After some questions on Twitter about how Andrew and I moderate the Twitter chat on Monday nights (#flipclass 8 PM EST), I thought I'd write a longer version than is possible in 140 characters.

To start with, we moderate together.  This division is an over-simplification, but I take care of the big picture and he takes care of details.  I have tried to moderate on my own, but it's just too difficult to make sure the pace is just right and people feel welcomed and engaged for the duration of the chat.  Major props to Brian Bennett, who ran the chat on his own for the first 7-8 months it existed.  There is so much going on in that hour that having two people monitoring and engaging sometimes doesn't even feel like enough.

First: choosing a topic.  There used to be a weekly poll with various topics, but lately, we have just asked for ideas from regular #flipclass chatters and then aimed for consensus on the suggestions.  Generally, people latch on to a topic that is in the twittersphere already, so it's not difficult to choose.

Next, the tech set-up.  Andrew and I start a Google Hangout 15-20 minutes before the chat and finalise the questions in a google doc.  We tweet out the topic a few times leading up to the start time.  When the chat starts, I have the hangout and the question doc open, and I then open Tweetdeck in Chrome (now that tweetchat is gone. Sad.) to follow #flipclass and interactions) and a Twitter tab to monitor the number of interactions I have.  The extra Twitter tab is because sometimes the stream moves so fast in tweetdeck that I miss interactions.  I like to have them all together at the end so I can scroll through them and respond to ones I missed during the chat.  It also makes me feel popular to know the number of interactions I get in a chat.

Our primary jobs during the chat are as follows:
Me: asking questions, watching the flow of conversation so we know when a new question is needed, or if our questions need to change to accommodate the way the conversation is going.  
Andrew: welcoming new people, making jokes, puns, and obscure (bad) music references, engaging in #hashtaggery, connecting people and continuing conversations, and retweeting good answers and the questions on nights that move really quickly.

However, we don't always stick to those roles.  I know that some people are under the impression that I'm the moderator because I'm the one asking the questions.  But that just proves how good a moderator Andrew really is - his work is largely below the surface.  He encourages conversation, brings people in and makes them feel comfortable, brings a liveliness to the conversation, and helps me know when to move to the next question.  Weeks where he's had something else going on and can't fully play this role have been weeks where the chat hasn't been as good.  

Watch his tweets during the chat carefully and you'll see how good he is at observing, engaging, and making the chat fun.  That's way more difficult than asking seven questions in an hour.

Something else that is probably not obvious: at least 70% of the time, we don't use all the questions we wrote because the conversation goes a different way than we expected.  Sometimes that's because we don't always know which questions are good and which aren't.  Just like in class.

We like there to be a bit of variety, so sometimes we end early and encourage people to find #coflip buddies, sometimes we run google hangouts, and sometimes we have google docs that people can use to engage further.  We also try and have topics that can engage everyone, from newbies to veterans.  

The two elements that are ALWAYS part of our chat are Collaboration and Connection.  We know how much better our flipped class has been since we started working together.  And we also know that part of the reason we wanted to take over the chat was to help people get connected to people with whom they can collaborate.  Hearing that people were inspired by us to start a coflip project or partnership makes all the craziness worth it.

We love moderating #flipclass, but when we have weeks like this past one, where the discussion was better than we anticipated and there was a bit of alchemy in the way everything came together by the end, it makes everything worth it.  There is skill in managing a discussion, and that's a little different online than it is in the classroom; however, I think moderating the Twitter chat has made me better as a facilitator of discussion in my classroom.  It's forced me to learn to read the room better and monitor flow more actively. 

It's easy to burn out when you work this hard on changing your classroom.  I discovered the Twitter chat soon after it started, and found that I could sustain the intense focus and energy I needed through the relationships and connection with people in that chat and in the flipclass community.  Through the Twitter chat and #flipcon12, Andrew and I met, and that has been the most important factor in keeping me inspired and motivated.  As we said in the chat - you need to reflect, and a reflective practice can easily lead to inspiration.  And collaboration weaves those two things - reflection and inspiration - into the fabric of everything we do.

If you haven't joined us on Monday nights, please do!  Follow me (@guster4lovers) and Andrew (@thomasson_engl) and then watch the #flipclass hashtag on Monday at 8 PM EST.  We do the Q1/A1 format, so when you see Q that means question and the number is the order in which the questions are asked.  You should try to respond with A (for answer) and the correct number as soon as possible after it's asked, though sometimes it happens that people fall behind so they answer later.  If you lurk but don't engage, you're missing out!  Jump in - this is just about the nicest, most welcoming community on Twitter and people will go out of their way to help you in whatever way you need.

If you have other questions about how we run the chat, or how the chat works, leave them in comments!

Starting with the texts and major themes, we map out what we want students to be thinking about and learning in each unit.  We have something like this for all nine courses we taught this year.  

This is the part of the process where I excel.  I love coming up with the overall theme and making the units into a coherent whole...and I love the moment near the end of the course where students realise that everything we did fits perfectly into the frame we constructed for it.  I've had that happen a few times on my own, but this year, it seemed like every class got there and the students recognised it more completely.  The difference is that now, I have someone else to help me figure out how to actually make it work.  I have probably several dozen documents created in the first eight years I taught that try and fail to do this, for a variety of reasons.


Now that I've experienced success, I see that the main reason they failed was for lack of Andrew Thomasson.

It takes us a few days of playing around with these course maps to be satisfied with them.  However, what we've discovered is that we do not want to get into any more detail than what is listed on the document above.  

A year ago, we started our YouTube Channel to host our research paper videos.  As we were preparing for our FlipCon12 presentation, we went back and watched those videos for the first time.

Both of us were shocked by how bad they were.  We actually had to stop watching because it made us cringe.

We recognise how revolutionary it was at the time for both of us to be in the same video and to show the process of writing an essay together, live on screen.  But there were lots of reasons why our early videos sucked so much:

1. We didn't know what we were doing
   
2. I didn't know what I was doing with editing
   
3. Neither of us had made enough videos or used them in class to understand what made for a good video
   
4. We were enjoying the process so much that we talked.  Way.  Too.  Much.
   

We didn't end up having a huge need for the video series this year - both of us ended up teaching something different than we had been assigned at the end of the school year, So they kind of sat there on our channel for the last year, and we mostly forgot the existed.

Then when we watched them again, I had an idea.  Now that I know what I'm doing with the editing side, and have some time to kill (yay summer!)I should go back and edit them down from 10-15 minutes to 5-6 minute videos.  So that's been the project that consumes most of my time these days, when I'm not working on our book chapters (PREORDER OUR BOOK HERE!).

I'd love to have some feedback on the updated videos.  I've added the updated video next to the original, just for the sake of comparison.

The old videos are on the left, and the new ones are on the right.  I made the old ones smaller because it made me happy and made the page look better.  The first video is about finding sources.  I've put the videos below the fold because I didn't want them to make the page load slowly for as long as they're on the front page of the blog.  Apologies for the inconvenience.  Please watch them anyway!

This is part three of a series on my collaborative partnership with Andrew Thomasson. 

It seems like every time I write about the mechanics of our collaborative partnership here on the blog, Andrew and I end up fighting.  Not just disagreement fights, where one of us wants to use Batman cartoons, and the other wants to go super arty hipster and use Batman comics...but only in an ironic way.  

No, these are Real Fights.  I guess when we talk about how awesome it is to work together, all that awesome has to be balanced out by some not-awesome.  This fight was about time.  We have about a dozen projects in the works, and we've had trouble finding the time to do any of it.  Even finding time just to be Friends First was tough the past two weeks.  Coming back from FlipCon, where we were used to having as much time together as we wanted, made readjusting to life lived through technology difficult.  

Finding time is probably our biggest problem, either in the school year or the summer, although our summer schedules conflict far more than in the school year.  Without bells to regulate where we are and at what time in a reliable manner, we have to prioritise differently when we do get time together.  There are always more ideas than we have time for.  And there are always more projects than we could finish in years of work.

But you know what?  That's actually a pretty awesome problem.  

We could be sitting there, bored with each other, running on the fumes of what we've already done or trying to reinvent our ideas just a little to make people think they were different.  But we have SO MANY NEW IDEAS that we can't possibly use them all.  Maybe that's why we like blogging and sharing on Twitter.  If we didn't share some of the ideas we have, then no one would ever use them.  

So even when we've seen our ideas on other people's blogs, or shared on Twitter, or in presentations or videos, there's something pretty cool about that.  Sure, we'd like attribution if the idea was taken from us, but we love that our ideas have a life beyond us.  

It's almost like creating more time for our work.  

We may not produce work forever, and it's even possible that we might not stay in a collaborative partnership forever.  But there have been so many cool things we've done, and even more cool things we've seen other people do with help from us or our ideas, that we think our work will last longer than we will.

And none of the good ideas we've had in the last year could have existed outside of our collaborative partnership.  It's the relationship that generates the ideas. 

 Just like in our classroom, it's the relationship that really matters.

Oh yeah, and we're not fighting any more.  When we argue, it tends to burn out quickly and resolve completely within a few hours (or even minutes), assuming we can find time to talk about it.  Conflict is just a part of life, and one of the things I'm proud of in our partnership - that we've learned ways to fight humanely, resolve issues completely, and not allow resentment to build.  As much as it sucks to fight, we've found that even the fighting is worth it.  It helps when you know that no matter what the fight is about, there's no escape hatch.  Neither of us is going to play the, "Forget it. This partnership and friendship is too much work and drama.  I'm out" card.  There's security in that knowledge.

Again, we are really blessed to be working together, even if there are occasional arguments and not nearly enough time for all the awesome we have planned.

There will always be too much awesome to be contained in our CoLab Partnership. 

#CoLabProblems