It seems like a lot of the concern regarding the NextGenTeachers idea is about a misconception that we are forming an exclusive group. Allow me to articulate our thinking in more appropriate vocabulary. I am heavily echoing Stephen Downes here, you can watch a video of his thoughts on this matter on Google Video.

We are forming a network with the goal of connecting people in ways that will maximize openness and as a result we will have deeper conversations and result in new perspectives. In a sense, we are looking at a new network topography.

This change in topography is in essence a new configuration of the network that will yield insights that were not possible by using the edublogosphere as it exists today. This is predicated on the idea that collaboration yields different data than would result in individual “work”.

How does this manifest?

I think the first quality we must posess is diversity. Downes speaks to a salad bowl, and if you consider the international nature of our group, diversity is a given.

We are also autonomous, insofar as we have articulated and thought-out values and guiding principles. They are certainly organic and subject to change, and that is in fact one of our ideals.

We are an open group. While we speak to our being young, our goal is to bring educators together to form a personal learning network of all ages. Cathy, a library media specialist has offered to mentor. Can you imagine if our outreach to universities brought an emerging LMS and Cathy together? Not to mention bringing this hypothetical graduate into the conversation as a participative voice? That is the goal. Openness, especially as it relates to context and identity. Part of our identity has to be our openness.

We are connected. We are users of aggregators, Skype, audiocasting, webcasting, and various other forms of communication. The fact that we are so widespread internationally and we have communicated so much already speaks to our commitment to communication.

We are distributed. This can be demonstrated based on our different passions. We belive that out of a sense of the connective, knowledge emerges.

If you watch Stephen’s video, as linked above, you will see that I took this line by line. I did so because this has been a guiding principle for us all along. Our goal was never the traditional “stars and gurus” approach. Truth is, I claim to know very little. I only claim to be on this journey, too. I did articulate a mission statement, or a vision, but only because I was trying to spell it out for the reader, not because I ask folks involved in this to ascribe to it.

I will follow up with more thoughts, and I am curious to see if this helps clear things up a bit.

As always, I only ask that in all of this, you hear my heart.

UPDATE: Here is the graphic I have been using as reference. Used by permission of Mr. Downes, although his work is released under Creative Commons, so permission was requested because it is a screenshot of a video presentation.