Human Bandwidth Manager

Over the weekend I was excited to find an email from Netflix announcing that Season 4 of Portlandia was now available for streaming. I never have time to actually watch television shows when they are on in real time and most often resort to binge watching them during long weekends and holidays. Portlandia is a nerdy sketch comedy series on IFC that features one of my favorites, Carrie Brownstein. One of the best sketches from the first few episodes was called Human Bandwidth Manager. In it, Carrie went to her local HBM to disconnect from all forms of social media. The HBM warned her that this was a grave mistake and it went on to show her losing her best friend when she was no longer on Facebook and he was unable to google her. This was a timely episode as we had just completed a month long Twitter challenge in our district organized and led by my blogging colleague, Holly, so I had been thinking a lot about how connected I am, how many different forms of social networking I've signed up for and how this affects my life. I have accounts set up for instagram, tumblr, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and probably others that I don't even remember. I love using Pinterest to curate ideas for school and home, but hate that popping on it for a few minutes can often lead to a lost hour of my life...and for what, really? I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook and really stay connected there to communicate with my book club group. 

And then there's Twitter...Twitter is where my disdain or frustration or whatever other feelings I have about social media ends. I LOVE Twitter! I love that every time I click on the Tweetdeck icon on my laptop I will find seven great ideas to use in the classroom, three interesting articles to read, something that fires me up (usually about education reform) and a sweet baby animal picture (I follow those so that I can calm down after reading articles on education reform). I love that I can meet someone in another district in our state, she can give me the Twitter handle for a library related person she works with, I reach out on Twitter, and two weeks later I'm sitting in an awesome tamale restaurant in downtown Indy networking with other teacher librarians and learning how they are making the move to a different kind of library experience for their students...and getting advanced Destiny training before and after lunch. For those who say they don't have time or that Twitter is just people sharing useless tidbits about their day or random information, I say look again. Find a teacher whose tweets you like and follow who she follows. Take a look at an archived twitter chat for #1stchat or #edtechchat or whatever your interest and follow the people who participate. I promise you it will make you better at what you do.  So, thanks, Holly for helping our teachers in our district learn the power of Twitter and for those who've had their Human Bandwidth Manager check them out of social media, I highly recommend you check back in to Twitter.