So what is this, really?

Edit to add: This was the intro post to this blog when it was hosted at ThinkLearnSpeak.com. I eventually decided that, while this makes for a good philosophy, it was too limiting given my varying interests, so it doesn’t really hold any longer. I migrated the over site over to my personal domain, but I’m leaving this post up for posterity.

Think. Learn. Speak.

That is a harder question than it looks. The difficulty comes in trying to pinpoint exactly what all my interests have in common. In short, this blog will cover social media, technology, and education, and the intersections and philosophies of those. At the very least, it serves as an extended outlet for me to share some of the thoughts I’ve had in discussions on Twitter and elsewhere.

Deciding on a name that ties everything together was tough, but I think this does a fairly decent job.

Think.

It’s all about the ideas.  Underpinning it all is the why: why are we doing X, to what ends, for what purpose?  These questions are often answered without realizing it and tie everything together.

On some level, that’s what computers do too, right? They’re thinking machines, plugging away at all those 1’s and 0’s. They aid our thinking as well. (Ok, it’s a stretch, but “Compute. Learn. Speak.” didn’t have the same ring to it.)

Learn.

Thinking meets the real wold.  The ideas meet facts and discerning a usable solution from that overlap is the result.  Education is not just an institutionalized process either; one learns their whole life, but the early-life education that takes place in and around this institution shapes not only your own life, but generations of lives. Shaping that institution thus shapes generations, and sometimes basic conversations about this institution are lost in the policy debate. Which brings us to…

Speak.

The last step: once the ideas and facts are put together, we share those ideas with others and make them better, bringing in opposing viewpoints, differing ideas, and try and improve them. Social media is now the ‘Great Conversation’ and there’s only so much depth you can get into on Twitter.

And ‘social network as system’ is itself a question, an idea. We try to get involved in the conversation through these media but the media itself shapes the conversation in its own way.

And that’s what I find interesting. You won’t find much in the way of “5 Tips for Better Tweeting” here (not that those things aren’t valuable in their own right) but I hope to share and shape your thinking about these institutions and how they interact. Applying those philosophies to your actions make it much easier to participate in a thoughtful way, rather than participating for its own sake.

It’s all connected, and I hope some of these writings help to explain what I mean by that.