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There are any number of things I read in other people’s blogs that I would like to respond to. However, I must carve out the time needed to craft a thoughtful response.
The nature of the user interface of blogs is such that “he who hesitates is unread.” If you don’t response quickly, you’ve lost your chance to engage in the discussion. Once a few readers post replies, people stop reading.
As soon as the author posts the next blog, the collective memory of the community abandons the previous topic. It’s 4:03 AM and I must surrender to sleep soon.
I HATE THAT!
Engarrafamento photo by Fernando Lins http://www.flickr.com/photos/littera/281029688/
Veteran educator Gary Stager, Ph.D. is the author of Twenty Things to Do with a Computer – Forward 50, co-author of Invent To Learn — Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, publisher at Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, and the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. He led professional development in the world’s first 1:1 laptop schools thirty years ago and designed one of the oldest online graduate school programs. Gary is also the curator of The Seymour Papert archives at DailyPapert.com. Learn more about Gary here.
This is a bug in commenting not blogging. You can respond at your leisure here on your blog.
I agree Gary. Blogs have their good and bad side. I suppose each blogger will style their blog according to their learning style and preferences. eg. some bloggers do nurture their comment threads and encourage thoughtful discussion. In other blogs the comment threads read like an echo chamber. In others there is no ongoing discussion.
Slow, deep thinking is important and overall the blogosphere does not really encourage that, in some ways it might encourage superficiality. However, I think a slow deep thinker is better off putting their thoughts on line than not doing that. Just the fact that there is an audience does encourage clearer expression than scribbling in a notebook at home.
One approach I like is to transfer some of my blog posts to a wiki and refactor them there at my leisure.
Recently I’ve been learning python. It’s hard to blog about that – learning a programming language. Because mainly you learn programming by programming. (although there are a few meta issues I could write about). So blogging is mainly about expression in English or whatever. It’s more to do with Vygotsky than Papert.
Tom,
In order to concede to your argument one would need to agree that the read/write web is a lot more like you Write and I Read.
That’s hardly a new form of communication.
Having been reading the big name “edubloggers” for about a year now, I find that many seem to be caught up in “being a blogger”…for whatever that means. After a while, many begin to sound the same and do not appear to want comments or a conversation. It seems more important that they write and write and write and link and quote and write and quote and write. If there is an interesting post, rarely do they respond in the comments.
I admit that if I don’t check my bloglines for a couple of days and I see someone’s blog has over 20 posts…I don’t read them! I really doubt that one person can have THAT many interesting things to say in 48 hours. (I am not a Twitter fan either!)
Roxanne,
I agree with you to some degree… that it can become one’s mission to try and get readership as a symbol of status and success. The conversation element can get lost. Once one becomes a renowned edublogger, I am sure the pressure to remain “on top” is felt. If readership goes down, status slips. I would prefer a good conversation between 2 or 3 participants over a plethora of comments that are impossible to respond to and take the discussion in different directions. On the other hand, seeing the diversity of thought out there can be powerful and quite beneficial. Also, there are just so many blogs out there that to be an active conversationalist on all of them is not very easy. In the end, we should blog for ourselves. If others can benefit, then that is a great by-product.
I completely agree with Roxanne and Stephen. My ego drives a lot of my blogging activity and my desire to read other people’s blogs.
Status, traffic and Technorati ranking turns conversation into junior high school.
My ego drives a lot of my blogging activity …
But isn’t that true for any writing, whether it by a blog, book or article in a magazine. Ego drives the need to gain status within a community, among other benefits like money, etc. And status leads to more readers which in turn feeds the ego.
Good ideas seem to echo in a community and amplify. If it doesn’t, maybe the idea wasn’t that good. And the ego is driving the idea, rather than vice versa.
On another note,
I would rather see educators reflecting in a public way online blogging or in forums whatever turns them on, rather than only talking behind closed doors and in insulated silos.
The fact that I am talking to the author of an article that I read online is different than reading an article in a professional journal where it might be difficult to contact or see what other people thought about a particular article or topic. It adds perspective to the topic du jour, something that I see as a failure in the educational journals that I have read in the past or online ones where readers are discouraged from contributing to the conversation.