Here, then, are my ten tech resources for staff as we start the new year:

1. Get to know your tech people. Here’s  a list of the technology support people. Most of the buildings have a “go-to” person in the building to help with technology needs. They’re a great resource for getting help fast. There are also three of us working at the district level. You’ll see Dan, Rick, and me in the buildings quite a bit.
2. Use the help desk at http://www.bbhcsd.org/helpdesk to report tech problems. Documenting issues helps us better prioritize visits to schools, track recurring and ongoing problems, and make sure we have everything we need to solve problems as quickly as possible. In many cases, we can also solve problems remotely, saving everyone time.
3. Head over to the user management system at http://www.bbhcsd.org/user. Log in with your username and password, and use the “Edit Directory Information” link to make sure your info is up-to-date. This data is used to generate the staff directories on the web site, links to staff members’ web sites, school email lists, and the automated emergency notification system. If your information is accurate here, you’re more likely to get those critical communications in a timely manner. At the very least, you’ll need to log in and enter your phone number. You can also change your password with this system.
4. The district uses Google Apps for Education for email, calendar, and shared documents. You can access any of these tools from any Internet-connected computer by visiting http://email.bbhcsd.org, http://docs.bbhcsd.org, or http://calendar.bbhcsd.org. Students in grades 5-12 are also eligible to receive Google Apps accounts. This is the first year for this, so many of them don’t even know about this yet. I have also created a handy Getting Started Guide for Google Apps (http://bit.ly/aazJTK) that might be useful for you.
5. The district uses the WordPress blogging software, which is a great way for staff members to quickly and easily publish information online without having to learn how to be a web designer. Intended to be as easy to use as email, blogs can provide a simple way for teachers to provide timely information to students and parents. For interested staff members, they can also be configured for interactivity, facilitating online student discussions and collaborative projects. To set up a blog, visit http://staff.bbhcsd.org and log in with your network username and password. An embarrassingly out-of-date WordPress Guide is available on the same page to help you get started. Professional development classes are also occasionally offered on blogging for teachers. If you’d rather use a site someplace else, you’re more than welcome to do so. Just update your directory information (see #3) with your site’s address.
6. Interested in having an online component to your classes? We use Moodle as our learning management system (http://moodle.bbhcsd.org). You can use Moodle to facilitate online discussions, disseminate handouts, assignments, and other materials, and allow students to complete and submit work electronically. Log in and have a look around. If you decide you’d like to get started with a class of your own, let me know and I’ll get you the right permissions. Students in grades 6-12 have Moodle accounts automatically, and fifth graders get them mid-year. If you teach younger grades than that, we can also accommodate your students on a case-by-case basis.
7. The district uses the Progress Book grading and grade reporting software. Attendance and grades are reported using this system. Your username and password will be provided by the EMIS office. Parents are provided with “parent access” accounts, allowing them to check on student progress online at their convenience. Teachers may also use this system for keeping parents updated about assignments, upcoming projects, and other classroom news.
8. When you log in to your computer, you’ll notice that there are a number of network drives. While these can vary depending on your building and position, the most common drives are these:
   • H: This is your home directory. Files stored here are only accessible by you, but you can get to them from any computer where you’re logged in.
   • T: (staff) This is the staff drive for your building. All staff members in your school have access to this drive, but students do not. It’s a convenient place to share resources with your colleagues within the building.
   • M: (diststaff) Like the staff drive, this one is available to all staff members. The difference is that the “diststaff” drive is available to all staff members district-wide. So if you need to share resources with teachers in other buildings (curriculum mapping, working on verticality, grade-level resources in the elementary schools, etc), this is the place.
   • P: (public) This drive is available to anyone with a network account (including students). In some schools, student access to this drive is read-only, allowing staff to use it as a dissemination tool.
   • O: (submit) Available at the high school and middle school, this drive allows staff members to set up “drop boxes” for students to turn in assignments.
   • I: (programs) You won’t really use this drive directly. It stores shared data for applications that run on the network.
   • X: (apps) This drive contains application installers and software drivers that are mainly used by the technology department.
9. Federal law and district policy require us to provide filtered Internet access on all computers that are or may be used by students. We use the Webwasher content filter service provided to us by our ITC, Lnoca. Because web filtering is not an exact science, there are occasionally situations where needed resources are inappropriately blocked, or where content is not blocked that should not be accessed in school. The district has set up a procedure for handling these situations. Staff members may submit Internet Filter Review Requests (http://www.bbhcsd.org/tech/filter) to ask that an exception be made to the filter. These requests are reviewed by a panel of principals and media specialists. In most cases, a decision is made within a few hours.
10. This summer, the district completed the installation of a wireless network in all six school buildings. District-owned devices that have been configured to use the wireless network should be able to access all of the same resources that they use when they’re connected to the wired network. Staff and students may also use the wireless network from personally-owned devices to access the web. Just look for the Beesnet wireless network. There’s no password to connect. When you start using the web, you’ll be asked to authenticate with a valid BBHCSD network account. Once that’s done, you’ll be able to browse the web. Please note that printers, file servers, and other internal network resources are not available from the Beesnet wireless network.

Have a great year.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I took a little vacation to Canada. We left early Monday morning, and came back Thursday afternoon. It was just a quick trip across the border to do the touristy thing at Niagara Falls. But, being the vacationers that we were, we didn’t pay any attention to the news while we were away.

It turns out that we missed a lot. While we were gone, Georgia State Director of Rural Development Shirley Sherrod was accused of being a racist, forced to resign her position, apologized to by an over-reacting administration, and offered a new position. The fallout was extensive. Once the full story came out, there was a lot of finger pointing and blame being passed around for letting this get so out-of-control. As usual, the new media tools (Youtube, Bloggers, Twitter) became the primary scapegoats. But the real problem is a deficiency in information literacy skills.

For example, if I see:

Shirley Sherrod is a racist.

What does that mean? Too many people don’t seem to realize that it means nothing. We learned this four years ago from my then-seven-year-old. How about this one?

Andrew Breitbart says Shirley Sherrod is a racist.

That’s a little better. It gives us some context. When I heard that statement on the radio as we drove home, I dismissed the whole story. I had read this Wired article about Breitbart, and I already had my own opinion of his credibility.

If, on the other hand, the story had been:

Daniel Shore accuses Shirley Sherrod of being a racist.

Or:

Jim Lehrer labels Shirley Sherrod a racist.

Or:

Glenn Beck claims Shirley Sherrod is a racist.

Those mean very different things. Depending on your personal bias, and your opinion of the journalists mentioned, you will assign a different level of credibility to each of those statements. Please note: I am not claiming that any of the statements above are true. I’m merely using these statements to illustrate a point. And even if I were claiming they were true, you should be looking for me to point to a source to prove them. If you want to try to figure out who said what when, start here (and good luck).

All of these statements are second hand news.

Fox News is reporting that Andrew Breitbart is saying that Shirley Sherrod is a racist.

So what? Show me a source.

Okay, wise guy. Here’s the video.

So she gave a speech to the NAACP in which she admitted to being a racist?

Yep.

And that speech was two minutes and thirty-six seconds long?

No. That’s just the important part.

Have you seen this video?

Information doesn’t exist on its own anymore. In this world where anyone can publish anything, anyone can say anything, anyone can make any claims, information doesn’t stand by itself. Truth is relative. If you are making a claim, you have to be able to back it up with a source. And as a consumer of information, it is my job to evaluate the credibility of that source, and, by extension, the reliability of the information.

That’s a lot of work. I realize that. But it’s not optional anymore.

When I was in high school American History, we spent six weeks studying the battle of Lexington and Concord. We only used primary sources — accounts written at the time by people who were there. The accounts of the events of that day, especially the firing of the shots on Lexington Green, vary widely. That process taught us that people write and say things from their own perspectives. Everyone has a personal bias. Everyone is trying to justify his or her actions, opinions, or conclusions. Our job — as listeners, readers, viewers, consumers — is to question the sources of the information we receive, and draw our own conclusions.

Those skills have never been as important as they are now.

Says who? Says me. I’m the source. Now, you have to determine the reliability of what I’ve just said based on what you know about me, and on the sources I’ve cited. It’s up to me to convince you that I’m right. Hopefully, I’ve done that.

Photo credit: Shirely Sherrod, by USDAgov on Flickr.

That’s why it makes me ill when I consider how much money schools spend on textbooks. In extremely rough numbers, we spend about $100 per high school student per year on textbooks. That varies from year to year, and from student to student. We also spend less in the lower grades than the upper ones (AP Calculus and Physics books are expensive).  But the point is, we spend a lot of money for information.

Over the last couple years, we’ve seen the proliferation of new devices to read electronic books. We could read ebooks on a netbook, or on a Kindle, or the Sony e-reader, or the Nook. Lots of people are talking about the iPad as an e-reader. And the Android devices should be along any day now.

But none of these devices really make sense for K-12 education, because they’re not designed for K-12 education. Want to make a fortune exploiting this need? Here’s what I want:

A device that has

• a price tag of $200 or less and lasts 3 years or more.
• decent performance in both bright light and low light conditions.
• a prayer of lasting all day without needing to be recharged.

A management tool that will

• allow the school to push content to the device. I want to send out a document to all of Mrs. Jones’ students. Or I want to send a book out to all of the Freshmen. And I want to be able to pull those resources back when they’re no longer needed.
• let the school push its own content to the devices, without paying fees to do it. Maybe I want to send out a student handbook. Or maybe we’ve developed a K-12 Flexbook. I shouldn’t have to pay or go through a hassle to get that on my own devices.
• allow students to “check out” materials from a virtual library that is based on simultaneous use licenses. Maybe we have 50 copies of Catcher in the Rye. That means that 50 people can sign it out and read it on their readers. When someone’s done with it (or when their time is up), that copy is made available to someone else.
• allow the school to license content without going through the device itself. Buying iTunes gift cards to put content on student devices is stupid. Amazon, you don’t make it much easier.

Content that

• isn’t more expensive than the books we’re buying now. I don’t care that it has audio and video. I don’t care that it’s updated once a week. We have to spend less money on this, not more. And remember, we have to pay for the device itself. So you get about $30-40 per year for all of the content a high school student needs.
• isn’t licensed on a per-student-per-year basis. Give us a number of licenses and let us pass them out, re-collect them, and use them again. Think along the model of the textbook. Students don’t go out an buy their own. And the school doesn’t buy new ones every year. We re-use things. And, with textbooks, it’s legal for us to do that.
• allows me to put it on any device. If I buy a Kindle today, and buy content for it, I should be able to move that content to an iPad in the future. Or a Nook. Or whatever. I shouldn’t have to buy it again to read it on another device.
• can be purchased from anywhere and loaded onto the device. This model of “you have to buy the content from us” is a bad deal for consumers. If a single device ever does emerge as the de facto standard, that content company is going to make a killing.
• doesn’t make me buy the printed book to get the digital copy. Some publishers do that. It’s bad policy.

It would also be nice to have

• this device replace our graphing calculators. Honestly, I don’t know why we’re still buying those 15-20 year old devices and paying the same amount we paid for them 15-20 years ago.
• web browsing capabilities. Wifi good (maybe good enough). G3/G4 better. And despite what Apple is trying to tell you, everyone does use Flash. Or they would, if they were allowed.
• a media player. Show videos. Play audio. Maybe record audio and video, too.

So who’s making this? Can you let me know when it’s going to be available?

Photo credit: Gaspi ‘yg on Flickr

There’s also a larger version of this video available in case this one is too hard to read.

If this is too difficult to see, there is also a larger version available.

If that’s too hard to read, there’s also a larger version available.

In truth, the problem hasn’t really been that bad. Once we got the ground rules set (no, I am not your personal on-call tech support), there really haven’t been that many annoying calls after hours. And most of the calls I do get have been fairly important.

Still, I’ve continued to buck the trend of increased mobile capacity. Some would joke that my cell phone still had a rotary dial. It was capable of sending and receiving text messages, but I never used it for that. It had a camera, but there was no convenient way to get the pictures off. I used it for phone calls, and that was it.

So why, after all this time, was I excited about upgrading to a smart phone? We’ve finally reached the point of device convergence. I can now carry around this thing called an HTC Evo. It replaces my cell phone. But it also replaces my mp3 player. With its 8 GB SD card, it has just as much storage space as my iRiver Clix, and I don’t have to carry another device. Plus, when I’m ready, I can upgrade it to 32 GB. It also replaces my PDA. Until about a year ago, I was using a Palm LifeDrive, a huge, slow device that gave me calendar and email access along with a few games and memos. All of that is now in the Evo. While the camera in the Evo isn’t nearly as good as my DSLR, it can keep pace with the point-and-shoot 8-megapixel camera that used to live in my laptop bag, and it also now takes the place of the Flip camera I used to carry around to do short video clips.

It hasn’t replaced my navigation system, but that’s only because I have an in-dash nav with an 8″ touch screen built into the dashboard of my car. If I were using a Garmin or a TomTom for navigation, I’d probably be leaving it behind at this point. It also hasn’t quite replaced the laptop, though I do find myself reaching for the phone to quickly check email, Twitter, and Facebook instead of waiting for the computer to boot.

I don’t have an ebook reader. But I do have some ebook apps for my phone. I don’t know yet if this is going to be good enough. I do know that it’s easier to read a book on the phone than it was to read one on my Palm, or even on the eee PC. But the jury’s definitely still out, and I have a lot of concerns about ebooks that aren’t related to any particular device.

So what’s that? Five devices replaced by one, along with the functionality to partially replace two or three others. That’s pretty significant. I don’t have to carry a bag full of devices around with me anymore. I don’t have to have a half dozen different chargers and interface cables and accessories. It’s all in one device.

There are down-sides, of course. I always shy away from those printer/scanner/fax/copier/coffee maker devices, because they never seem to do any of their various functions very well. In this case, the phone itself is not quite as easy to use as the old flip phone. And the camera is a little harder to use than the old Canon point-and-shoot. But the old phone didn’t pull my contacts directly from my Google account. And the old camera couldn’t scan barcodes and look them up online. In all, it’s a pretty good trade-off. I’m very impressed.

There are two things, so far, that I don’t like about the HTC Evo. The first is that the battery life sucks. With heavy use, it won’t make it through the day. Once the newness wears off, and I’m not using it all the time, I don’t think this will be much of an issue. But just in case, we’ve ordered an extra four batteries and two chargers (total cost, $33). See, unlike some companies, HTC lets you replace the battery. This should provide ample battery life in those situations where we need to go multiple days or periods of intense use without a full charge.

The other thing I’m not happy with is the wifi antenna. At least, I think it’s the antenna. Sitting on my front porch, I couldn’t even SEE my wireless network with the phone. This is in a location where the laptops don’t have any trouble at all. At work, too, where we’re flooded with wifi, it could barely make a connection. I’m hoping this can be fixed (and will be fixed) with a software update. Many people have complained about this, and it is quite annoying. Still, though, with the great G3 coverage, I haven’t missed the wifi that much.

Android is incredible. I’m very impressed by this operating system designed for mobile devices, and I’m convinced that anything running Windows, even a mobile version of Windows, just isn’t going to cut it. I get a similar feeling with the iPhone UI, though I haven’t really used it enough to make informed comments about it. I do really like the openness of Android. I can attach the phone to my computer, and it shows up as a drive. Try that with your iPhone. The apps marketplace is also more open, with no one saying that developers have to use a particular development platform, and no overbearing company taking a cut of each app sale. While I’m optimistic about the WebOS stuff that HP just purchased Palm to get, I think Android devices have a real future in the mobile market.

It’s still new. I still don’t know what the long term effects of this device will be. But I’m excited about it, and optimistic about it. That’s going to take a while to wear off.

When we were talking about setting up our own system, our network consultant commented, “you know, you’re going to need another person to manage this.” I knew. But I also knew I wasn’t going to get another person. We’d just have to make it work with the resources we had. It’s just email. It’s been around for 30 years. How hard could it be?

Five years later, we have a much better answer to that question. Email falls somewhere between oxygen and water on the basic needs hierarchy of a school. If there’s a problem with the mail server, it rarely takes more than a couple minutes before everyone knows it. If an email outage lasts longer than a few minutes, the incoming messages really start to pile up, and it can take days for the server to catch up.  Scanning for viruses and spam takes a lot of processing resources, and we had to move those functions onto a different server to keep them from overloading the mail server. With more than 90% of incoming messages being classified as spam, we’re sorting through a lot of chaff to get to the few kernels of wheat.

The biggest headache, though, comes from traffic spikes. A well-meaning staff member might send a 10 MB attachment to 500 users, for example. That’s 5 GB of data that has to be processed. Or, sometimes we’ll be flooded by hundreds of connections from spammers performing dictionary attacks against our domain. “No, you don’t have an account called ‘aaa@bbhcsd.org’? Well, then, how about ‘aaB@bbhcsd.org’?” Invariably, these types of things lead to service slowdowns and interruptions, annoyed users, and grumpy tech staff.

This spring, it became clear that something needs to be done. It’s doubtful that we’d be able to get through another year without significant upgrades to our email infrastructure. The growth in email volume alone, which has quadrupled to 20,000 messages a day since we switched to our own server, means we need to replace our mail server. And with that, we need faster, more robust solutions for anti-spam and anti-virus scanning, email archiving, and backups. To add to all of this, we really need to start providing email accounts to students, so they can collaborate with one another using tools like Google Docs. To provide email accounts to all 5-12th graders, we’d be increasing the number of accounts we’re managing five-fold. I don’t have the resources — either hardware or human — to do that.

Wait.

Google.

What was that about Google?

Google will handle our email for us. For free. Through the Google Apps for Education program, they’ll give us as many accounts as we want. We can have 7 gb of email storage space per user. Since I’m looking at about 3500 users, that’s more than 25 TB of data storage, just for email. Plus, we get Google’s spam and virus filtering technologies (which are among the best I’ve seen). Our webmail client (which is currently the functional but none-too-sexy Squirrelmail) becomes Gmail. If we want to (and we do), we can even enable IMAP access, so our staff members can continue to use the same email program they’ve used all along. So from their perspective, very little has to change. And with the API tools, creating and managing accounts can all be tied into our existing user management tools.

If only they did email archiving.

Our first thought was to continue to archive email ourselves. After all, how hard can it be? Basically, we’re talking about saving a copy of every email message. The archive goes on its own server, separated from the rest of the network, over in a dark corner of the data center. It quietly saves all of the data, just waiting for us to need it.

But that means that all email must flow through the archive. So the workflow would look something like this:

1. A staff member composes an email and sends it to another staff member.
2. The message goes to Google, because that’s where the sender’s account is.
3. The message gets forwarded to the archive server, so it can be logged as sent mail.
4. The message is sent out by our local server.
5. The message goes to Google, because that’s where the recipient’s account is.
6. A copy of the message gets forwarded to the archive server, so it can be logged as received mail.
7. The message is delivered to the recipient’s inbox.
8. The recipient’s computer connects to Google to retrieve the message from the inbox.

So that message goes across our Internet connection five times. Plus, we have to maintain our own server to archive it. And, we have to have our own server to send out email, effectively funneling all of our mail through our own mail server. Additionally, we have to have backups of all of this. And there’s no guarantee that all incoming email would be archived. In the event of a problem with our server, the message would still get delivered to the recipient’s Google account, even though it hasn’t been archived yet.

Enter Postini. Google will do the archiving for us. This service isn’t free, but considering the benefits, it’s worth the money. The email’s not bouncing around from server to server. It’s being archived off-site. They’ll keep each message for up to ten years (we only require five). And I don’t have to have any mail servers. Sign me up.

There have been few technology “no-brainer” decisions. I remember finding out in 1996 that we could get Internet access from our cable company at 5 mbps for $5 less per month than a dialup account and dedicated phone line. That was a no-brainer. I also remember finding out in 2005 that we could transfer our home phone number to a cell phone for $5 per month instead of the $20 we were paying, and get free long distance. That was a no-brainer.

This is another one of those situations.

These days, of course, I have lots of passwords. I have different passwords for each of my seven email accounts. Then, there are all the online services, online banking and credit card sites, blogs, social networking tools, and a host of other places where I need to prove my identity by typing in a password. They’ve become so commonplace that we take them for granted. Even our elementary students have passwords, and most of them don’t have any trouble remembering them. They’re a very convenient way to prove who we are.

But the convenience comes with a price. If someone has my password, he or she can become me online. If my computer is set to remember my email password and someone else uses that computer, they can read my email and send email from me. If a student standing over my shoulder picks up my password by watching me type it in, he can then log in to my network account and access my files. If my Paypal password is easy to guess, anyone can access that account and make purchases on my behalf.

When talking about passwords, I’m reminded of the adage that passwords are like underwear:

• change them often
• don’t share them with friends
• the longer, the better
• don’t leave them out where people can see them.

Last week, we had an incident where an impostor accessed several of our staff members’ accounts. They were able to read email, delete files, and generally wreak havoc with these accounts. It’s still unclear whether the passwords were compromised by a student seeing them typed, or by someone who happened to guess well. But there was a common thread: all of the passwords involved were fairly weak. One was a four digit number. Another was the staff member’s last name. I sent an email to all staff strongly encouraging them to change their passwords immediately. I also referenced a Lifehacker article by John Pozadzides on weak passwords. It was amazing how many of our staff members’ passwords could be compromised in a matter of minutes.

Many of them took my message to heart, and have changed their passwords to something a bit more secure. If you haven’t changed yours yet, here are a few tips for improving your password:

• Don’t use your name, or the names of your spouse, children, or pets. Those are just too easy to guess.
• Stay away from words that can be found in the dictionary. It’s pretty easy to do a “dictionary attack,” where hackers try all of the words and word combinations to try to get your password.
• Mix upper- and lower-case. For the average password, changing some letters to upper-case will make the password 200 times harder to crack.
• Use all of the characters. There are 102 keys on your keyboard, but only 26 letters. It’s okay to use punctuation, numbers, and even spaces in passwords. Throwing in some of these characters will make your password another 100 times harder to guess.
• Use different passwords for different things. Our student records system uses different usernames and passwords from our network and email systems. In this case, that was very good. Whoever got access to these teachers’ accounts couldn’t access grades or attendance information.
• Protect your email. Your email password is probably the most important one. Why? What happens when you go to an online site and you click the “I forgot my password” link? They email you a link that you can click on to reset your password. If someone has your email password, they can reset your passwords for many of the online services you use. So your Facebook / Twitter / Youtube / Flickr accounts might be in jeopardy if your email password is compromised.
• Change your passwords. Certainly not every day. Probably not even every month. But once in a while, change your password. This is especially true if you school IT person just strongly suggested that you do so (hint, hint).

Despite their shortcomings, passwords are still the most convenient way of proving our identity. We just need to take a little care in making sure we get as much security out of them as we can.

More recently, I’ve been involved with two or three organizations that have felt the need to “take advantage of social networking.” We need to leverage the power of social networking tools to build a community of support around our cause. We can get people to care about the important work we’re doing by posting updates on Twitter, starting a Facebook group, uploading YouTube videos and generally having an online-everywhere presence.

I’m sure that’s what Justin Hamilton and Sandra Abrevaya had in mind when they set up the “official twitter account for Department of Education Press Secretaries.” It was also undoubtedly the goal when the US Department of Education starting using Twitter to report an hour-by-hour account of what Secretary Duncan is doing with the unfortunately named @usedgov account. But despite having more than 15,000 followers and 450 updates since setting up the account last year, the DOE has only managed to find two people worth following. Those are the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the Department of Education and Federal Ed Resources, also at the Department of Education. That’s right. They only follow themselves.

When they talk about leveraging social networks, what they really mean is that they no longer have to issue press releases to the news agencies, and hope that the newspapers and nightly news reports contain favorable stories based on those press releases. Now, they can issue the press releases directly to the public. They can control the spin. They can lead the “conversation” in a way that shows them in the best possible light.

But they forgot that, in the online world, “conversation” is not in quotes. So when Bud Hunt, a very well-respected teacher, blogger, podcaster, and member of the online educational community, used the social network that the Department of Education is embracing to ask a simple question, they didn’t know what to do. Here’s what he wanted to know:

I continue to ask of everyone I can speak with in Washington and in Congressional and government offices alike: What is the rationale for eliminating funding for the National Writing Project? It is a simple question, or it seems to be. But I can’t get anyone to answer it beyond broad strokes of “local and state redundancy” and “no significant impact” on students. Since I don’t understand how a national network can exist at the local or state level, and I have evidence to the contrary on impact on students and teachers, I’ll keep asking. It just doesn’t make sense.

In the old world, when you had a question like this, you would write a letter to the Department of Education and ask. Or, maybe you would call them. Leave a message. Someone will get back to you. If no one responds, you might get upset. Maybe you write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper. Maybe you write to your congressperson. But there’s no real recourse.

But in Bud’s case, he used the social network to ask the question. That means that the question was asked in a public forum. A lot of people pay attention to what Bud says. So when he asked, they perked up. “Hey, yeah, what about that?” They anxiously waited for the response, and saw… nothing. So they asked Bud. “Hey, Bud, what did the DOE have to say about your question? That was a good question.” So when the DOE didn’t respond, it hurt them a lot more than just not calling him back in the old days.

Other people started jumping on the bandwagon. Zac Chase posted about the NWP. So did Chris Lehmann. Karl Fisch reposted Zac’s post. Suddenly the community was alive. And everyone was looking at the DOE Press Secretary’s office, waiting for a response. But the response still hasn’t come.

I think they just didn’t get the fact that when you start a conversation, you have to listen more than you talk. If you’re really going to leverage social media tools, you have to participate in the conversation.

The best explanation of this that I’ve seen comes from Marta Kagan’s What is Social Media? She does a great job of explaining all of this, and I highly recommend viewing it (or the somewhat less appropriate original version) if you’re thinking of trying to leverage social media for your cause/organization/government agency.