Blog Juice for Educational Technology

In his now famous video, “Did You Know?,” Karl Fisch starts with a slide that states, “Sometimes Size Does Matter!”

This photo shows a small group of educators, networking at the EduBloggerCon at NECC in June.  The picture was taken and contributed by Steve Dembo.

Last week (or maybe it was three weeks ago) I was delivering a breakout session at a conference.  I think that the audience was school librarians.  Anyway, to demonstrate the powers of social networking, I told the audience about my Social Networking for Teachers wiki, which I’d started on Wikispaces on November 13. After seeding that wiki page with four prompting questions, I announced the site on Twitter and through my blog, and requested assistance in building out the site. As a result, it was contributed to 40 times in the next three hours, and 120 time in total, since that announcement.

Then one of the librarians, sitting by the isle, about five rows back, raised her hand with a smile and said, “But David, you’re famous.  Certainly your network of readers can accomplish this.”

After gaining control of the coughing spasm that this comment induced, I smiled, allowing that she may have a point.  But then it occurred to me, that those edits were not performed by 40 people, or 120 people, or 500 people.  In the first three hours, 17 people made changes.  This is not an unimpressive number.  But I do not believe that it is the size that accomplished this task.  I do not believe that it is a size that makes the difference.  In total, the wiki was contributed to by 28 people who identified themselves and others who made edits as guest. 

Again, not an unimpressive number.  But I still believe that the size of your personal learning network is not nearly as important as its quality.  Who do you connect to in your social networking — through your blog, blog readings, Twitter, social networks, social media, and social bookmarks — and what is their value to you?  How do they help you do your job?  What do you look for?

Do you really have to wait until you have 500 readers to start tapping into your network?

It might be an interesting study, to compare the amount of content generated within Ning social networks to the number of members.  In general, do the larger networks create more content per member?  What’s the critical tipping point?  Is there one?