So what happens when someone in a presentation you’re doing blogs it as it happens and you find it later through your standing search on Technorati which you set up for the very reason that you can find out what people are writing about you and your ideas?
Speaker insists that the “founding fathers” would love it if they could see a world in which everyone participated and contributed. He may know his blogs but he don’t know history. The founding fathers were upper-class elitists who didn’t even envision universal manhood suffrage. The democratization of American democracy wouldn’t come along until the Jacksonian period in the early nineteenth century. So I sure hope he’s not telling these high school kids that the founding fathers would have loved a system in which everyone gets to participate and contribute because he’s just feeding them historical hogwash that was already being questioned by historians as early as the 1950s.
Ouch.
Even worse (or better?), the author goes on to list
“Some sites I wandered across when the speaker got repetitive (or boring) and when I wasn’t doing other things (shopping for guitars).
Golly. And here I thought I did pretty well, actually. I had a couple of people come up afterwards and say they really got a lot out of it. (I wonder if they blogged it…) But this is the fine line of blogvangelism, especially with a higher ed audience: 66% still need the Blogs 101 talk, 20% want the Blogs Pedagogy talk, and 12% want the RSS-from-Furl-and-Flickr-Into-My Blog talk. (I’m not sure what the other 2% want…time to shop for guitars, maybe? Sorry…I take it back.) Tough to make everyone happy.
But I’d rather know than not know as it adds to my own learning about all of this. Actually, I do think it’s pretty cool that I was able to find that post and get that feedback even if the author wasn’t inclined to give it to me personally. And the best part? It turns out these were his personal notes that he was encouraged to post (in edited form) to a new blog that sprang out of my presentation.
Go figure.
I’d read it, consider the points, and shrug it off. It’s not personal. I’ve had this experience many times, and it will increase as more people find their way to the “Write” side of the web.
You will never be loved by an entire audience and in the classroom, you will have students who canonly sit there with this on their minds “u suk”.
I welcome dissenting opinions being posted publicly as I want to be fallible, which is human. I worry that educators feel like they need to have perfect technology (t will always let you down), perfect lessons, and never a stray link. It is an unrealsitic, unhuman expectation. If the work you do is mostly good, the world lets you know, and negative statements can be neglible against it, especially if they have little credence beyond the “u suk” sentiments.
I would take it as a positive. Small Pieces Loosely Joined writes about the beauty of the web is in its messiness, and that it is built along people’s interest. At least this detractor followed his interests (shopping for guitars) and wrote about it, and I believe this is what you advocate.
My professor was at your presentation and she came to class all enthusiastic about the new technology she learned about. She was showing us her new blog and wikipedia — and she was very excited about it. So by reaching her, you managed to get a whole class full of future teachers interested in blogging — or at least one or two people.
Even in that class (integrating tech. for teachers), we have a huge variety of skill levels. From the artist and graphic designer who designs her own Web page to the guy who can barely turn on a computer and everything in between.