I’m currently at PCMI in Utah (that’s the Park City Math Institute) for three weeks. There are about 50 middle and high school math teachers, all geeking out about teaching. Tomorrow I’m supposed to give a 5 minute talk about blogs and twitter. Little do they know it will be 7.5 minutes. Mwa hahaha. Talking about this stuff is not a big deal, and given a microphone and an internet enabled laptop, I could probably talk for a good hour. But to whittle away at my thoughts until I hit some core ideas that I can collapse into 5 minutes — that sounded like a fun challenge.

I decided to create a pecha kucha (20 powerpoint slides, 20 seconds per slide; see my favorite one here). Making one was new to me. And dang, it was hard. I failed. It turns out I didn’t get to 20 slides, and most have a little over 20 seconds of talking. So below you can watch the presentation that resulted out of the failed pecha kucha. Or, alternatively, the new style of presenting I like to call pechaka kuchaka.

Before diving right in and watching, I need you to watch one 18 second video. We couldn’t play it in the session for technological reasons.  So watch it. More enticement: there’s a BABY in it. The baby may or may not fly using magic.

Now for the presentation. Sorry about my voice. You’re not the only one who hates it.

Note this isn’t a post about how to blog or twitter. Or how to separate the wheat from the chaff when reading tweets and blog posts. Or how to not get overwhelmed with all the info out there in the blogotwitterversphere. This are just some of my current thoughts on some reasons why I do it.

I just want to share again Dan’s contribution to my presentation one last time, since it captures so much.

For those of you who are interested in these ideas and want to learn more about blogs and twitter, I’ve compiled a few links for you to explore more:

(0) My twitter page

(1) How to start your own blog (my thoughts, Kate’s thoughts, Elissa’s thoughts, Riley’s thoughts)

(2) My “Why Twitter” post.

(3) I made special note of The Moment when I started thinking of my tweeps (twitter buddies) as friends. Even though I don’t know them IRL [in real life].

(4) I save my favorite bits of twitter conversation, and aperiodically post them. I save more of the witty banter than the math substance stuff (which tends to get codified on peoples’s blogs). But you can see that we honestly do like each other a lot. Even though, again, I don’t know them IRL. To see these conversations, just look at the “FAVORITE TWEETS” page at the top of this blog. Or click here. If you’re looking to find some good peeps to follow, read these and pick the funniest ones. They’ll keep you going for days.

(5) If you want to see the blogs I read, just look on the right, at my blogroll. Some of them are defunct now, but I can’t quite delete them yet. The two most famous blogs are by far are Dan Meyer’s dy/dan and Kate Nowak’s f(t). (Apparently having mathematical notation in the title of your blog makes you an instant winner.) Our very own PCMIer Jesse Johnson has a blog (Math Be Brave) and Cal Armstrong does too (Things I Do).

(6) You can see all the blog posts that I find amazing here. It updates as I find more and more awesomeness.

(7) Some lists that people have made of math teachers on twitter are here and here.