Networking Advice from Ants

I love fireflies. To me, they are nature's fireworks. And I've been waiting for them to appear since June. Last night, in a beautiful symphony of patterns, they lit up the night sky. My heart was aflutter; my friends had returned.

And isn't this what our personal learning network should be like too? People who light up our lives with exciting, new information that's helpful? This week, I finally got in touch with a technology-guru family member. And you know what? I now can download my video from my camera to my computer!

Ant Advice No. 1: To build the best ant hill, network with the entire ant family.

Upon reflection of my network activities this week, I realized an important methodology: build your network simultaneously in two directions, focusing on two main areas: people and information. For information this week, I learned that twitter is being used as a tool to notify customers of product sales. Thinking this was a good application, I tried to see if any science education stores were utilizing this Web application for informing clients of promotional science products. Acorn Naturalist, one of my favorites, Steve Spangler Science and eNasco did not utilize twitter; however, Steve Spangler does have a blog. As I continued to gather ways to network, I reached out to science educators and individuals in childhood learning, and reviewed the Science Channel and How Stuff Works to see what I could learn or follow. Ultimately, the best way for me to build myself professionally is to keep all potential learning avenues open to enhance my knowledge level (i.e. science abilities) and people contacts.

Ant Advice No. 2: Because the Queen is hungry, leverage all ant workers to carry the carbon-rich leaf food.

At times though there are some avenues for networking that must be avoided because they waste my most valuable resource: time. Therefore, I not only think that guiding principles are important for utilizing technology in the classroom, but also managing the use of my time spent with technology. In other words, I'm not willing to veg out in front of the computer reviewing hundreds of emails, without responding, or perusing many tweets that add no value to my professional development. Therefore, this week, I also was working on honing my management of technology tools so that I could use technology to my benefit, setting up rules or scheduling posts. Technology on automatic is effective and efficient.

Ant Advice No. 3: Nothing or no one is let into the ant hill, except what the ants allow.