One appeal of blogging that rarely gets mentioned is the free psychoanalysis that comes along with being part of an online coterie, and lucky for me, Tom has offered up his breakdown of my “blogancholia.” (Oy.) He keeps picking at me (in his “loving way”) about my view that these are new literacies that we’re eventually going to have to teach in the classroom, and he says that my frustrations stem from the slow acceptance of what I see as this “revolution.”
Ok. I feel better.
Look, I know the ‘new’ Internet is still the ‘old’ Internet. But new or old, the ability to create content in this way fundamentally changes our relationship with the Web. It changes it from consume to construct. One way to two way. And that changes how we teach with the Web, or at least I think it should. Because it also changes the way we learn with the Web. And that’s the key. Tom sees Weblogs as a “repair in the collaborative fabric of the web.” But I see Weblogs and wikis and all these other tools not as a fix but as a transformation, primarily because of the richer, deeper more interactive learning that I have experienced over the last three years. Yeah, I know, I know. I’m probably an outlier in that regard. But I guess what keeps me blogvangelizing is that I really want teachers and students to be able to take this new Web and use it to transform their own learning. And to do that, there are some new fluencies and literacies that they need to know. How do you manage all of this content? How do you really collaborate in ways the extend beyond the classroom? How do you edit what you read, not just what you write? How do you publish effectively?
Having said that, I hope Tom continues to relentlessly needle me about all of this stuff. It’s part of what makes this process so valuable, and his normally wise observations push my own thinking on a regular basis.
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