Pat offers Part 2 of his Disruptive Operating Procedure handbook. Here’s a shot over the bow:
Any particular organizational affiliation or control must be kept as far away from the edBlogger network as we can keep it. Large, well-funded educational organizations will support nothing that they won’t try to control, and nothing that they control will have as its priority teachers and students.
There is much politics afoot here with the NWP and the various local orgs that I’m not privy to. But I’m feeling like I have to keep my focus on what I can do with my new position to build and grow my own slice of this network (that little dot just to the south of NYC). I’ll say it again, I know that my good fortune can and must be shared…
Buy me $50K worth of server hardware and three years of Kern County Manila support, and allow blog site creation for any k-12 public school teacher in the country.
There must be grants, other benfactors that could bring this about. I KNOW I could raise some of this. Let’s put together a “business” plan and our passion and take this idea to some folks who wouldn’t be into it for the money or the prestige but simply want to improve education. I’ve spent three years watching my wife do this. I have some people we can take this to, but we need to formalize it…make it more than just loosely connected dots.
And once we get that part done, the good news is thatErin Clerico of Weblogger.com fame is working on a kinder gentler Manila.
The Site Creation Wizard I have been working on takes the idea of turnkey websites much farther. As new Manila sites ar born, they get prefabbed pages and content with site structure and navbars to match. Editorial and other site preferences can be tweaked. This capability lets Manila community site masters offer a custom site wizard for each group within their organizations. This is going to save many Manila man hours.
There is definitely a movement here…let’s keep it going.
I believe that you need to focus on the part you can play within the organization. I would like to see you continue down the path you have already set foot upon– a parallel edu-blogging university within the bricks and mortar school. It is parallel to the Bizarro World that is sometimes k-12.
Pat is on another path that will bisect yours many times. Or maybe we can think of it as different waves which only amplify and never cancel each other out. You are not subverting the system, you are helping it to evolve. And as Stephen Jay Gould was fond of saying evolution is sometimes hot and heavy, not glacial; punctuated, not flowing; spikey like Syd Vicious, not smooth like Elvis. You will be ready and waiting for the tipping point I do believe.
No, no, no. Not “another path.” Check the essay again. Will’s “build and grow my own slice of this network” is precisely the same path we’re all on and should stay on – creating a decentralized, distributed, regenerative network. Big “no thanks” to bigEdu money and happy “hello” to local level installations and ISP hosting of blog and disruptive tech tools. Pilsen, Hunterdon, Middlebury, NYC Alternative Schools (if they last), SFUSD (if the $ gets unfrozen), BAWP, MUWP, SDWP, AkWP, CAWP, Richard Stockton College, Jenny Levine and her offer of Illinois Library hosting for school librarians, those folks in Utah and Nebraska and Oregon if we can ever get them to join up with us – all examples of how this will grow. If we go for any bigEdu $, it should be from an independent foundation or, better yet, a consortium of bigEdu types, who will guarantee our independence.