Learning Twitter with Hawaiian Values

A short preface

You may recall that I declared 2008 our year for the Brex Initiative.

Our online expressions of the MWA Ho‘ohana Community have always been centered on ‘Ike loa, the Hawaiian value of learning since our beginnings in 2004. Two years later, Joyful Jubilant Learning (JJL) was born as a community “home base” for explorations in learning that would embrace more than Managing with Aloha (and thus, more than we might be able to fit in here, on MWAC).

We have monthly learning themes on JJL just as we do on this site for our value study. Here on MWAC I have chosen one biggie for learning which we will revisit all year long: Brex, short for our Brave Experiments with Digital Learning. That last link will take you to the index of what we have done so far.

This is the first of a two-part posting, an update to my newest Brex project: Twitter.

Back in February, I wrote,

I've just joined a new social network on Ning in the past week. Have been on LinkedIn for a while now, have a Tumblr lifestream, but I'm not a Twitterer and have said no to Facebook on purpose (Yeah, you can say no. What's hard is to stop second-guessing yourself about it.)

...from our Brex Kick-off: Who is the Digital Learning Coach in your company?

Well, that was then, and I am a Twitterer now! Love it, and you can follow me there if you are too :)
If you aren’t on Twitter yet, perhaps you’ll think about it?

Why should you? For Brex, and your own digital learning!

Today: Learning Twitter with Hawaiian Values

Tomorrow: Getting Started in the Value-Based Way with 5 Tips
Also: Bonus Learning Links

Tweet Surprises

As of this writing, I’ve been on Twitter for eight weeks and two days. For you seasoned tweeters who may be reading and can relate to these numbers, I’m following 149, being followed by 193 (I am behind in my follow-backs), and have tweeted just over 1460 updates because my learning curve has been a highly conversational one. Talking story is right up my alley!

And that was but the first of the surprises in store for me: Twitter is not just about their own prompting of  “What are you doing?” I have found it is also about “What has your attention right now?” and “What do you think about it?” It has been fascinating.

Thus far, and I still consider myself somewhat of a newbie there compared to many, my introduction to Twitter has proved to be jam-packed with digital learning on 21st century social communications... very Brexy!

According to my strengths profile done via the Gallup Organization, being a Learner is one of my signature strengths. Essentially that means that I am drawn to the process of learning, even more than the subject matter itself.

SIDEBAR: Gallup really nails me on this as one of my strengths... I share it here in case it sounds familiar to the Learner in you!

"Whatever the subject, you will always be drawn to the process of learning. The process, more than the content or the result, is especially exciting for you. You are energized by the steady and deliberate journey from ignorance to competence. The thrill of the first few facts, the early efforts to recite or practice what you have learned, the growing confidence of a skill mastered - this is the process that excites you."

From JJL: I have posted a simple highlighter exercise on this there (with a longer version).

The downside to being a Learner defined in this way? I can eagerly jump down rabbit holes with complete abandon. Knowing this about myself, I’ve used the Key Concept of value alignment in MWA to give myself some parameters. Today I will share the ones I have come to develop for my learning Twitter.

Learning Twitter with Hawaiian Values

I’d venture that those who now call themselves Twitter Folk would agree with me on something: Twitter turned out to be much more than we had originally thought it would be. I vastly underestimated the app’s potential for communicating with others, and building online networks at an exceptionally rapid clip compared to blogging.

Twitter seems simple, and using it is a snap. But there are decisions to be made along the way, all which can be summed up in a favored phrase of a coaching client I have: She will always ask, “For the sake of what?” meaning, What do you intend to get out of it?

Decision-making isn’t always clear-cut, but for me it is straight-forward as a process: Decision-making is about keeping in alignment with your values, and if you can narrow them down to some essential ones it makes things a bit easier and much more consistent. So after my two months of rafting down the Twitter stream, these are the values I have chosen to keep me afloat!

1. Aloha and Following: The assumption of good in all people.

One of the first decisions you have on Twitter, is Who do I follow?

Many will answer this based on assumptions they make about others: “They are already following so many other people, how can they possibly follow me too?” Well, because of time differences and other things, I have learned that the answer is, “You’ll be surprised, they just can (for their sake of what), and so can you (for your sake of what).”

For me, the practical considerations of can or can’t have become largely irrelevant; it’s a matter of assuming the best and good in all people, and letting them demonstrate they can live up to all the great expectations I may have. This is in keeping with my personal value of Aloha: I believe all people start at good and can return to good; I just do. I’m not a person who believes there is “bad seed.” Glitches are behavior issues that can be dealt with; not always easy, but always possible.

Here is an example of Twitter-learning that helps with understanding how making an assumption about what others are capable of is often short-sighted:

This may be more quickly obvious to others, but it took nearly two months of tweeting (what the updates you post on Twitter are called) for me to truly understand that there is an important distinction to Twitter as compared to the blog-eye’s view I have been so accustomed to:

• On a blog, everyone reading the current page at the same moment in time will see the same thing you do.
• On Twitter, there isn’t even one chance in a million that the “recent” view you are looking at is the same as someone else’s because of all the follow choices made individually (unless you duplicate each other deliberately).

What does this mean? There is very little you can assume about the way that conversations happen there, other than about your own contributions. Sometimes your contributions will be half of the whole, sometimes a third, perhaps even a fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh! Having very little you can assume, means that your best bet is to optimistically assume the best of people, and that they are trying to keep up with the Twitter stream as best they can. After all, they also have a life they tweet in between episodes of, just as you do.

Generally speaking, I follow people I want to converse with, hoping they are willing to converse with me, and I follow back all who I sense are real people extending their follow invitation to me, and not web-bots or solely auto-generated Twitter feeds. I will not follow back immediately and automatically though; more on that with the next value, Kākou, the Hawaiian value of togetherness and inclusiveness.

2. Kākou and ‘We conversation’: My “for the sake of what.”

When I have discovered I have a new follower, the first thing I will look for is their real name on an About Page their bio takes me to, and if they have a blog I will spend some time reading it. If not, I hope they have shared more on their Twitter bio, for that and their page of recent tweets is all I have to go on. I strive to be a positive and civil person, and expect that others will be too. The more it seems we share interests and values, the higher a person will rise to the top of my list to follow back and strike up a conversation with.

I’m not judging people, I’m trying to get to know them so our conversation will zoom once we’ve started it. In a nutshell, Twitter has helped me broaden the conversations I want to have online with my global Rosa-village (please excuse the self-centeredness of that in the interest of brevity). It has made those conversations quicker, easier, and in relatively real time. With Twitter, starting new ones is a joy in the lightness of their context, and in the immediacy of the attention given. It has also been wonderful to witness the way people are so willing to share their networks (both people and places) and be connectors. It makes me want to reciprocate, and I do.

I have yet to do this, but I imagine that I will need to purge my follows to what is manageable for me at some point, for I am not a good lurker; I seek to engage. Should a purging time ever come, that decision will be a Kākou “together we are better and stronger” and “language of we” decision for me on if our collaboration is happening or not. When I have tried to reach out a few times to certain individuals and have found it futile, I will un-follow; they seem to have lost interest in the connection they first may have thought they wanted (or consider the conversation over), and that’s okay. They are having their “we conversation” elsewhere, and can easily find me again should they want to try another time.

One last note on follows: Although I have my settings set up for Twitter to send me a notification of all new followers, I find it doesn’t always happen. If you decide to follow me, please do send me a back-up tweet saying hello to be sure I know! If you don’t I may also think you want to lurk silently for a while, and I will defer to respecting that.

3. Lōkahi for Global Harmony: We are more alike than different, and it is good to need each other.

All of you are so smart: I am NOT the earliest adopter! Twitter has turned out to be a GREAT place to reconnect with blog readers I may have lost track of once they decided to take the plunge and write their own blogs and build their own communities. On the one hand I have been so happy for them, and thrilled to see their growth, on the other, I miss them, and that they stopped having conversations with us on mine. Blogging is a big commitment and an awful lot of work; to do it well takes a lot of focus and invested time. It isn’t as easy as saying that we now have two places to visit each other.

Then there are those who never started blogging, but did get into some other pursuits. To reconnect with some of these people again in such a quick way has been my Christmas present under the Twitter tree. It’s as if we never lost a beat during all this time in between our growth spurts apart. However I am not infringing upon their privacy either; when you get a tweet, it means, “This is a good time for me to engage. How about you?”

Lōkahi is the value of unity and harmony; it is a value of teamwork, and teams ebb and flow as their projects do. It is quite wonderful to know that every possible team player is quickly within that 140-character tweet. My tweets become about getting to know people so that I can help them celebrate their strengths, and so we can optimize them together when mutually beneficial opportunities arise to do so.

4. ‘Ike loa and Learning: Differences are good too, especially those which help us learn.

I can most value our differences when they take us to ‘Ike loa, the Hawaiian value of learning. As I said in the beginning of this article, the Ho‘ohana Community was founded within the pursuit of new learning, and Twitter is adding to this in the most magnificent way because I believe we learn best through other people. You may recall that belief as what my Daily Five Minutes® is all about.

People represent such incredible richness in knowledge. Take a look at this site, for a quick overview of just how much reach Twitter now can offer you: The Twitter Pack Project Wiki is absolutely rife with recommendations (hat tip to a tweet from Jonathan Fields).

The Twitter connections I am learning most about now have to do with my new Flickr account, and a photography initiative by Amy Palko called The Fire of Images. It is highly likely that it will be the subject of yet another Brex update to come.

Language and localized tones and colloquialisms have also been a fascination for me on Twitter; conversation there gets richer and richer with each new phrase you learn. There is an amazing amount of personality and humor that can be released in those 140-character missives!

5. Ka lā hiki ola: Embracing the creativity of a new day in the way we communicate and engage.

Ka lā hiki ola translates to “the dawning of a new day” and I think of it as the value of hope and promise. Web apps are a kind of “new day” in the way we reach out and touch each other. Our creativity and open-minded embrace of that prospect truly represents hope and promise for me; I have a very optimistic and positive expectancy about it.

I have not gotten this far with Twitter yet, but I suspect that it can be part of a growing of how I look at Sense of Place, which frequent readers know to be a sacred concept for me, and not just within Hawai‘i. With Twitter, the phrase may evolve to A Sense of Place in Time.

“What are you doing?” has a right now presence to it, “and where are you?” promises even more contextual richness. Best of all is when you add, “and what are you thinking about?” to the first two. Thinking is something you join into as it happens there, versus how you respond to it after the fact on a well-edited blog post. Now there is a lot of merit in blog editing versus impulsiveness, and thus the combination of the two for someone you follow, gives you so much more complete a picture of who they are, all within the respectful acknowledgment of what they are in fact willing to share.

So those are my value parameters: Aloha, Kākou, Lōkahi, ‘Ike loa and Ka lā hiki ola;

1. Aloha and Following: The assumption of good in all people.
2. Kākou and ‘We conversation’: My “for the sake of what.”
3. Lōkahi for Global Harmony: We are more alike than different, and it is good to need each other.
4. ‘Ike loa and Learning: Differences are good too, especially those which help us learn.
5. Ka lā hiki ola: Embracing the creativity of a new day in the way we communicate and engage.

Yes, Twitter is addicting, and yes, twittering can hungrily consume your time in large, fast-fleeting chunks. However if the addiction is about connecting with people and learning all I possibly can from them no matter who they are and where they may be in our diverse world, I’m all for it.

Tomorrow, I will share what I believe to be a great way to get started with Twitter that is in keeping with this value-based approach, narrowing down to the simplicity of just 5 Tips. I will also share a list of links to some of the better articles I have found, for those of you who might want to read more. After all, let’s not forget that ‘Brave’ part to Brex, nor the experimentation!

Meanwhile, let’s talk story a bit; are you on Twitter? If not, what are your reservations? If you are, what value or values are you aware of bringing to your “for the sake of what?” What are your Twitter intentions?

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Mahalo, thank you for reading today.

If you would like to read more about Aloha, I would recommend Aloha in A Love Affair with Writing. Here is something on Sense of Place on the Internet: A Brand New Community Ecosystem.

Take a look at the column to the far right for my other value indexes, and for Key Concept Indexes and Categories.

Comments

[Steve Sherlock]

Well done Rosa, I look forward to tomorrow's follow up.

Twitter is good to use. As we have discussed previously, I can only use it outside of work so my time is limited. The tools available to play catch up with the conversations are available but the time involved is the key. I'm going to need to cut back further if Twitter finds a definite place.

[Joanna Young]

Great reflections Rosa. I love the way you are using Twitter to talk story!

Joanna

[Rosa Say]

Mahalo nui Steve and Joanna! You both were people I watched on Twitter in my earliest days so I could learn more about what I was doing there, and it's been great having yet another way we can engage.

Steve, there definitely has been somewhat of a trade-off with the frequency of other tools I use; Stumble Upon is one example I'd like to return to more. Twitter has also taken from the time I devote to my feed-reading, but I honestly think I'm overdue for a value-based purge there as well. I suppose you could call it all ROA: what is the return we decide we need our attentions?