I have two great loves in my life: my family and my career. I am passionate about both of them, but lately it seems like work has overshadowed my family. If I am being honest I would have to say that for the better part of the last year my family has taken a backseat to my career. I teach and develop online classes. Most of this is done at home on my own time due to the constant interruptions at school which occur even during my prep time.

I also have developed an amazing PLN that I love interacting with, but each minute I spend with them is a minute that I could (and should) be spending with my family. My family does not quite fully comprehend that I learn so much on Twitter. The other thing that they do not understand is that some of the friendships I have made on Twitter are very meaningful.

My husband made the awful mistake of giving in to my request and bought me a BlackBerry for Valentine’s Day this last year. I am now connected to all of my email accounts, Google chat, and Twitter around the clock. While I think this is great my family is not as thrilled. You see, I have not yet mastered the art of unplugging and taking a tech break. I enjoy the ability to connect to my network at any time from any place. My family is not impressed that I make myself so easily accessible to the world.

Last week I walked away for a few hours. I actually powered down my laptop and cell phone and I snuggled up with my husband in our favorite over-sized to watch a movie. When I had trouble remember the last time we did that I realized that I have been plugged in for way too long! It finally occurred to me that I need to find some balance. While I love working and I am not in danger of burning out; I am missing out on some very important things in my life. I am just not sure how an online teacher spend less time online, but I will figure it out.

Twitter, blogs and emails can wait, but my family can’t. I still have a lot of work to do online this summer, but I am going to turn off Twitter and I am going to purposefully neglect my reader. While I am online I need to focus on the task at hand. I need to learn to become more efficient when I work. I get tend to get sidetracked very easily! I am not quite sure how I will do this, but I need to find a balance.

I know other people have faced the same issues. How have you managed to strike a balance between work and family time? What are some of the suggestions you have for finding an adequate amount of time for each?

Being the parent of a child with autism makes you a little more aware of eye contact in conversation. I’m noticing some interesting patterns at NECC that say a lot about how I socialize. First, there are times when it has become painful for me to make and maintain eye contact. That has to be a sign that I’m overwhelmed by the sheer number of folks I’m seeing and meeting. While this year’s conference has a smaller turnout, 18,000, that’s still a lot of people to plop down in one place.

Sometimes when I’m talking to folks, I find my eyes wandering to scan the crowd and I’ve seen others do this as well. We are either trying to find someone we were waiting for in the sea of people, or checking for faces we know in person already. Sometimes we are checking for someone we have only known online up to this point and have been dying to meet IRL. This is that one golden chance to meet others we haven’t seen face to face and we don’t want to miss that opportunity.

Those of us who have already been to conferences, even local ones, have a circle of people we know and hang out with. They are our base camp in this sea of humanity. It is easy to stay in a tunnel here. If you are completely unfamiliar with teaching conventions, and never go online for PD and professional social networking (and there still are folks like that even at a place like NECC), you will stay in your bubble of local district buddies, an “accidental” tourist at the convention.

If you are too wrapped up in your “network” you already have, you will miss conversations with the person in front of you, or next to you as you go down your must meet check list. You will be in your own bubble that includes only folks you KNOW are like minded, but may miss a conversation you should have had with the person in your district back home, or in a session at NECC who is from the other side of the country.

My favorite meetings are the ones that are impossible to plan, but easy to undermine. You miss them when you only talk to the folks you already know. Those are the connections based on nothing more than propinquity. You sit next to someone at a session, and one of you strikes up a conversation. You are invited to tag along to a dinner, and are seated by someone from the other end of the country that you’ve never met before. Someone strikes up a conversation as you wait for a shuttle bus. You could learn a lot, or, you could miss that metaphorical bus, as you avoid eye contact and conversation.

Photo credit: My eye on Flickr

1. Share your interests.
2. Use Twitter to share links.

With so many outstanding ideas and links being shared daily, it is important to consider how these resources can be efficiently saved for future use.

To date, my primary ways of saving Twitter resources shared by others for later reference have been:

1. “Favoriting” the tweet by clicking the empty star by the tweet either on the website or in my favorite iPhone Twitter application, Twitterfon.
2. Retweeting the tweet so I can both share it with others and find it later in my own Twitter stream/feed.
3. Clicking the shared link and then using my social bookmarks (Diigo which cross-posts to Delicious) to save and tag the website for later use.

This evening I read that the Evernote web service has been updated to permit Twitter users to dynamically save Tweets to Evernote. After you follow EverNote’s MyEn account on Twitter and click the link EverNote sends as a direct twitter message, you can link up your EverNote and Twitter account by logging into the EverNote website. With that setup complete, simply include “@myen” in a Tweet to save it to EverNote. This is a new and innovative way to archive good ideas as well as links from Twitter friends.

How are you saving and sharing “good finds” from Twitter?

I am on a mission to raise awareness about the benefits of using tools such as Twitter to establish PLN’s. I recently began an experiment to see if Twitter could be used by educators to collaborate across time and space to reach a common goal. I decided to start a project called Send a Newbie to NECC. I picked one person from my PLN whom had never attended NECC, but whom I believed would benefit immensely from the experience. I wrote a blog post asking people from my PLN to show their support for Twitter and their PLN by donating to a fund to help send Richard Byrne (@rmbyrne on Twitter) to the National Educational Computing Conference .

I selected Richard because he has been such an integral part of my PLN. He takes the time to share valuable educational resources on a daily basis – often several times a day – ultimately saving busy educators valuable time. Richard’s blog recently won the Edublog’s Top Resource Sharing Blog for 2008. With 1600 followers on Twitter and 5000 people subscribing to his blog I think it is safe to say that he is an important part of many PLN’s.

The intent behind this project is to raise awareness about the positive side of social networking. Twitter, like other social networks, is not the problem – it is how people use it. It is difficult for some educators to see the benefits of networking with a group of strangers. Educators need to see examples of how Twitter can be of use to them before they will embrace it. Many fear networking because sites like MySpace and Facebook have received so much bad press recently. I am trying to make a difference by rallying my PLN to support this worthwhile cause. The success of this project rests in the hands of the people in my learning network. I am not only relying on them for monetary donations, but I also need them to help promote this project and gain more support from the people in their network. I hope you will consider participating in this unique project.