Twitter is kind of your local crowded, bustling, 24-hour diner where you walk late at night in and there’s all these random conversations going on. Some people are gossiping, some people are yelling at each other, some people are pontificating, while others are only there to get noticed. The great part is that in twitter, you can sit down at any table you want and engage in any conversation you want. Moreover, you can engage in the conversation as much or as little as you want. If you want to jump right in and start discussing things in full, go ahead. If you’d rather sit back and eavesdrop, you can do that too. Retweeting is the twitter equivalent of high-fiving.

Last night, I sat down at the Project Based Learning chat (#PBLchat) table, put up my feet, and had conversations with maybe 60 of my peers and like-minded educators. To keep things from being too unruly, we have a weekly topic, and for the first weekly #PBLchat our topic was on project ideation, or, “Where do you find project ideas?” And starting at 9pm EST (actually, a few eager beavers jumped the gun a bit), the conversation was fast and furious. Over the next hour there were over 1100 tweets with the hashtag #PBLchat. The ideas were flowing so fast I could hardly keep up. I was constantly about 2-3 minutes behind, asking questions, retweeting great ideas, and tossing out a few ideas of my own.

Many, possibly most, of the participants were New Tech teachers, but many others were teachers that are interested in PBL. Several participants are educators that have no access to PBL professional development on their campus, so they have to look elsewhere for ideas and reflection. It’s easy for us in the New Tech Network to either become insular or stagnant, to think that we have all the answers. But the truth is, there are countless great teachers throughout the world, many of which use PBL, and many of them hang out on twitter. In some cases, it’s the best teachers’ lounge they have.

There was a nice mix of both on-the-ground, nuts-and-bolts, practical ideas for project inspiration (Kiva microloans, the Onion, Mike’s Social Studies PBL curriculum map, TED talks, case study Science) as well as big picture stuff (community partnerships, team teaching, life as PBL) and even some super meta-cognition stuff. I even said some dumb stuff.

I’m looking forward to future #PBLchat topics. As a first crack at #PBLchat, the topic was perfect, but I’m excited for more, meatier topics that will spur deeper reflection (and even arguments) about the practice of PBL.

Within minutes of #PBLchat officially wrapping up, we had our first blog post reflection from Adam Babcock of Danville New Tech: “After tonight, I know that I want to put students more in charge of their projects.” I’d say the notion of student-generated, student-centered project generation was the most “high-fived” concept from last night’s chat. It’s nice that teacher within and outside of the New Tech Network have a place to talk about how to make that happen.