I have seen the list of these advantages to blogging (broken link) but, while I believe that blogging is beneficial to my career, I have a hard time believing all of those benefits without some evidence. Specifically I have some reservations about benefit number 5 and to a lesser extent I question numbers 3 and 10 also.
Matt put a good question on his blog last week in response to Paul’s post. I just read the question again and realized that I had missed something the first time I read it.
“Why make learners go through the cognitively challenging task of reading, comprehending, thinking of a response, composing the response, and finally typing the response?”
There is benefit to forcing users to take the time to read, comprehend, think and then compose a response. There are times when that is not important, but sometimes it is and the designers of social software should consider what is important for the tasks they are supporting as they make decisions about what kinds of interaction to support.
Nate has some great (and mostly accurate) things to say about Stature and Zero-Sum Games. If you go read his post make sure to read Ward’s comments as well, he has a valuable perspective to add.
I notice that while we have a mutual goal we seem to disagree a little bit on the proper approach to attaining that goal. I agree that the blogosphere does not operate under the same principles as traditional publishing. That fact that in traditional publishing “the number of voices is restricted by the economics of speaking” while “the blogosphere removes that economic barrier” is a salient point. The area that we seem to disagree on is in the rules governing diffusion and adoption.
Nate disputes the value of having people with stature in AECT joining the blogosphere. His argument is that their stature does not carry over to the blogosphere and I agree. The reason that I believe it is necessary to have such “ranked players” joining the blogosphere is not because their stature is useful in the blogosphere, but rather because they have social and professional stature within AECT. While publishing in the blogosphere is a different animal (probably a dog if Alan has anything to say about it) than publishing in traditional journals, diffusion and adoption of blogging by people within AECT is the same as diffusion and adoption of internet courses by people within AECT. In each case there are some adventurous people who stay on the cutting edge of technology but widespread adoption does not take place until some of the established people begin adopting the practice. When the ranked players begin using blogs more people who are slower to adopt new ideas will view them as a legitimate outlet for expression and information gathering. Admittedly that presupposes that there is enough good content. If there is enough good content already then a higher profile and broader participation are all that is lacking, if there is not enough good content then we have very little to recommend what we are doing to our friends in the field.
It is about time that we acknowledged the truth of what happens when Lobbyists have so much sway in our system of government. I don’t think there is anything else to say after what Mr. Lessig wrote. This is more than simply the access to broadband that I have written about previously. In both the specific case and the general trend we must take back democracy so that it is not subsumed by capitalism.
I was pleased to discover, thanks to Nate, that Ward Cates has become a part of the AECT blogging community.
I welcome Ward for a couple of reasons, he is a representative of that group of people within AECT who have the stature withint AECT to change the way blogging is viewed within the profession and also because I consider Ward to be a friend. I look forward to reading Ward’s thoughts (through his blog) and hope that there will be more like him who begin to recognize the tremedous potential that blogging can have within our discipline.
Speaking of which – welcome also goes out to Sharon Smaldino. May the ranks thus continue to swell.
I am surprised to find that Leon reads widely enough among educational bloggers to have found little old me. I am both surprised and pleased that the Guru of the Obvious acknowledged me for my less than flattering commentary. I obviously did not take him seriously enough before.
He has forced me to use French – and apparently MT does not like French.
I have lately come to an interesting discovery as to why most education centered blogs tend to become “blogging in education” centered blogs.
Not long after I started blogging I became disinterested in blogging because so much of it was inward focused on the merits of blogs in education. Once I got over that and started to focus on writing about the things that I was interested in (and finding other sources that were more focused on those things) I began to really appreciate the potential power of blogs. As I began to blog more I became acutely aware of the potential power that is lost because of the lack of participation within our professional community. Basically it comes down to the fact that the adoption rate is not high enough yet. That brings me to begin pushing for ways to get more people involved and aware of the benefits and power of blogging which means that I have started blogging more about blogging than I used to.
My only disclaimer is that I am also pushing other educational bloggers to take their message back to the traditional outlets and to refine their message to be more effective in promoting the wider adoption that will really lend power to the medium of blogging. We can use the blogs as a platform to solve the issues related to adoption, but in the end we must take the solution outside of the blogosphere or slse it remains nothing more than an unproven theory of how to get people involved.
Update – see Scott Adams’ Conversations about starting a blog for another good perspective on this subject.
Thank you Nate for sending exactly the message that more people in AECT and education need to hear. In Why Blog II you have reminded us of the essence of what we need to tell the current non-participants. unfortunately those non-participants will never see your message because they are not participating.
My latest quest is to get the blogging community to recognize the need to take our message back to the traditional outlets of information distribution and Nate has given me the perfect example to work with.
I have recently recognized that one of my primary academic weaknesses is that I become intensely interested in everything I study. When I started out my interest in education was instructional design. Later I took a class in assessment, not because I was interested in it bet because it was convenient for my situation. By the time I finished my masters degree I had an emphasis in assessment and a goal to continue my studies in that area. At the beginning of my doctoral program I had not even been formally introduced to the study of social computing, but there was a doctoral seminar on the subject and I decided to take it. Less than halfway through the semester I am finding myself increasingly interested in social computing and I am convinced that there is much to be studied, understood and applied to education related to that subject. At this rate I will drop out of my doctoral program after 10 years and be interested in all areas of educational technology without having mastered any one of them because I will never have been able to sit down and focus on one area long enough to complete my PhD.
I am determined to not let that happen, but I find it exhilarating, exhausting and disturbing that everything becomes so interesting as to begin to consume my thoughts. It is a wonder that I can concentrate on more than one class in any given semester.