I was asked this week if I thought blogging had been replaced in relevance by Twitter. I don’t. Here are few examples of why I think blogs under-pin much of what flicks too and fro in micro-conversation — especially the disputants that want education to change.
At some point, someone somewhere decided that being good at using computers was important. Office automation changed the way we organised the office. A secretarial pool provided services for those not important enough to have an exclusive. The mechanical and electonic typewriter gave way to the personal computer.
Within a few years these machines were connected to each other (as long as the token ring held) saving us the bother of even walking from desk to desk. Only the very very important retained a real secretary. Most of us now have a semi-autonomous bot called email. Which often burys us in busy-work. How many emails do we all receive with half-thought out ideas, incomplete documents or questions that seemingly have already been answered. At least the typing pool meant THINKING before sending.
The internet, or rather email — wiped out an entire human office network. I wonder how the bored despondency on Revolutionary Road would have been changed if April Wheeler was on Facebook, or her husband was a tele-commuter [insert new project idea].
The physical shared reality of work-home-life today has been forever changed by connected communication. Our peers and friends are milliseconds away and some of them are warlocks – and critical to the development of schools and students.
Meg Hourihan in 2002, blogged about ‘what we are doing when we blog’. The post includes some foundational information – outlining the framework and mechanisms that differentiates an essay or journal from a blog.
She explains
“we’ve embraced a medium free of the physical limitations of pages, intrusions of editors, and delays of tedious publishing systems”.
Rebecca Blood’s ‘hammer and nail’ post from 2004 is an excellent essay on blog development and culture. She talks about Robert Wisdom putting the term weblog into our vocabulary, going on to talk about distinct differences between a blog, ezine and journal. I love the way she talks about blogs “amplified one another’s voices” and “dependable sources of links to reliably interesting material”.
Read Karl Fisch’s jack-boot post entitled “Is it okay to be a technologically illiterate teacher?” from 2007. The statements and comments from that single post at the time hit the edublogger community like a concussion shell — but three years after, Twitter is reliving the highlights. Today Karl is wearing the big-pants, writing for the tech section of the Huffington Post.
He makes the comment
“Whenever I post to The Huffington Post I’m going to cross-post here, and I’m going to both ask and count on all of you to get involved in the conversation there as well as here”.
There are plenty of references and RTs about “Shift Happens” and “Did you know”; but what Karl recognises is the power of conversation. All of that flows into Version 4 of the video — [use with care as you’ll scare the sheep].
I see many edu-comments about digitally illiterate teachers, whom often seem to take pride in their lethargy — in Twitter, but Karl nails it — in his blog.
Seth Godin wrote recently
“helping them see your idea through their lens, not yours”
Godin thinks our biggest challenge in trying to attract people to our idea of what is ‘the right’ solution. Social and personal learning networks as concepts are as magical as Tinkerbell — if your audiences’ lens is digitally-myopic. A solid argument or thoughtful reflection on a blog is far more tangible to newcomers.
In Twitter we move between networks of people — in a blog, interest comes from comparatively small intersection of my Tweet-pool. I would miss blogs for more than tweets.
Finally, and much more recently – Elizabeth Helfant wrote in her blog, Helcat Rants and Ramblings: Defining Emerging Literacies
“Literacy has changed, whether we want to recognize that or not.”
She outlines various notions and factors that are critical in under-pinning and attempt to shift pedagogy and ideology out of its Edwardian robes. That one post is more powerful than a week of hash-tagging and system-slagging.
We cannot forget however that whole school development is important. Schools are not teachers vs admin vs executive — they are chain — and we need to take a holistic approach. It is likely that our future writing-work will not be committed to Microsoft Word or passed to the secretarial pool – but to chains of conversation connected.
Frustratingly, the insane decision to focus on ‘the desktop’ fails to understand the internet is the platform, not the enemy in schools. We will have to wait years until the madness subsides however. In the mean time, the internet is alive with hacks and work-arounds, so strong is the desire to be connected to others.
The internet is not a collection of ‘tools’ and ‘websites’. Anything outside MS Office is not scary or emerging — to be viewed with suspicion. If we wanted to be really spiky in staff-development – we’d be talking about 3G mobile, augmented reality, serious games and de-schooling. Yet here we are — a decade later – fighting to get blogs in the classroom and Word off the desktop. If you want to quit smoking, don’t buy cigarettes. If you want to change pedagogy – don’t build typing-pools, embrace the conversation by reading, commenting and creating yummy blogs.
Playable 