“We bloggers are playing with fire and, if allowed to continue, we will burn down the fucking house.” Terry, back with a vengance, bucking up Pat who is fighting the good fight and feeling justifiably frustrated. Puts me to shame.
Is it me or is there a shift in focus afoot? Seems like more of us talking about barriers to implementation rather than software, though I know there will be plenty more talk about software. Pat isn’t getting props from an administration that is unable or unwilling to have an out of the box thought. And Brian is banging up against some hard questions as well:
“As we have tried to make websites more and more manageable all of the time, we are really past the point of making it simpler, technically. It is now so easy to type your content and hit the submit button, that I’m convinced through experience that if someone isn’t doing it, they would not do it regardless of the situation. You could give them a pen and a simple form to fill out and they would be the ones that never would get around to completing it. Once a simple solution for updating web pages has been delivered, it becomes pretty hard to convince me that the reason web pages aren’t being updated is because of the solution. So what questions DO you start asking? How about, “was there ever content to go here in the first place, or are we creating houses with no buyers and then getting mad when we can’t find anybody to move in?” Echos of my If you Build It post from a few days ago.
Seb says “it takes time and effort to build up new habits of work and communication.” And that’s the worst part, I think, the real difficult and time-consuming commitment it takes to really change the way you teach, the way you’ve been teaching for 10 or 15 or 20 years. It’s hard enough just recycling the good stuff from the last time you went through it and now here comes this whole new idea that on the surface at least glows with potential. How’d I get so “lucky” to get to the point where I feel like I’m playing with Terry’s matches? And unlike Pat and Joe who can’t get a commitment from their discricts, here the problem comes with technology being “rammed down our throats” and the whole angst that comes with that. (And no, I am NOT complaining.)
Maybe putting your ideas and your work up there for everyone to see scares teachers more than students. Hell, kids are used to publishing their stuff in a variety of guises (chat, IM, etc.) Which makes it even more important for teachers to get with the program. Think about it, was there ever a time in teaching when kids really did come in knowing more than the teacher about methods? Hey, that IS a scary thought!
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