« Real Sushi | Main | Podcasting: naive attitudes to exploring technology »

July 03, 2005

K-12 blogging explained?

Weblogg-ed points to this article
What is a blog? Educators discover the newest form of intimate and immediate conversation as finally getting it right, saying:

Finally, an article on blogs in schools that gets it pretty much right. What's in a Blog? is the lead story in this month's American School Board Journal and it does a great job, I think, of framing the potential of blogs and in accurately reflecting the state of the Read/Write world. Now if every board member in the country reads it, we might start bringing some sanity back to the blogs and safety conversation.

However, I was struck by a couple of things. First of all, it never explains what a blog is at all, nor make any meaningful comment on its history. Secondly, it highlights blogs as tools for high placed admins in school board to talk about 'issues'. That is, it is the journalistic/public relational side of blogs that get all the cred.

To its credit it does note that all the coolness is being done by teenagers, highlights the potential for younger bloggers to communicate, and does focus on the 'putting people in touch with people' aspect, but it clearly misses the point that blogging was, has been, and hopefully will be about co-blogging, not blogging as personal broadcast medium. I read your blog, you read mine. We share info from our overlapping spheres of influence, but it is not, in its best sense, a form of journalism or public media conduit that the late-comers to blogging seem to want to create out of it. I personally think that this pressure comes from the fact that many people want to talk, but aren't really interested in listening. Sure, they respond to comments about their work, but they don't want to search out your work and engage with it; unless you're a big name, prof, A-lister or have a following.

Sure, I'm a prof, but this isn't much of a proffy top-down blog, in terms of content and attitude, it is as much a mix and match pile of information of what's going on in my life as my sister Cats' blog is. And no, that's not Catspaw (aka KAT!).

I'm always ranting that computers are for putting people in touch with people, and the objects they create. The broadcast media metaphor fails in its centricity, just as a-list specific blogs are 'often but not always' crippled by their incestual myopia. I want to see if or how blogs can manifest themselves as chaotic community tools, islands of order amid the woof and warp of an individuals myriad of social relationships throughout a life, written for the self, shared with an infinite number of potentially reciprocating readers.

Now coffee time. Will check for logic and spelling errors later.

Posted by jason at July 3, 2005 08:15 AM

Comments

Post a comment




Remember Me?