know like so that's just that's bubbling up for me and that's something I think I did rely on Twitter for increasingly that's why I had that both and relationship with it I started to be able to get those things on Twitter and I put less time into investing in them and you know this I'm really torn about this because y'all know I'm a huge advocate of online education and online spaces but you know it really did have a negative impact on my mental health to I had I think you know I'm kind of waking up to like three and a half years into this pandemic how isolated I had become and how much I relied on those interactions that I never needed to leave my house for and like I forgot to leave my house y'all like and finding those people who I can have those conversations with and connect with on different levels and be my whole self with has been a challenge but it's been improving my mental health so that's coming up for me is I'm torn about like do we how much do we want to invest in finding a new space or creating a new space when you know maybe we need to just go outside and take a walk with a friend I don't know I'm torn on this one Speaking of the touch grass idea Brian mentioned a question in the chat has anyone talked about Facebook and that's perhaps sort of my wrap up comment on this whole conversation is that in the before times Facebook was for me a way to be in touch with the people with whom I was personally friends in real life or my family members and it still has that thing so if somebody from another college or university sent me a Facebook request I would decline and it was a separate space just for my own in real life connections after the demise of twitter and especially during the pandemic that went by the wayside now if you send me a Facebook request I'll gladly say sure let's connect but that meant that something was missing or something had changed and when we think about the spaces that we've got I want to I want to say two different things on different sides of a coin the return to in-person conferences symposia events like I'm going to EDUCAUSE in Chicago next week and I'm really looking forward to connecting with a whole bunch of folks and that does me some good spiritually as well as professionally it's just nice to be able to talk to somebody in person at the same time I'm also an advocate for continuing to do the virtual conferences and virtual access because there's folks who are immunocompromised or can't afford to go or for whatever other reasons of privilege or circumstance can't engage in those kinds of places so I would always advocate for having a space where it's welcoming and it's accessible so that's a your question about Facebook Brian takes me right down that path thank you thank you and just I checked this into the chat a little while ago I did some quick back of the envelope calculations and Twitter, sorry Instagram and Facebook remain by far the hugest socials right now people keep pronouncing Facebook dead and it's not happening the second tier is really Twitter and then the avenues we've been talking about are mainly far below we do have a question that has come in from Heather Mangrum and I think this is a terrific question and I want to make sure she gets the chance to ask this in a higher education declining is it not important for academics with fact centered information to share to stay despite the toxicity where else can these voices have a loud enough microphone I'll put that up again because that was that's a rich question I want to speak to that oh go ahead Lee no what I was going to say that it I mean if this has been long been a debate on Twitter about should I stay or should I go in terms of how safe somebody may or may not be right we know that who you are what you look like how you present all of your gender your gender identity your disabilities all of that kind of stuff matters in terms of how your voice is received whether or not you have a PhD or affiliated in higher education and I think that's even more true right now but the way I see is a lot of academics have started this is another space where people have moved since Google Reader has died a long death long ago but the the substack right newsletters going back to an earlier connective technology which is email to be able to so it's more of an opt in much like blogging was an opt out we still have that opportunity for communication connection those kinds of things but I mean I don't know you know I don't even I don't think I've shared anything relevant to academia on Twitter in six months it's been on LinkedIn or on Facebook or elsewhere because I just find with the algorithm I don't think it's reaching anyone so I just I guess I understand that and I appreciate that I guess the question is not again Heather if I'm misunderstanding this please let me know I think is in question of individual choice so much as communal responsibility you know if we step back from a place that we find to be some degree toxic however we define toxic that incredibly overused word what is the responsibility of academics to wade in anyway or do we seed ground through disinformation, misinformation and so forth Brian I was going to share that early on when the new owner took over my friend Sharla Berry and I were kind of talking about this and she pointed me to Sarah Kensior did I get that right thanks Tom I put Sarah's tweet on this in the chat and Sarah don't seed territory in an information war and that was very powerful for me and that was one of the reasons I stayed as long as I did lots of folks were fleeing but I knew that for me in particular the disabled community and the ADHD community were on Twitter and again for many folks that's a lifeline and I felt like if I'm leaving you know where where does that community go I have some resources and privilege to share how can I support that community staying felt like the best way to do that for a long time once I got a little more confident and settled on Blue Sky and I saw there were people transitioning over there I felt better about making that decision as part of a marginalized community to say okay there is another space to go that has lots of its own problems as well no easy answers and to Heather's point about seeding territory or do we have an ethical obligation we have to weigh the fact that we can't be everywhere we have to take care of ourselves before we can take care of others and we have to recognize that being in these communities is already a privileged stance I take a lot of boxes for examine privileges right cisgender, white, older all the gray hair you name it and if I'm in a space and I'm able to have an influence on a conversation for a positive good I have that ethical obligation also to create space for other voices I want to welcome in people who are newer to the field I want to welcome in people who have circumstances and viewpoints at the same time I'm not going to fight every battle every person who's got a bone to pick and wants to disagree with me, Lee is absolutely right if we're thinking about substack or other publication venues we've had these problems for decades I'm a public scholar and I posted something on inside higher ed or in the Chronicle of Higher Education or I wrote a letter to the editor of my hometown newspaper in 1986 and every crank in the Cincinnati area just wrote back to me right but what we've got now is we have communication channels where it's not just three people who are reading it but you actually can have a wider conversation with a large number of people and I think having those conversations finding the place where you can actually contribute you feel safe to do so and if you have some privilege go exercise it on behalf of other people who don't so that might be my rallying cry to everybody here on the session and you've been doing it while we're holding this panel I'm reading through the chat and I am absolutely proud and amazed at the community that's building here well it is a terrific community if I can be cynical for just two seconds about that question as well no you can't it's also funny take as many seconds as you need to me there's there's a cynicism that bubbles up when I see that it's like isn't this our responsibility to stay on these platforms for the greater good when we were told when we first got onto these platforms by academia that we were wasting our time in what we did to account or anything and so now we've come full circle where the work we have been doing is retroactively I don't know if recognized as the right word but maybe weaponized in order to you know burn us out even further right like we were I'll show you all the comments on my public scholarship on inside higher ed and everything that told me I was wasting my time that what I did didn't count that Twitter was like social media generally was a waste of time and you know then to kind of turn around to a lot of these communities and say you know it's your responsibility to keep the truth alive you're kind of like really where we all when we were when we were you know turning around on us and hitting all over what it is that we were doing on here exactly where they were thank you I don't think that's cynical at all but what I do have to say that it's truly dark is that we are almost out of time we that's the problem I'm not going to let that happen what I wanted to ask you all as a final parting shot for each of you if you could just say a sentence about where you think academic Twitter is going to end up in a year from now so I'm going to give you all a chance to think about that and just say one sentence you know where you think it's going to end up is it all are we all going to follow Karen into pottery and offline are we going to distribute ourselves across all kinds of different platforms as Lee described or are we going to be very careful and come up with curated individual small communities as I think Tom has described off and on so what do you think and we'll do this in the order in which you arrived Karen what's your sentence for a year from now what do you think small is all okay and who is the author that you cited for that oh that's Adrian Marie Brown thank you small is all small is all very good and Tom how about you after a year the network effects will mean it won't be academic Twitter it'll be academic blue sky that's a strong clear run thank you sir and Lee I don't even think Twitter is going to last another year just generally academic Twitter or otherwise I mean and if it is it will just be bots yelling at each other so you know I I don't have a lot of hope for Twitter more generally or X as it's now called Twitter is already dead guys it's X now so I can have Twitter it's academic X and I just I I don't see it I don't see it lasting longer than a year and if it does it won't be much longer than that afterwards it'll go well thank you thank you for that and thank you Lee thank you Tom thank you Karen this has been terrific and very very useful conversation and thanks to everybody for such tremendous activity in the chat you know I like to end this by pointing where you can follow me and that's how I updated that follow here so here's where you can find me on Twitter where I still am along with Shindig here is myself on mastodon there is my threads handle and there's my blue sky handle so you can find me in all of those I continue to explore them and also to follow Chris Aldridge's question you can follow me on the Indie Web my own blog which I've been running for years right there as someone who's an early adopter of social media back before the term was even coined I find this all historically fascinating and also personally very invigorating but I especially love is that we can do it in the social context of all of us together thank you everybody for all these thoughts and ideas if you'd like to go back into our previous sessions and take a look at what we have been saying about this just go to our archive tinyurl.com FTF archive all the way back to 2016 if you'd like to look at what we're talking about coming up just go to the forums homepage and look for the upcoming events by the way Educause next week in Chicago next Wednesday who would like to join us live and in person there please let me know also if you would just like to all of you please take care of yourselves it's a wonderful thing together with you it's wonderful to collaboratively future with all of you please all of you take care be safe and be well we'll see you next time online bye bye