What Educators Do Best

One of the obvious joys of blogging is the opportunity to be an expert on everything, even if only in my own mind, and in my case, that's where my joy has been pretty much confined to. Playing with what I can only consider to be an educational blog (because it has no other apparent useful value), I started thinking that I might eventually want to actually connect with some kind of audience. Originally I took it that making connections would depend on assigning the right key words to insure attention from like-minded intellectuals searching for information. Eventually I determined that perhaps there were no such key words, or no such intellectuals, at least who would admit it, or that what I was producing didn’t qualify as intellectual, or maybe even as information.

Based on this positive attitude, by trial and error I eventually came up with the idea that perhaps I could more productively apply the effort to looking at some blogs and blogging strategy instead of thinking I knew how online searching worked. After skimming through a few educational blogs, however, I quickly realized something else. There are numerous suggestions for great ideas, resources, and connections, but probably 95% of posted material, like blogs for a lot of subjects, either repeats what has been posted other places or rediscovers things that have been produced by somebody else, adding captions to screen captures from Second Life as cartoon graphics, for instance.

Some of the responses make sarcastic comments about redundancy, some attribute social networking to political conspiracy or alien intervention, and some include links to Pamela Anderson's latest sex tape (...which is really about animal rights. How would I know? Research.) but the authors are not discouraged, and in the end, does it matter? Blogging communities are more insular than global information access seems to suggest, and we spend a lot of time chasing our own tails, but is that really any different than talking to somebody you know about something cool you found out about on the internet? Probably not, neither.

And does that mean blogging for education is a bad idea? No, it just means that the problem isn’t information. The problem is access. Educators spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel, but then, maybe that’s what they do best.

Here's Thinking for You

Iffy