One aspect of blogging and social media I like is culture-watching. Today in NSW, teachers return to work and is marked once again by increased Twitter gruel.
Seasonals wake from their holiday slumber to tweet about the ‘near future’ which is going to be super. They spend a great deal of time endorsing the brilliance of fellow supers, their feeds brimming with ever-so-positive comments which I’ll aggregate to “the next school year is going to be awesome”. Yep, it’s all super.
I have no time or respect for these people, they are part of the problem, as they add to the media distortion that ‘everything is awesome’. It’s not. Families are sleeping in cars, it’s almost impossible for new teachers to get a permanent job and the office troll has re-armed for a new season’s hunting.
During the holiday-hibernation, those who stayed on the wall, have been impacted by the death of Aaron Swartz, the release of new search-graph technologies, announcements by various governments about further censorship and monitoring of citizens. Teachers in Seattle have refused to administer standardized tests and US schools have been told to offer disabled sports teams or abandon having able-only sports teams. While no one can’t know every educational event, these are the ones who amplify and have high-impact on the quality and relevance of the feed. Their input to the nexus of information is not “oh look my friend is so amazing”.
I have a problem with seasonal near futurism. Believing everything will happen in the near future is not awesome. What is interesting right now, is that those who invented the near-futurism of educational rhetoric rely almost entirely on Twitter to perpetuate their trade, while the really interesting stuff has moved to Google Plus.
Ed Tech has drained billions of dollars out of schools via Twitter. The outcome (as predicted by numerous academics) has been “no significant difference” unless we’re talking about how a few made some serious cash from Web2.0 rhetoric and now live to a life-style that they certainly want to remain accustomed. It would be super if they presented some data, but alas I suspect the same grey men will show the same boring PowerPoint about Clay Shirkey and quote Prensky badly.
Show me how near-futurism isn’t just system daemons building quasi gated communities of hash-tag dogma. As a learning network, Twitter works best if you agree to Tweet “Oh I love your bracelet” whenever I give the princely wave.
Welcome back to 2013, don’t mind me … let the hash tagging begin. Before you know it the Eddies will be on and the rich will be telling us how awesome ISTE is and I’ll be looking at a photo of your lunch.
High five education. We’re living on Rifle’s raft already.
Playable 