Tryangulation

The brief history of an idea

Brief note: I'll get back to the discussion on ancient and modern paradigms after a post or two to sort this out.

Once again I'm probably too slow, but that's one of the problems I've been thinking about. I hope some of the suggestions at the end can give a more positive and encouraging spin on some of the frustration.

Once upon a time several years ago our teenage son came home from school with this little guy. "Honest, he followed me home all by himself." Right. Never mind that Sam is a cat magnet (here's proof) and that he offered better prospects of a warm house, good food and lots of attention. 

We knew little Mutlu was not a street cat because he was so affectionate and so trusting.  And devastatingly cute. Still, for some reason he was apparently homeless. We already had a cat who wasn't fond of animals (she's never learned the brutal truth about herself), so Mutlu had to go.   I took this photo to deliberately tug at hearts and get people to think twice before saying no to offering a home.

Little Mutlu's story is very loosely an allegory for an experience I had a week or so ago. I wrote a post, and a phrase I used in passing was repeated by a very popular edublogger, who then added some of his own thoughts. Another very popular edublogger wrote a comment there, and then carried his version of the idea further on his own blog.

Having a pretty full work week and living in GMT+3, it easily takes me 2 or 3 days to read even the A list edublogs on my feed reader.  So some time after my post I had a pleasant surprise to see that I got mentioned. My emotions changed, though, as I saw how much commenting happened on those two popular blogs, while I didn't get any action on my own blog. It felt like my little half baked idea wandered off like Mutlu, looking for a better deal. 

My disappointment wasn't about getting enough credit, or drawing enough traffic to my sight, or getting a better rank. Rather, I missed out on a chance to interact more directly with people, put my ideas to the test more and feel more a part of "the conversation." Since then I've had some good correspondence with both of the bloggers involved, and they've been very generous with their thoughts and forgiving of my whining, but it's my lot in life to think too much about conversations and community and emotions.

Not long after, and not at all because of my metaphorical Mutlu and me, there has been a surprising amount of buzz in the edublogosphere about blogging elites at cocktail parties, leaving a lot of people frustrated and feeling like outsiders.  Wow. That didn't exactly cheer me up, and although a lot of the popular (and very good) guys had very good arguments that there is no inside and that everyone gets lonely, that you've got to be true to yourself, regain some perspective, and not let the apparent imbalances get to you -- in spite of that, I've learned through the years that if a lot of people feel like something is wrong, it's probably because something is wrong.

One thing that bugged me --and I saw it happen again just last week with someone else-- is that the conversations keep drifting to the blogs everyone focuses on. It's not their fault, it's crowd behavior. We read those blogs first, we want to write our comments there (who wouldn't?), and then we've run out of time or interest to read other blogs and write more comments. With my time schedule and slow brain (and a peripheral time zone) -- most days the read/write web is the either you read or you write web.  It takes a lot of work to do both.

What to do? I have a few ideas for making the edublogosphere feel a little more encouraging, seasoned with a little doing unto others, and letting what goes around come around. You're free to add your own ideas.

1. Slow down. Take maybe 10% of the time you devote to your own blog, and use it to read a little more broadly, think a little longer, comment on some blogs you don't visit very much. Shifting gears is good for the brain, so you'll benefit, and your comments will leave some feedback that those bloggers have been craving (and I'm not talking about stats here, I'm talking about engagement).
2. Stop. As a variation on #1, let's all declare a blog holiday: everyone refrains from publishing blog posts for one day, and just comments, again preferably on blogs you haven't focused on lately. Face it, just about any blog --even the top 1000-- or its readership, would not suffer if it's volume were reduced by 5% or so. In return, more people will have a little more time to read what you've already got, and maybe give you some interesting feedback you otherwise would have missed. We slow thinkers actually have things to say now and then, so give us a chance.
3. Don't keep every kitten that comes to your door. Encourage threads to loop back to their starting place somehow. Jon cited a comment by Vicki (couldn't find a link) that the conversation doesn't belong to anyone in particular. She's probably right, to a point. But at the same time  we could gain more by giving a hearing to the new voice that goes with the new idea.
4. Give one another the benefit of the doubt. Overall, people have been very patient with each other through this discussion, even though comment writing is right down there with email for being a poor vehicle for communicating emotion and nuance. We don't really want all the buzz to be about this anyway, do we?
5. Cross over. Jon got a traffic spike by writing about swimwear. I thought about turning this into a cat blog, but since Mutlu left, this is all I have to work with (link).
6. #5 was a joke, OK? We're all working to make a difference and blogs are just one part of that. We can go a little easier on ourselves as we try to take in the bigger picture.
   

An apology: I have lost track of the connection among several of the comments, and comments on comments. If I've missed a link, please add it in the comments.

Read 7000 posts in under 10 minutes

Today is my first day back to work since August. I've been away to help our sons settle in the US, work on other family affairs, and to attend to some health issues. During that time I pretty much stayed away from blogging, reading blogs, or keeping up much on anything at all.

About ten days ago I started reading again, and was daunted by the nearly 7500 unread posts in Bloglines, plus hundreds and hundreds of email bulletins and notifications from networks and wikis I'm a part of. I felt a little numb and overwhelmed during the first 500 or so, but I  began to see the trends and, stepping back, saw the emerging higher level patterns (á la one of my favorite books).

So here, in flagrant disregard for scientific data collection and analysis, is my summary of the key edublog topics that I was missing over the last six months, roughly in order of frequency, word count, or heft:

1. Buzz around big edutech conferences, where articulate keynote speakers cast visions, inspire, and challenge us to change the world. This buzz then fans out into auxilary visions for overhauling schools, but not enough, in my opinion, about deschooling.
   
2. (In a near tie with #1) Frustration over how unchanged the world is right now: fellow teachers, school technicians, administrators, board members, parents, whoever, who still don't get it.
3. Good news about students who get it: transformed classrooms full of self-directed, project-based, web 2.0 savvy teacher-facilitated lifelong learners. Bring it on!
4. The latest thing. In this case, Ning, Twitter, Voicethread, XO and "flat" everything.
5. Good news about fellow teachers, administrators, superintendents, board members, parents,  who get it, becoming transformed into facilitators, enablers, coaches, and catalysts. May their tribe increase!
6. (In a distant last place) Good stories about learning that aren't focused on the technology.

After 6 months of not reading, and then super intense scanning (slowing down many, many times to read more closely), I've seen the Pareto principle at work: 80% of the good stuff can be found in 20% of the blogs.  A lot of the rest is echo.

The posts I find myself slowing down for are those by people I've had personal (albeit digital) contact with, and those who say something unique. That has helped me clarify to myself why I blog, and I'd encourage others to think more about their own unique contribution. Along similar lines Terry Freedman had an interesting post about how fewer readers, not more, can help a blogger keep focus.

In spite of a lot of the grousing I've read, I have to say that change is happening out there. Up close, blog post by blog post, the change seems almost imperceptible sometimes, but stepping back, I could see that more and more people are experimenting and reflecting. Even though the technology per se is in focus maybe more than I'd wish, more practitioners are thinking more about teaching and learning, examining themselves, and letting go of preconceptions.

Remember that in the open sea, a tsunami is barely perceptible, yet full of tremendous power that is finally realized when it reaches the shore.

The photo is of my office when I arrived today. My desk will probably never be this clean again.

Window to the EduBlogger World

Today education bloggers around the world will participate in collaborative events that will showcase the EduBloggerWorld online social network. I joined the network about two months ago, and have enjoyed the interaction between edubloggers from many different countries.

One of the main events of the day is the contribution of blog posts around a common theme from as many edubloggers as possible. Here is my contribution.

I started blogging about three years ago as a way to challenge myself to improve my writing, and hence my observation and reflection, as I looked around for things to write about.  I've started and abandoned several blogs before creating this one as I learned more about the technical side of putting together a blog and also narrowed down my focus.

This blog is where I write about how we learn, how we use what we learn, and whether formal education helps or hinders those processes. I might write about education policy, cognition, education technologies, and my own "aha!" moments as I learn something new. I have studied pedagogy, literature, anthropology, linguistics and public administration, and I have worked both inside and outside the education sector in three different countries; those experiences, and a lifelong urge to find the connections between things, have given me a perspective that I think is worth sharing.

I blog principally for myself, as a way to focus my thoughts and find ways to articulate them effectively. Sometimes my thoughts strike a chord with other edubloggers, and so my blog create opportunities for me to have conversations with fascinating people around the world. I also blog as a way to share my discoveries with my colleagues, and as an example they can follow as they explore the possibilities of this medium in education. 

My window to the edublogger world is supposed to include a photo of either where I blog, or the view I have while blogging. I'm sharing both: the top photo is of my office in Ankara, and the bottom photo is my view of a snowball fight outside my window on a snowy day (notice the open classroom windows in the background?).

edubloggerworldmeetup2007

If you write it, they will read... or maybe not

One of my goals in this blog is to stimulate conversations among the people I work with here in Turkey and to encourage them to test the waters of Web 2.0. However, I find that often this blog reaches an audience quite different from the one I intended. 

There's nothing wrong with that, it's just an interesting twist in the blogging experience, since I'm always telling students that the best writing is supposed to be targeted toward a specific audience.

A few weeks ago I gave presentations to our  International Baccalaureate students about the extended essay requirement for the IB Diploma. In order to help them pay attention to me instead of their notebooks, I prepared my notes ahead of time and put them in a wiki, along with several other resources. 

The funny thing is that now nearly half of the visitors to the wiki are from outside Turkey ('FI'=Finland??). I guess those unexpected guests found me somehow on their quest to answer questions about the extended essay, and then moved on. That has made me appreciate comments on my blog even more, and makes me resolve to be a better commenter.

Sometimes writing a blog is like timidly starting a conversation with a stranger in a crowded room, and finding out out your paths have crossed many times. At other times, it can make you feel like someone passing out handbills in Kızılay (or Times Square). But never mind that. Just keep casting your nets and sharing what you've got, because you'll never know what will come back.

Back in a few days

We've started our 2-week semester break now, and I'm off to show off one of our favorite places to visitors from the US. I'll be back here in another week or so. Meanwhile, check out some of the blogs on my blogroll (on the left side of the screen), or in my Bloglines news feeds.