Tag: Social Discourse

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 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.

Rovy suggested a non-proposal for a non-session at AECT. I don’t want to fully reject the idea, but it seems to contradict the idea I had in first suggesting a session. If “the only publicity is through blogs” we virtually invite ourselves to keep preaching to the choir. The point of having a session was to bring the discussion to those who are not participating in the blogosphere.

After reading the post on the AECT news blog I am thinking that perhaps we should contact the Radical Thinkers of Penn State to see if we could learn from their experience or possibly even enlist their help.

Back to Nate and Rovy. . .

I do believe that there is a connection between Critical Mass and the Long Tail. They are not separate, but part of the same continuum. You are right that if the long tail “GETS a critical mass, it ceases to be the long tail and becomes, instead, the Big Spike” except that there is an unnamed bridging area where the long tail merges with the big spike. I was talking about moving the more diverse elements of the conversation up the tail to get closer to or even a part of the big spike.

If it were easier to access the diversity of conversation it would be correspondingly easier to demonstrate the real value that is already present in the blogosphere. I like what you said that “My success from blogging is not dependant on having 45 people reading every deathless word. If nobody reads my blog, I still win.” The problem I see is that a major benefit of blogging is the opportunity to get diverse feedback for your thoughts and diverse access to the thoughts of others. If, in fact, you are the only one blogging there is no benefit beyond writing out your thoughts in a file on your own computer.

I see that Rovy took your post in a different direction, and he is also right in stating that “the critical mass is the entire population in the curve, including those on the high-end (most popular blogs) and those trailing out near the end of the tail.” The feature that distinguishes the members of the big spike from the members of the long tail is a critical mass in the readership of their individual blog. We do not need to cross that line for each diversant blogger, but we do need to introduce people not to blogging as a practice (because most people are aware of it) but to the richness and diversity of the conversation, we need to introduce them to the value that is present so that they can participate or appreciate the richness of ideas that are being presented through blogs. All the “ranked players” know the value of mixing ideas and distilling new insights from the mixture (that’s how they got “ranked”), what they ned to see is that that rich mixing is improved and accelerated through the medium of blogging.

I have been thinking about this a lot since yesterday and I realized one of the major problems with this conversation is that it is taking place in the blogosphere – we’re preaching to the choir. If any of the ranked players want to get started they should not email a blogger to get help starting, we should take the discussion to them through publications and presentations. We should be presenting this at AECT in October. We should gather a rich variety of blog feeds to introduce people to the diversity out there and we should show them how to explore for new ideas according to their interests and we should show them how to lurk. What we should do is make writing lower on the list of things we teach and emphasize exploring and reading as the first steps to participation.

We’re not too late for the second deadline for submissions to AECT this year. What do you guys think?

Rovy has taken my previous post exactly where I wanted it to go. I agree on all his points. The educational bloggers with the highest rankings are still worth reading for those who are not wholly into the technology side of things, but we meeds to develop those “unexplored corners of the blogosphere” so that they do not require so much digging to find. I have been doing this for months and I still have not found the kind of variety that we need.

I believe that those well-known members of our field need to find a way into the discussion. We need to get the variety farther up the tail. And if anyone can direct me to some of those hidden places of variety I would be most grateful.

I wish to thank Nate and Rovy for the conversation that they have been having about the digital divide and the participation or lack thereof in the blogosphere of many distingushed educators.

I have been following this conversation from Rovy’s side, but I finally did what I should have been doing the entire time and went out to find Nate’s blog for his full thoughts – what a treat. The conversation, which I already appreciated, was even better and more crucial than I had realized.

I have been having a very similar conversation with Andy Gibbons, who is one of those distinguished non-participants. One of the reasons for this digital divide, I believe, is that the conversation within the blogosphere thus far has been two dimentional – it has been more focused on the technological aspects of improving education and has not had much depth as far as broader theories of learning and instruction are concerned. This is not conducive to bringing in those who are not interested in the technology for technology’s sake. What we need is not just a critical mass, but a crtical mass of variety in the ideas being discussed though the medium in question. That is where it will begin to gain the validity and prestige that will bring a wider range of people in. So far there is no vision among the non-bloggers about how fundamentally different the world is as a result of these new communication tools.

I believe that the critical mass of topical variety is the lack of critical mass that we must address. Thanks again to Nate and Rovy for this conversation, but even more thanks to both of them for having a broader range of substance on their own sites than I generally find among educational bloggers.

I have noticed a number of posts lately in reaction to the grand entrance of the “Guru of the Obvious” into the blogosphere. I have to admit that I am slightly jealous of someone so brazen as to blatantly try to goad all of the most popular bloggers into linking to his blahg to increase his ranking.

I have also noticed a few other practices – such as not allowing comments. I think I know why he has set his blahg up that way – comments do not help ratings but trackbacks do. He may claim that this is an attempt to avoid comment spam but I personally receive 20 times as much trackback spam as comment spam. I would not be put off by such tactics if he had anything at all to say, but he doesn’t. In response to a question related to his lack of content he said “I have been so busy fielding lucrative consulting offers and fending off media requests that I simply do not have the time to write everything I would like today.” What he failed to say was that he had been to busy to write anything of any substance.

Courtesy of his “no comments” policy I refuse to trackback to the blahg of Leon Lighips, but if you are reading this post the chances are pretty good that you have already read posts linking to the “guru” from those he is planning to take down. Too bad he has nothing with wich to replace them.