I’m not sure exactly what it means, if anything, but I just want to reflect for a second or two on my post about 21st Century Skills for Teachers and the 130 comments and trackbacks that ensued. I’m not one to look at my stats very often or track visits to my blog, but I do know that the number of responses to that post pretty much obliterated the old standard in terms of the amount of conversation that transpired. And while much of it was obviously just a connection to what a lot of other folks were feeling or experiencing on that topic, some of it is no doubt due to more people, lots more people in the fray, reading, writing, participating, learning.
I’ve said this before, if nothing else, the network feels more palpable and connected than ever. Without a doubt, Twitter has had much to do with the numbers of comments that have been left here of late. Tom asked in the thread to see a graph of the comments here over time, and while I’m not savvy enough to do that, there’s no question that more started coming around the same time I started “getting” Twitter. And from a network standpoint, the explosion on UStream has been pretty amazing. Just today I caught portions of a high school talent show in Shanghai, a tech session with students in Illinois, and a workshop from a conference in North Carolina. (And I missed much, much more than I saw.)
And there are downsides to this as well. Can anyone really read through 130 comments? Are we getting too distracted, too connected, too participatory for our own good? Are we simply adding to the echo chamber of nodding heads, or are we doing what we need to do to move the conversation out of the blogosphere/twitterverse/ustreamland? All questions, btw, that in some form or another were captured in the comments on that post.
But here is the good news, the best news of all of this. In those 130 comments and trackbacks, there were many, many, many new names and voices. All sorts of people who took it upon themselves to jump into the mix and share their ideas who I don’t remember hearing from before. That can only be a good sign.
Thanks for all of your contributions here over the years, all 8,800 of them. (That’s one stat that’s easy to find.) I have and continue to learn much as I hope you have as well.
(Word cloud for the post provided by Britt Watwood.)
Thank you, Will, for starting, stimulating, and following through on all the conversations. I think often folks start on something, get distracted, and move on to something new without following up/through with things.
Your blog has steadfastly kept things moving forward. I’ve learned so much (and expect much more) – thank you!
Got the update of your post more quickly from twitter than Google Reader. Wow!
‘Are we getting too distracted, too connected, too participatory for our own good?’
Great questions here, questions worth asking. I believe the answer has to do with Yottabyte (10 to the 24th power, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of digital information). This is the unit that quantifies the amount of data we will all have access to when fourth graders graduate.
The challenge will be (and frankly it is the challenge right now) to sift through the exponential amount of information to find accurate and useful data, applications, and people resources as we grow our PLNs. This leaning process is what will be the most critical process for fourth graders, and all kids who will graduate into a Yottabyte world.
Is is possible for education to be on the cutting edge all the time? Do we need to be a first mover in 21st century skills? Balance is important. However I felt the comments from your blog “21st Century Skills for Teachers” are showing frustration that education is way behind the times . How long have these web 2.0 resources been available and so many of us are just getting our feet wet? So long that that our students are starting to wonder when we “educators” are going to catch up. The gap that is forming is getting bigger as outlined in your cell phone discussion.
Our decision makers are not USING these technologies and we are finding pockets of teachers trying to champion the use of these technologies. Your blog is an excellent staging area we can use to fuel the battle to bring or rather liberate these technologies into mainstream classrooms. We can build our own networks. You mentioned a school in NY with 3000 students and 300 computers? Wow, what an uphill battle.
I appreciate the dialog and the opinions expressed.
Thanks
“Can anyone really read through 130 comments?”
I’ve noticed this problem on popular edutech blogs lately (including this one). It’s not the number of comments, its that many people write half-page, unscannable rants to express a two-sentence idea. (I’m guilty, too.) Details are sometimes interesting, but true elegance comes from skillful summarization.
I think the many comments on your posts show what a wonderful dialogue you initiated. That is the magic of the network. By reading blogs and comments, I am growing in my way of thinking and refining what I value and believe. I have learned to better express myself and also learned how different things look from other perspectives. Thank you for writing such stimulating things that get the dialogue started!
To answer your questions…
Can anyone really read through 130 comments? Not all the time.
Are we getting too distracted, too connected, too participatory for our own good? Yes.
“All sorts of people who took it upon themselves to jump into the mix and share their ideas who I don’t remember hearing from before.” I personally find myself wondering what truly motivated them to “jump into the mix”?
Has the “edublogosphere” become a “baggy monster” in the Dickensian sense?
Cheers, John
As a blogging newbie myself, and as someone who studies teachers’ uses and non-uses of “new literacies,” I’ve been fascinated by this thread and am now about to be one of those new voices that Will is mentioning.
Of course we all know there are so many barriers to uses of new media in traditional schools. My new teachers continue to tell me of all the familiar filters and rules and regulations that prevent them from even doing the simplest things. Not to mention that their very contract renewal depends upon their students’ performance on paper/pencil tests that are anything but current.
But what I’ve been amazed at is the amazing amount of time that blogging takes. And now we have “live blogging” in which people are writing summary transcripts of live events and then other people are logging in and then another group of people are reading this transcript, or listening to podcasts in which someone records his/her feelings about a recent live event. Not to mention watching the uStream of the event.
I know many educators who barely have time to go to the grocery store much less keep up with the 130 comments, as Will mentioned. So who ends up participating in this dialogue? People who don’t sleep? Or maybe people who are foregoing “American Idol?” Maybe that’s a good thing!
But I also think about the rhetorical constraints of the traditional blog design, and I wonder if we’ll look back someday at these early blogs as we do now at silent films. The “comments” are usually subordinate to the main blogger, in that they appear in much smaller font and without some of the accompanying audio/visual aides. I think what may happen is that, yes, it becomes somewhat participatory but in a fairly monotonous way–just from the standpoint of who is participating in the blog. How many people are going to Will’s blog (or mine or Clarence’s) who aren’t already converts or who aren’t really already very interested in this topic? I really felt for that principal the other day who defended here the banning of cell phones (even though I don’t agree with her either. So there!)
A somewhat related note: are poor typists left out of the conversation? I’m serious!
Oh well, I don’t know that any of this is really new, and I feel bad for taking up someone’s time who read it. It’s so long that I should have put it on my own blog. And it’s taken me about 30 minutes to compose this, even as I’ve got a million things to do as we’re getting ready to sell our house. But that’s a post for my personal blog.
“Are poor typists left out of the conversation?”
ABSOLUTELY! If computers are truly the new paper and pencil, what kind of students and people are we creating if we never give them the time or resources to learn this skill? What happens when they leave the classrooms where all we use are paper and pencil? They will never participate in an environment similar to that again after leaving our schools.
That thought truly scares me.
Is it all too much? Is what we are rushing to create beyond our capacity to experience? Maybe we need to, as a society, step away from the edge and admire the view for a while, digest, assimilate…but where’s the thrill in that?
If you really want to blow your mind, think about all of the readers who did read all of those comments, but did not comment…like me:) It hit a few hundred nerves for sure! Thanks for continually writing excellent, thought-provoking posts. I read them all.
Al Upton just topped that 130 mark – http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=South_Australian_educational_blog_shut_down&action=history
I just came across this link from the WSJ. The article talks about this particular issue of comments in blogs, why we comment and why we read them. Fascinating. It is actually beyond our control…
Dave makes a good point on how blog posts can become too long for their own good and summarization is definitely helpful for busy readers. I would also add that I, personally, find it tedious and sometimes annoying to wade through tens of responses that are just echoing reiterations of the post (in this case, Will’s). Perhaps the educators in all of us cannot resist the opportunity to pat someone on the back for a job well done, however, I’m more interested in reading posts (in this blog and others) that add a new dimension to the initial post rather than a bunch of “way-to-go’s.”
Today I wrote a blog based on an article found in the Windsor Star and other papers across Canada called Docs citing e-addiction . This worked out to be a nice caveat to the discussion here on whether we too connected or participatory. The world of Psychiarty is saying compulsive e-mailing and text messaging could be classified an official brain illness! I wonder if blogging is next? Glad I didn’t text this entry! whew!
what do you mean by insight into the world of the unseen, the unknown, the unexperienced?
Here’s something to ponder … has/should the old “work/life balance” discussion shifted to “work/blog/life balance”?
As an educator, turned administrator, now consultant … one of the things I have heard (and said) consistently over the past 25 – 30 years is that there isn’t enough time to get my work done and still have time for a life. I constantly hear educators complaining about how little time they have to prepare and/or how little time they have for their family.
My fear as I watch my own children spending more and more time chatting, texting, blogging or whatever other new words we will come up with is that the more avenues we create for folks to communicate, the less true, face-to-face interpersonal communication (i.e., intimacy) there will be.
Oh well … it’s 5:30 am – time to get on my scooter and explore the Taiwan countryside …