Teachers Are Like Silicon Valley CEOs...

Read Write Web is one of the best sites available for interesting articles that may or may not apply to education but are interesting none the less. This was what attracted me to this article titled, "The Pay-It-Forward Culture: Silicon Valley's Practical Generosity". Written by Steve Blank the article describes the culture present in Silicon Valley from the 1960's through today which helps entrepreneurs and start-ups by providing information and lessons that can only be learned through years of experience. This immediately reminded me of the current culture among teachers.

Just like the CEOs described in the article, teaching is becoming a pay-it-forward culture. However we are actually taking the idea to another level. While the Silicon Valley culture is mostly limited to Silicon Valley, teachers have leveraged social media in order to more easily share the things that help one another succeed. Those that participate are able to leverage the collective intelligence of thousands of other educators. Reaching out to other educators who collectively have seen much more within the world of education than your local network could ever hope to experience. 

We as educators should take it as a point of pride that we have been able to so easily migrate from our own local PLN's to the global teacher network that has become quite powerful on social networking sites sch as Twitter. In the past 30 days "Education" peaked at .11% of Twitter traffic (for comparison the term "Emmys" peaked at 2.29% this year). 

While that doesn't seem like alot it must be understood that Twitter recently announced 100 million "active users" (users that post at least once a month). That means nearly 110,000 Twitter users were posting something relating to the topic of education.

Even assuming 25% of those posts were actually irrelevant to educators that leaves 80,000+ posts relevant to education. That means that if an educator were to log onto Twitter on a given day they could potentially have access to thousands of educators actively sharing their thoughts and ideas, most of which can be highly relevant to that person. Scott McLeod had a great post on 20 great things an educator would have found if they were on Twitter the day before.

As educators we must be on top of the latest trends and changes within our society. As cliche as it may sounds we are literally teaching the future. We must know what is coming to the best of our ability, and be willing to share that information as openly as possible. Silicon Valley CEOs may be creating the future, but we are creating the Silicon Valley CEOs. So get out there and network, and remember to pay-it-forward.