Nurturing Learning Communities Reflection 6

Here was this week's reflective prompt for my class: Do you have any global connections? How did you acquire them? If you don’t how will you try to make global connections? What do you hope that your global connections will do for you? What can you do for them?

Virtually, that is

I know that I have "global" connections, but they are indirect connections through PLNs and such.  I have one person from Germany that recently added me to one of their lists and followed me on Twitter and one from the Dominican Republic.  Is that global enough?

This did make me think about the fact that I don't think you can force connections.  This is a world of lurking more than dialoguing between each other.  At least that how I feel right now, as I tried to engage people last week in various discussions with questions posed to various hashtags.  I got no response other than people adding me to lists or favoriting my tweet.  I'm not trying to scold anyone with that, but it is a bit hard to make connections, at least meaningful ones when people don't respond.

Like I said last week, I think Google+ might be better for making connections.  At least if you are a part of the EdTechTeam's Google+ community.  I really enjoy EdTechTeam.  I went to one of their FutureReady Summits last summer, probably a year ago today actually, and right around Thanksgiving, I went to one of their GAFE Summits.  I'm going again in August as it's in my neck of the woods.  

It was during the last summit in Temecula, that I started making some of my connections.  I was able to do that through the GEG SoCal Google+ Community.  At both the summit and at CUE, they did a meetup, which is both intimidating and fun.  If you wanted to get started with finding a GEG (Google Educators Group) for your area, start here.  I highly suggest it.