Techlearning blog

As participatory media tools evolve (Twitter, Ning, UStream), concerns about where blogs fit, if at all, weigh heavily on my mind.

Last week, I offered little value or insight into the collaborative world of edubloggers. While I provided a prompt for discussion, fodder for weekend thinking, I failed to add much in terms of value-added through analysis or reflective thought that adds to our collaborative efforts to learn and improve education.

Professional blogs in education constitute a part of a living system, evolving and growing as we do. However, how they are growing and evolving, or not, as a valuable collaborative communication tool concerns me.

With more tools forming like Twitter and Nings that appeal to the Age of Speed and one stop shop, blogs must re-invent themselves as a truly valuable tool in this collaborative, participatory world. My concerns over the Death of a Blogger have little to do with the tool itself dying. My concern has everything to do with exploring whether the edublog community is holding up its end of the collaborative bargain to use blogs as a collaborative tool for the betterment of education.

The bottom line is that blogs need to evolve or face a sure death of stagnation and lack of change capability. For me, it starts with evaluating how well blogging is functioning as a collaborative tool that adds value to the educational community. According to Rosan (2007), “there are ten cultural elements that are typically present when collaboration works” and these form the basis of exploring how blogging needs to evolve: trust, sharing, goals, innovation, environment, collaborative chaos, constructive confrontation, communication, community, and value.
While all ten cultural elements are critical, the following are key to blogs evolving as a powerful collaborative tool.

Goals
There are times when I ponder what the goal is for the edublogger community. Obviously, there will be those that immediately move to the power of blogging is that it is about the individual; it is about whatever that person wants it to be about. While this is true, I would hope the end goal for edubloggers is improving education and that the goal of individual blogs or community blogs will focus on how they are helping to achieve this larger community goal.

Constructive Confrontation
One of the greatest challenges facing the edublogosphere today is the lack of constructive confrontation.

How many times have you disagreed with a post you’ve read yet never responded? How many times have you felt challenged by a post yet left without stating your case? How many times have you felt your ideas carried more weight, had more substance than the original post yet never reacted?

It is hard to imagine that with the daily bombardment of blog posts there is little to no disagreement of ideas, little to no challenge to thinking. Don’t get me wrong. There are the occasional constructive confrontations (Richardson vs. Sager Discussion) but these are so far and few between that the excitement of the confrontation is the focus not the ideas being challenged and reformulated.

At the same time, there is another reason why constructive confrontation does not seem to be a part of the edublogosphere: complete devotion to a person instead of an authentic look at ideas regardless of the person. In other words, it is easy to become enamored with a person and lose the ability to look critically at the ideas being presented. This inevitably leads to constant agreement with a person despite their ideas, a community of parrots so to speak.

For instance, Cathy recently commented about Twitter replacing Blogs because of what she read. According to her, “Blogging is dead so why be concerned about it. I've read it by the leaders in the field that no longer see a value in it. Just look at Will Richardson who uses Twitter as his RSS and blog. If Will Richardson no longer needs blogs, it is time we all take a hard look at blogs as well.” While this person may surely have strong reasons for having such feelings about blogging, the response leans more towards a devotion to those deemed leaders in the field and I’m not sure that devotion of this kind is what Ed tech leaders want.

While not speaking for these leaders, it seems to me they would prefer constructive confrontation over chorus-like nods of agreement that permeate with each and every post. Something tells me they want to be challenged and engaged within the context of a global professional learning community. I assume they don’t want the educational community to be passive consumers that respond in constant agreement and constant acceptance of ideas simply because it comes from a leader in the field of education.

If educational blogs are to evolve, we must embrace the concept that collaboration involves the confrontation and the challenging of ideas. This doesn’t mean disagreeing just to disagree; however, it doesn’t mean agreeing just to agree. As Paul Hamilton stated, “I value the ripples of reflection that flow outward in comments like these” when referencing the insights from others on a recent blog post. It is about creating a discourse about ideas that we are sharing with the community. It is about looking critically at the innovations by others and reshaping these into stronger concepts that can make a difference in education.

Communication
Blogging is obviously a communication tool but with the creation of new tools on what seems to be a daily basis, it is critical to determine how best to use blogs.Jeanette Johnson recent comment on the Death of a Blogger post is a great starting point: “as long as there are those who'll wish to think and consider deeply (which will be forever, contrary to the-sky-is-falling fears about our short-attention-span society), blogging will live on”. Jennifer Wagner adds to this by saying that a “blog is where [a conversation] goes into depth and continues”.

In this sense, blogging is about the depth of thought and the creation of a critical document that while self-broadcasted, pushes others to think at greater depths about an idea, concept, or situation. I wonder, though, how much of this is really happening on blogs.

How many blog posts are stretching your thinking? How many posts are providing the depth of thought that cause the type of stir that spawns change? How many posts draw upon research, draw upon best practices, draw upon theory to create more than just opinions? How many posts force difficult conversations or at least create lasting, sustained discussion? Without a doubt, there are posts that do these things but many more that do not.

Obviously, the tool Twitter has sparked a lot of discussion of late but this goes far beyond Twitter. Pamela states in the comment section on the Death of a Blogger post that “blogs are new arrivals for many classrooms”. With that, how do the teachers in these classrooms feel when they begin reading the blogs written by educational technologist and find talks about all of these other tools? Overwhelemed? Behind? Lost? If nothing else, this somewhat shows why the masses are not embracing the foundational participatory media tools let alone all of these new ones that come and go.

By no means am I saying new tools shouldn’t be explored or discussed on blogs. However, I believe the majority of blog posts need to evolve to a point where these create value though depth of thought. Other communication tools like Twitter and Nings can provide a forum for random thoughts, stream of conscious, discussion forum type questions and concerns, promotion of events or ideas of value, and general fodder such as Death of a Blogger Part I which add little value but offer much food for thought.

I simply believe that communication on blogs needs to evolve to a point where audience is considered and that communication is at a greater depth than its current state.

Value
I believe blogging has transformative power and it is the tool I value most in the world of participatory media. However, I am beginning to wonder if the concerns expressed by Friedman and Keen regarding everyone talking and no one listening is causing or has caused the value of blogs to diminish:

"The same technologies that allow us to connect with each other as never before also allow us to interrupt each other as never before. The technologies that are empowering individuals to upload their own content and inscribe themselves on the world also contribute to a coarsening of our language and the dumbing down of our discourse” (Friedman p. 517).

Blogs obviously offer value to a number of educators but two questions are constantly on my mind: 1. How much value do edublogs offer the masses in education? 2. How can bloggers create greater value for the masses in education?

This is by no means a cry for fewer bloggers. This is pondering how blogs need to evolve so that the wisdom of the crowd is heard not drowned out by all the voices. Part of this comes from using blogs in a new way. I advocate for a more thoughtful, academic use of blogging so that Keen (2007) and his proclamation that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment” doesn’t continue (p. 16).

All of the cultural elements discussed in this post come down to the value blogs add to education. If blogs don’t add value, they will surely die. However, this is just one possible way for blogs to evolve towards greater value to education as a whole.

John Pederson quoted Hugh MacLeod in last week’s post stating that “Blogging isn't dead. Far from it. It's just a subset of something much larger and more important." I couldn’t agree more but how great of a piece of the puzzle blogging is depends on how we allow blogging to evolve. If it doesn’t evolve to a more meaningful place, the voices will be so deafening, the ideas so muddled, that the value-added will be little if anything more than self-promotion of the individual, a song for the choir, and a place for reinforcement against those that “don’t get it”. Sadly, the educational community will be the one that suffers because it will lose the power of the collective intelligence that is capable of causing change as a global learning community.

References

Keen, A. (2007). The cult of the amateur. New York, NY: Doubleday.

Rose, E. (2007). The culture of collaboration. San Fransico, CA: Red Ape Publishing.

Senge, P.M. (2000). Schools that learn: The fifth discipline fieldbook for educators, parents, and everyone who cares about education. New York, NY: Doubleday.