Outside of the Echo Chamber
I was just reading the comments to Will Richardson’s latest post and was amazed and the mix: nobodies (like me) not just rubbing elbows but conversing with some of the biggest names in our field: Will, Gary Stager, Chris Sessums, and others. People who don’t just present but who keynote at conferences. People who write the books and articles that we all read. And I’m thinking to myself, “the internet, web 2.0, this is it! It’s breaking down the walls. It’s all coming true. It’s no longer the ivory tower vs. the trenches.”
But is that true outside of the field of educational technology? We tell teachers they should build out their “personal learning networks” and get in on the conversation, but what is the conversation like in their fields? I suspect it’s not so rich as it is up here in the choir loft. Take a look at the latest issue of Mathematics Teacher and try searching for any of the authors of the articles on Technorati or Google BlogSearch. I hope you do better than I did, because as far as I can tell, the five or six that I looked at had no online presence whatsoever. Ouch. Then try searching for blogs on Technorati using search terms like “geometry teacher” or “high school geometry.” Double-ouch. Not only are the experts not part of the conversation, there is no conversation.
A sobering exercise, but one that I will remember the next time I stand in front of a group of teachers and tell them how wonderful blogs are for professional development. It’s possible that the stuff is out there and I’m just missing it. But maybe we just aren’t there yet. If that’s true, how do we get there? How do we jump start these conversations so teachers can see the wonderful things we’re all seeing when we fire up our RSS readers and go running around the edublogsphere?
