 Hello, K-12 online conference. I'm Alan Levine. I'm really happy to be here today. Actually, I'm in Vermont on a beautiful sort of beautiful rainy day To talk about stories always about stories So, you know, some people collect rare stamps. I collected coins as a kid might be antique dolls Might be, you know jewelry from strange places Music minerals baseball cards. I think you get it me I Collect shiny little nuggets of serendipity Examples of the unexpected gains when you give away ideas and things you made to people on the internet that you don't even know Without expectation of anything in return. I want to believe that these are not rare Sometimes I wonder why they're hard to find But this whole thing comes from my own experiences on the internet since the late 1980s I won't tell the whole story, but the one that really kicked it off for me Maybe I'm telling the whole story The one that kicked it off for me was doing a presentation in Australia kind of about this very subject Showing an example from something in Flickr how some stranger commented on my flowers And that was pretty cool But then this hand went up in the back of the room and the woman said that was me like the odds of that were Incredible they were insane like my heart stopped and so that's in me like This stuff happens and it maybe happens more than we pay attention to or maybe we don't like celebrate enough Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's my own fascination habit. You know people do have kind of weird collection things These stories amazing true, whatever I call them They're not going to change the world. They're not going to fix education It's not going to make it easier for you to teach. It's not going to invigorate some new magical formula into what you do But you know these times now we have so much we're worrying about we've got privacy We've got the impact of what this engagement is. We got the whole technology thing and even around us outside school There's things going on society that makes it seem like are things breaking down? And so you know what? honestly These stories give me hope and I hope that you get some hope out of this So I really started collecting them as amazing stories for a presentation At the 2009 open education conference event coover and I've done several iterations since then And you can find them all on my own website And if the video editors do it right, there's a url right down there and it'll be on the conference materials afterward And what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to introduce them to you I'm not going to play all the stories. I got 25 new ones That's pretty cool that I've collected just for the k-12 online conference And you know I made a pitch for this from one of my favorite local metaphoric viewpoints in arizona It's quite an expansive view And really what you're looking at without too much of a geography lesson Is the edge of the colorado plateau. So you're looking At coming off of what's a stable reliable platform that drops off Into this great depth of unknown mystery wide open And there are things down there that you can't really know from up here until you venture down there And some of the paths are hard. Some of them are easy. Some of them you won't find anything some of them You'll find magical things, but you really don't know from standing out there. So Think of it as a metaphor if you're not there already. Come on. Let's sit out and talk a bit So what I'm going to do in this keynote I'm going to just introduce you the stories and play a little bit of excerpts Of what I think are the important points You'll find different ones or maybe not, but I'll leave the full watching to you But they are really worth the time to look at and maybe to think about and say hey, maybe that happened to me Somewhere in the middle. I might muse or mutter about why they seem hard to find And then I'm going to ask you I'm talking to you participants in this online conference As you go through this experience of meeting and connecting online to share back some stories with me with this site Of what kind of ordinary or maybe amazing stories happen That just were kind of instigated during this conference and even if you don't well I just hope you have some fun. So with that Let's get to the first story and here we go Somebody who probably talks more about sharing than me is dean shiresky And if you're an education, especially k12, you're probably hard-pressed To be in twitter and not come across Things that dean has shared as well as some of his silly things his pants his jumping up and down his naps And he uses this his own silliness as a way to exemplify the power of personal sharing While I was away from home for two weeks some folks online began to scheme And all of a sudden my wife sent me pictures of packages that were coming in the mail I had no idea what they were After the end of the two weeks I was presenting in wisconsin and I was handed a pair of socks And at that point The light bulb came on and I when I came home I opened up 86 pairs of socks from People all around the world the things that start some of these stories are so small like you would never even notice them sandy brow jensen the fellow digital storyteller artist writer just creative persona Shares this one of how a photo she shared in flicker was found by someone and used in a literary journal But as a good story goes there's not a twist I went to her url and it turned out that she and I Lived in the same neighborhood unbeknownst to either of us and I am now the uh Contributing artists to that literary journal And I met everybody who contributes yesterday at a picnic in the local park during a road trip across canada in 2011 I got a chance to meet andy mckeele And this is one of those examples where you find someone in education technology Who has a rather interesting thing that they are passionate about outside of this role and for andy It has to do with wood I took a picture of this arbutus tree And these arbutus trees are amazing because they shed their bark and they're just a fascinating tree And alan saw this picture that I shared on instagram and said hey, you know That looks a lot like these manzanita trees that we have down in arizona where I live And we just got dialoguing back and forth and sure enough about a month later This piece of manzanita appears on my doorstep So what do I do with this piece of wood that alan shipped me from the desert? Well, I turned it into pens of course, and I mailed a few back down to arizona I actually started turning bowls and all kinds of other things out of this piece of wood. There's another twist to the story I was talking about andy and also another educator friend Dye who did something similar with some wood I sent from arizona I was telling this to howard reingold who was interviewing me and howard got so interested He went out and started getting into wood turning on making pens Most of my work has been in higher education But connections in the way the world works now doesn't limit us down to those boxes So it's been great that I've gotten to meet great educators Like heather dernan and her colleague clarence fischer in manitoba who do this collaboration between their middle school students And so heather got interested in some of the stuff some colleagues and I were doing in DS 106 with a digital radio station an internet radio station And she got interested in some people who helped build the DS 106 radio station Helped heather and clarence set up one called 105 the hive and it's just blossoming to this great thing And what was really cool about that first broadcast was that the grandparents of one of the students Was tuning in from thousands of miles away in hawaii So this is an example of where people that i've actually never met face to face Um, we're very generous in terms of helping us get this radio station up and running It's now being used by many teachers across canada and it's a free radio station that any K to 12 teacher can use with their students Theresa mckinnon shares a great story That started of all place in a comment on a steam river blog post in 2011 where she first met simon answer They both teach fine languages in different country and this chance meeting sparked a discussion That led them to develop clavier connected learning and virtual interculture Extending research network in which they've had thousands of students Connect and learn from each other in their study of foreign language started really simple with a comment I don't even know andy mead. I think he got word of my project Through someone else in my network, but here's an example of how simple it is to tell a story Get in your car and just say so andy talks about how I met someone special through twitter Change his life all of a sudden we started chatting Through twitter, uh, we follow each other in instagram. She mocked me in this instagram because I only took pictures of my dogs Um, I'm much more diverse diversified now because of her all of a sudden three years later We're married. We have a beautiful nine-month-old baby Um, we've got a perfect life And a story from another educator Kathy home Very typical story Still always good to hear teaching students a book They're tweeting about it and sharing their artwork on twitter. The author responds connection made Kids go crazy. The stuff is easy. It happens a lot If you put it out there when I think about openness I think a lot about the question. Well, what are you open to? And that's why I want to tell you about the time I met Brian Alexander Joe's great tale was of going to a conference And happening to find out he was on the plane with a colleague. He knew but maybe didn't know so well In fact, Brian Alexander was sitting in the seat behind Joe Joe was traveling with his wife And his young son, maybe his son's first time on airplane The kid's excited. He's standing up. He's looking around making big eyes at Brian and Joe knows that Brian's important He's probably working on papers or his presentation And he talks about how Brian just like didn't take this child as a nuisance. And in fact, smiled at him Made a connection. This has nothing to do with technology or education. This has to do with being people And I've profited a lot from Brian's skills and knowledge and his professional contacts, but mostly I've benefited from contact with Brian That he is someone who is open to chances to be kind I could do a whole presentation about stories about Mariana Funes An educator from the uk that I got to know through DS 106 the digital storytelling course She took over the operation of the DS 106 daily create every day publishing a new creative challenge for other people to do And sometimes as she talks about it, it's hard to come up with something And so you find something small and so an unexpected thing happened because she had the idea to ask people to take a photograph of a door doors And I was not prepared for what I found on the stream that morning doors doors doors And not all from people who usually participate in the s106 It turns out that Francesca loves doors and she flooded the hashtag with beautiful photos She chatted with a friend about her daily create find and the friend loved doors too I spoke to them about the s106, but they wanted to talk doors Somebody else joined and then somebody else Somebody sent in a Pinterest board with more door photos than I could count A friend of mine sent in A set of door photos from a lovely Italian town Francesca joined by Daisy, Francis, Janet, Elodie, Sandy, Alan, Bill The door addicts club had emerged We had found each other from all over the world through a love for door photography and open sharing It turns out it is a thing and that doors seem to be a kind of material metaphor for boundaries and transition in our lives I was so pleased to see a story come in from Claudia Lemero See my main knowing of her was around 2006 2007 and second life Don't laugh. It was an amazing time back then you and your hindsight anyhow Claudia's story is really important because it talks about the fact that it just doesn't mean putting things out there letting them happen You have a plan is so in her story She talks about how she's very attentive to her connections on LinkedIn She seeks out people and interesting and proactively seeks to connect people and that was how She tells the story of how she met Barry Galston started with a connection in LinkedIn Then they decided to have a Skype conversation I remember meeting a kindred spirit that day At the end of that call we scheduled another talk a month later Then our conversation went dormant Could have been another end of story I was coming up on the one year anniversary of my mother's death Claudia continues to tell the chronology A little too beautiful collaboration that's ongoing and regular today between her and Barry All happening because they both made an effort to sort of keep this conversation going There were so many points in her story where it could have dissolved and disaggregated into nothingness But it didn't and that's what makes it a beautiful story My LinkedIn inbox shows a short message on April 22nd Would you like to continue our conversation? And my reply absolutely thanks so much for following up Whenever telling my connected story It's a part of me that it always feels it's a little bit arbitrary Where to start and where to begin I think like most my connected story started as a lurker, but unlike others Started in real life. I've never met Aaron Davis lives in Australia. We've interacted on Twitter blog posts, etc But I know him and so his story is kind of a series of steps. It's not just one thing It's kind of making connections offline online Taking the risk to start new things Getting involved in riso 14 And then so to move out actually establishing his own digital space on the web And what he says moving to self-determined learning One of the most creative people I know on the internet is Kevin Hodgson. He's got his comics. He's got his music He's got the teaching that he does and here he talks about how people different countries different places Collaborated to build a poem together for no other reason that they thought it was an interesting idea It kind of began when Ron began talking and sharing out a poem for him that and then invited me and some others to contribute as well and From there the kind of idea of connections across the world as poets and collaborators kind of really came to be in a very interesting way that led to One single poem or eight of us were writing poetry every single day for the course of the week and then Pointing all together as a collaborative audio poetry project Okay, how about a little bit of intermission? I will get back to the stories. Don't worry But I want to talk about something that comes up a lot when I do this several rounds of Soliciting these stories, you know, I publish blog posts. I Put things on Twitter. I email people I sometimes am surprised at the difficulty some people have in responding to what I'm asking for I think it's kind of simple, but you know, sometimes your ideas that seem simple to you are complex to other people It sometimes also gets frustrating as you can see in this video Hey there, my name is Feldspar Yeah, I'm a stuffed animal you can tell but I live here in Strawberry Arizona with Alan Levine I'm a little bit concerned about him. He seems to be kind of frustrated these days About people who aren't giving him stories All I want is a video not a blog post or some google hangout or guys Just a story and why I don't want retweet Let me just do a story. What am I doing wrong? So in general for these stories, I really do prefer a video But it doesn't have to show your face like look at what sandy brown jensen did She talked and showed the scenes around the places where she lived I think the human voice is important to these stories because it makes it that much more real There's some detachment. I love words, but there's a detachment that words alone can have We have to imagine so much more of the person the human voice carries so much with it But you know, kathy don't harissa mckinnon they shared great stories that were basically images and music And you know what? I don't reject any of them. I have simple rules here. I love all the stories It doesn't have to be fancy animation like you'll see that amy-berval does Really, all you need to do is sit down with your mobile phone Pick it up. Take it out of your pocket I should have been ready You know just say hey, you know Hey Here's my story and just tell it to the phone like you're talking to story You won't believe this thing that just happened. I was so surprised when Dot dot dot fill it in So, you know, that's all I seek anything else you want to do It's bonus So I don't have any rules, but you know People say what do you want? What do you want out? What kind of story do you want? They can't ask me What kind of story do you want? I want you to figure out what the story is. That's surprise and exciting you It shouldn't be what I think it is You know in 2012 I did an online presentation for this for Alec Curris and his uh at MOOC course and I asked people in there It was anonymous to put on a shared whiteboard the things that they thought made it hard to share I was really surprised nearly every response that I saw written there Reflected question of people's own importance self-worth. They would compare themselves to others. Oh, I'm not worthy I'm not as good as Alec Or just how it might look to share something that's not professional or might affect their reputation So I really want to thank Darren Kerapatwa for turning me on to this video by Derek Sievers That really puts it well as to what we think is ordinary and what we think is amazing I get this feeling often amazing books music movies or even amazing conversations I'm in awe at how the creator thinks like that. I'm humbled But I continue to do my work. I tell my little tales. I share my point of view Nothing spectacular just my ordinary thoughts So one day someone emailed me and said I never would have thought about that. How did you even come up with that? It's genius Of course, I disagreed and I explained why it was nothing special But afterwards I realized something surprisingly profound Everybody's ideas seem obvious to them All that even John Coltrane or Richard Feynman felt that everything they were playing or saying was pretty obvious So maybe what's obvious to me is amazing to someone else Hit songwriters and interviews often admit that their most successful hit song was one they just thought was stupid and not even worth recording We're clearly a bad judge of our own creations. We should just put it out and let the world decide Okay, hopefully that message means something to you sure did to me but back to the stories Amy Burrvall An amazing creative force amazing. I gotta stay saying amazing. That Amy's amazing And just black pink and white what she draws and what she shares She ain't just giving me one story. She gave me 10 10 stories and they're all They're all worth listening to but a lot of what Amy does in these stories is talk about again How she actively Puts out messages ask people to get involved in her projects and when she was a teacher with her students And so i'm just going to put one story in here of how Amy was teaching Her students and they were listening to ted talks And her practice of having her students do back channel conversations about the speakers during these videos And what happens because the speakers sometimes listen and talk back Again It changes everything for these students to be heard And it's pretty darn simple Here let Amy tell us about it and the cool part was we would find out what the twitter handles were of the speakers And a couple of times the speakers would actually write us back as we were watching and this blew my students minds away um Doug Rushkoff Wrote us. I know and john ronson who is brilliant and did one of my favorite ted talks about the strange answers to the psychopath test um He was kind enough to write my students as well and It just it it just brought a whole new level. I mean it completely changed their view of of what school could be Ken bauer originally from canada, but being a teacher Exoco for the last 20 years Tell some great stories about both the influence of people suggesting him the trying new things And also what happens when he takes that as a leverage to go out and create connections with other people Later that same year I ran into john bergman One of the pioneers in flip learning at our main campus in monterey Had a great talk with him and he said ken, you know, you you can need to like Stir up flip learning here in mexico So so I thought oh, yeah, I'll create a private facebook group and And and for our people here at the tech and he said no no no you got to be public You got to open this up to everyone you need to be the leader in in in mexico for flip learning so And you know what one thing leads to another like a chain reaction ken gets involved in flip learning He goes to conference He meets a teacher educator named bright bennett bright bennett's involved in ds 106 ken gets involved in ds 106 meets jim groon and myself and brian lamb We start collaborating together building connected courses together All of a sudden ken is part of this great project that we're working on in mexico at the university of guadalajara One thing leads to another if you put something into it. Well, our rich is a music teacher in the south part of the uk She's a accomplished Performing cellist she gets interested in connected learning. She becomes part of connected courses going on She's in a hangout with gardener camble. He asked her to play the cello live She's a performer. She's practiced. She doesn't always do live. She doesn't know she takes chances She extends she does a project where she has her students raise money and come to the u.s To meet other student musicians that they become connected with she decides to come to arizona and visit me We want to play music together. I'm a terrible guitar player. And here we are down in tuson At the mission san javier playing music and sharing together me teaching her that's crazy And I did one of those things that that I certainly wouldn't have done even at the time of the webinar and uh, and we played things We just played things And it was really fun and he became my teacher When does he come in? e That's it. Yeah, okay And then what Meet simon answer We're just from the uk living and teaching language in france Got to know him through connected courses and some of riso 15 14 whatever Simon's a really thoughtful guy and he kind of sometimes turns issues inside out connectivity is good But in this story he talks about His day of somewhat being frustrated about the wireless at school and some things going on But then talking to people he works and teaches with in hady and dealing with situations in napal and sort of realizing in perspective um His stories of connections and what it means for people sometimes deal a lot more with disconnections And I suddenly felt completely and utterly Disconnected overawed useless helpless and I thought to myself well, you know, what is the point of being a connected educator if you can only connect with people who share the same Same privileges So this is a story. I suppose of connection Because I would never have been able to tell the story if I had not been connected to The guy in Haiti I'm telling the story the the the very day that this has happened I couldn't have had An understanding of those difficulties if I hadn't had those long conversations that I've had with my friends Blaise for example I couldn't have had the the understanding the limited understanding that I have of of what was going on if I hadn't seen the photos of school building projects and and Sebastian the guy's work in Haiti But I'm left with that feeling of Helplessness and and sometimes I feel Almost it's it's perverse. It's a perverse vicarious Spectator sport being a connected educator so There is hope There is hope in all that David karnahan from uh, the uk. It's a good friend. I got to know through ds106 fantastic musician In fact, he recorded for me the original music that you hear on the intro and some of the breaks for this video He just gave me a song because I asked for one and he's freaking talented with the guitar and other instruments But his story and I didn't want stories about me, but he did anyhow He's talking about his work for jisk, which is really an important organization in uk for higher education and technology How often they have to pay money to license images for their publications? Now he was doing a work on another colleague Jonathan worth and he decided to look and flicker and found some images I took of Jonathan, you know a photographer taking a picture of photographer that david found useful Opening licensed creative commons that they made of use for this report. They had to publish pretty simple story Ends well There are loads and loads of pictures of Jonathan with a camera So I thought I could just use one of them and it was openly licensed and He had a great picture of the guy who'd actually put the report was actually about And that became the front cover of the report and everyone loved it And we also used it in the blog post for that report and I've introduced a whole bunch of other people to looking in allen's flicker collection for if they're Doing anything that I need an image for jesk Alison Ender us gave this great story which Appropriately opened with her and her dog elroy. It wasn't about elroy But again story of perhaps unlikely series of circumstances. She is a grad student working in higher education Sees a tweet about someone writing an article about issues of being an adjunct. She has an experience She reaches out to this person and offers some suggestions He ends up interviewing her Featuring her in a story that appeared in the chronicle of higher education Now I think that happened was for the publication They asked her for a photo of herself and so they asked for three so so they could choose And she sent a couple professional ones But the third one almost on a whim She sent a picture of her with a backpack coming off of a trip That she took up in the northwest and that was the one that they went with So this picture goes out That's a picture of her as she says I haven't showered for three days etc But there goes out on the chronicle. She gets a lot of feedback positive from that article things happen Someone invites her to be part of an event through the pod network and they start talking And allison starts to wonder, you know, why did you pick me? It has to do with that photo And she said, you know, um, I read your story on vitae and I worked as an outward bound instructor for Several years and I just really loved that you had a backpacking picture and that I thought we'd have a lot in common pedagogically professionally You're somebody that I think I'd like to have a beer with like it was that it was that kind of thing, right? And so, uh, we had a lovely conversation about where she worked next thing I know we're talking about hiking and topo maps and gear and Um, suddenly I'm off the phone with this woman realizing that I really didn't get much information about the actual gig that I had said to But I knew that I had a new friend in ashville, north carolina Hi, I am brian netcalf and I live in the center of canada My true story of amazing connections Shares how I was solicited from a far off continent to send money to help out an individual whom I had never met As you know con artists and scammers Will go to extreme lengths to harm seniors And I am a senior citizen People ask me what kind of stories that I like to get I can only dream of getting more stories Like this one I say for last from brian netcalf. He gets here with a hook He plays with it. He uses like real-world situations He doesn't give away the story from the beginning And I really shouldn't tell the story because brian tells it so well But I did get to know brian through dance one or six. He came in retired teacher He was blogging already but brian took on deus one or six and creativity with a voraciousness and a detail For sharing how and why he did things that was a beautiful example for my students Anyhow in his stories. It doesn't have to do with me. Thankfully, but he does me through deus one or six Another fellow student named jess mccall who happens to live in australia Jess has this dream of going to this event in canada called unplugged. I got to go too Meet jess, but that's not the story To fund the trip jess came up with this idea. She's amazingly creative that she would do a poem for anybody who helped support Her trip to the u.s. She would write an original poem and perform it for them and brian asked her to do a poem on The power of sharing and it's a beautiful thing and you just have to listen to brian's whole video Sorry, I am not doing it justice Stop this video or go later go to my story site and watch brian mccass story. You won't be sorry Wow, thank you if you're still there for staying with this video for so long I hope you enjoyed. I enjoyed putting it together. I hope you really go to the site and check out the stories There's the url right down there But more than that, I really hope you give me a story There's a form on there And I'll put that link too or you can go to and I have to do is tell me you know a little bit about the story Send me a link publish it to youtube or vimeo just do it really quick But right after the conference or during the conference I bet something is happening that will surprise you as far as who you matter What kind of connections you're able to meet just through the act of being part of the k12 online conference or stuff You're doing ordinary otherwise And I'm just going to close with some little excerpts that I pulled Messages from video where they're telling you the message not me Thanks again, and I hope you have some stories to share There is nothing life changing about this little story. It was just lovely to see So many beautiful photos openly shared and I think it really continues to impress upon me How important it is that we connect on these very human personal levels And even if they're sort of born out of these Rather silly ways. I think there's still something really powerful about connecting with other human beings In this really really interesting way What this taught my students was the power of their words and the power of being connected In over a year, I'd say in 15 months that one random tweet and that one email Has really opened doors for me and quite literally changed my life And that basically means education rhymes with hope And I think that if I have any message at all is that hope goes from haiti to france and back to you So, yeah, there are issues of disconnection but What can we do apart from connect those little instances or glimpses of hope And that's kind of how connectedness works. Um Sometimes the people that you really need are the people across two oceans or The people across the ether not necessarily the people living in your same Geographical vicinity and I really appreciate that and that's what connectedness means to me So I suspect Alan's probably saved us over the years quite a lot of money He's made our stuff look better And he doesn't even know he's done this. He's just made this as He's just been making pictures because he loves to make pictures and we've been able to benefit for that Kathleen's now a dear friend I And I owe it all to some random encounter on the internet The web allows a lot of possibilities It's always easy to get caught in trap of thinking that every journey is the same But it every is everyone has their own story and it's never quite complete A lot of times we we need to just get out there and share our stories and follow people and say Hey, I like what you're doing and they can come and see what we're doing Say, hey, you know, I would like to implement what you're doing. Can you help me out? In summary, I would suggest that this amazing story of connection might be considered the ultimate con job as it starts with a canadian conference And involves much connecting with other online learners or jess mccollich Conceives of an idea to raise travel funds She needs to convince contributors and promises to construct poems Lastly, I can say I'm so pleased with this endeavor In fact, as an investor, you might say that I am indeed quite content Take care. I hear so many people devalue online connections It's important to remember that those are our living breathing people behind those facebook twitter LinkedIn names reaching for connection each in their own way It's about what we do with those connections You need a little bit of luck, good timing, serendipity, chemistry And if you do feel a spark of possibility, lots of persistence and showing up It's about risking to say what you think And being generous and kind Giving each other the benefit of the doubt Showing appreciation Not taking understanding for granted Continually opening your mind Building trust takes time, so you need patience And it's just unbelievable how one tweet of a Vine video got us connected And through Instagram and Twitter Just more connection and all of a sudden life's pretty awesome But I just think it's pretty amazing just to see what can happen when you share Some of the things you're doing in such public spaces It made me wonder if Sherry Turkle is right When she says we are so desperate for connection Without commitment that we get excited about connecting Through any content, ephemerally But maybe, just maybe The joy that we feel in the open web is about finding our common humanity I'm feeling grateful just for that And I think we could do really well to think about The ways that openness and kindness Can be related if we let them This doesn't have to be a big production like Amy Brawall does with animation etc Just prop up your mobile phone and press record Take like three or four minutes Talk like you're talking to a friend Like you wouldn't believe this thing that happened to me I was online, I was researching this And I came across this person And next thing I knew That's all you do is express the excitement of making that connection In your own voice Just say it right to the camera And I just did One take Three minute video Upload to YouTube Fill out the form I was done I was outside playing in 10 minutes And then this is the kind of sound that I will hear You can pull a line and share them at the K41 line conference So I think you know what to do now Can you help out? And then just submit your story at the URL below Thank you