Where am I now

    Just as we begin each educational leadership class by looking at our knowledge competencies, we conclude each class by reassessing our skills, knowledge and attitudes, measuring what we have learned and how our classroom experience has informed our understanding of education.  Early on in Media and Technology in Parish Education I identified two goals that were still growing edges for me.  The first one is supporting intergenerational learning, and the second one is supporting theological and biblical reflection in a variety of contexts, and with a variety of people involved.
    Often when we talk about intergenerational learning, we talk about forging relationships between older adults and youth, but I am in the middle and personally, I am much more comfortable reaching out to older adults than children, teenagers and even college-age young adults.  However, technology and media create openings for conversations in ways that might not happen otherwise across multiple generations.   Three of us in my family shared this video with each other – my retired Navy officer father, my eleven year old flute-playing daughter and me.

    Similarly, my almost sixteen year old daughter commented recently on the way that we watch people grow up through the photographs they share on Facebook.  I have classmates who have posted scanned photographs from our high school years and for my daughter, cameras have always been digital so pictures from kindergarten through high school are easily shared online.  Comfortable with using social media and technology to tell our families' stories, now we are beginning to discover how we can use them to tell our faith stories as well. 
    Blogging our theological and biblical reflections for this class has let me invest time in Blogger, adding elements to my blog like a cloud of the tags, labels or subjects in my posts and a blog roll or listing of the blogs I subscribe to in Google Reader.  The reader itself has a search engine to find blogs based on keywords so I can search for a title or a topic and add it quickly.  And for a twist, in Blogger, when I list my favorite musicians, I can click on a name and find other bloggers who share an interest in that musician. (So look out for more bluegrass theologians.)
    These tools and resources have connected me with other people who are blogging particularly about faith, leadership, education and social media.  But just making the connections isn’t the same as having conversations.  For conversations, I will always hope to find and make opportunities to sit down across a table with other people in a concrete, physical space, but as a distributed learner, I am also very comfortable with asynchronous conversations. 
    Using Hootsuite I can read feeds from Facebook and Linked In, and even RSS feeds from blogs, but I primarily use it to follow conversations on Twitter where I tweet @christinaauch.  In Hootsuite, I set up streams or feeds – lists of Tweets by other people - in Twitter using hashtags.  Hashtags are words preceded with a pound or number sign (#).  Right now I have my main Twitter feed where I can read anything posted by someone I am following, but I also have a half-dozen or more streams that I read that are based on the hashtags or subjects:

#chsocm (people interested in how churches are using/can use social media; tweetchat begins July 11)
#isedchat (independent school education chat)
#edsocialmedia (education and social media)
#finalsite (a web communications conference in June near Hartford, CT)
#gather2011 (Bread for the World’s conference in June in Washington, D.C.)
#WGF11 (the Greenbelt-esque Wild Goose Festival held in June in NC)
#NN11 (Netroots Nation 2011 conference in June in the Twin Cities)

Here I see tweets from many more voices, anyone who uses the hashtag in fact. For tweetchats we are actually engaging in synchronous chats, at a given time and date, but you can also stumble onto them and go back to them if you can’t be online at the proposed time. 
    It is in these conversations that I hear a number of voices, including Lutheran, Episcopal, United Church of Christ and Unitarian Universalist, and other Protestant voices, and now the Pope as well.  Different nonprofits and denominational offices and ministries (Bread for the World, Vibrant Faith Ministries and David Creech at ELCA World Hunger, for example) are on Twitter, too.  Tweets are conversation starters, and the conversation grows as comments are retweeted or people reply to earlier tweets. 
    For people who don’t think real conversations happen in 140 characters or less, in the past few days, I have had a conversation about how to talk to our children about Jesus, our gathered community and worshiping together without answering “Why do we go to have to go church?” with “Because that’s what we do on Sunday.” and connected with someone who has written his thesis on themes similar to Clay Shirky’s. Earlier this year, I spoke to David Creech about a course he had taught on Christian responses to poverty and hunger.
    These are real conversations happening without the benefit of a landline phone, knowing someone’s full name or having a peer introduction. They are respectful, engaged and thoughtful conversations about God, wealth and poverty, justice, faith, fear and pain as well as places where joys and sorrows are shared. The participants often are more diverse in racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds than I would find at a roadside diner or coffee shop in my corner of the world, and probably in my congregation, although I’m less convinced that we are any more successful at bridging class divides.  Nor do I think our digital spaces should replace our physical spaces and face-to-face conversations, but they afford unique opportunities that complement and even enrich those conversations.