Wow. Peggy Noonan is pumping up blogs (from a journalism sense) like I don’t know what. And at the Wall Street Journal no less:
But when I read blogs, when I wake up in the morning and go to About Last Night and Lucianne and Lileks, I remember what the late great Christopher Reeve said on “The Tonight Show” 20 years ago. He was the second guest, after Rodney Dangerfield. Dangerfield did his act and he was hot as a pistol. Then after Reeve sat down Dangerfield continued to be riotous. Reeve looked at him, gestured toward him, looked at the audience and said with grace and delight, “Do you believe this is free?” The audience cheered. That’s how I feel on their best days when I read blogs.
That you get it free doesn’t mean commerce isn’t involved, for it is. It is intellectual commerce. Bloggers give you information and point of view. In return you give them your attention and intellectual energy. They gain influence by drawing your eyes; you gain information by lending your eyes. They become well-known and influential; you become entertained or informed. They get something from it and so do you.
It’s a great read, one that I think is pretty level headed and “spot on” about a lot of what’s happening right now. But we still have such a loooooonnnngggg way to go before we’ll see just what the long term effects are.
But this is why I believe that the technologies will change education. If the Fourth Estate is reeling a bit by the rise of citizen editors and the creation (in progress) of a new definition of journalism, I just feel like the same can happen to education. Like newspapers, we just don’t hold the keys to the content anymore. And I think we all better start waking up to that fact…
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Jim Wenzloff has put together a nice primer on how to get the most out of Furl. I have to say it’s definitely one of my favorite tools on the Web, and more and more I’m finding it to be an invaluable, focused resource for me to mine. Of course it’s taken a while to build up the content, but rarely a day goes by that I don’t go to my archive to find something that I need. And the best part is just sharing a link to my topics when people ask for resources…
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An addendum to my story from yesterday:
My colleague’s brother is a high school principal in a major East Coast city, and during a phone call they had yesterday, the conversation turned to the Internet.
“My teachers are complaining that the quality of their student papers is just getting worse and worse,” the principal said. “And it’s because they’re getting such bad information from the Internet. Are there any lists of ‘reputable’ sites out there that we can get our kids to use?”
My colleague, who has had the misfortune of sitting through many of my information literacy harangues, and who is a very smart person himself, said “Why don’t you do some professional development for your teachers and show them how to teach kids to find good sources?”
“Oh, no,” the principal said. “They won’t want to do that. They don’t have the time for it.”
“Well, don’t you think the kids need to learn how to use the Internet effectively as a research tool?” my friend said.
“I think it’s better for everyone if we just give them a list of sites they can use when they do their papers,” the principal said, “and tell them they have to have a certain number of those resources in the final product.”
Now, this is a loose transcript of the conversation, but the point is clear. Instead of teaching effective use of the tool, the easy way is to limit the reach of the tool, rein it in and limit its effect. If that is or will become the prevailing view, we are all in serious, serious trouble…
…and Stephen Downes seems to think that might already be the case:
But the thing is, this is not a new insight. So why do we keep getting pulled back from anything like real learner centered learning?…It doesn’t take a course in dialectical materialism to see it being shut down. Today’s theme? Take back the web.
A call to arms, perhaps?
