Where have all the bloggers gone?
Will Richardson is blogging about once per week now. In April, he wrote a totlal of 6 posts. In April of 2007, he wrote 27. Andy Carvin wrote 1 post in February, 2009 and 7 in February of 2007. David Jakes went from 8 (April, 2007) to 2 (April, 2009). What happened? Where have all the bloggers gone?
I suppose the answer is Twitter. And that upsets me, because in the course of that transition, what has happened to the conversation? We’ve gone from expansive, probing reflection to 140-character platitudes, from the symposium to the water cooler. This is definitely the English teacher in me speaking, but I fear that Twitter is robbing us of a great opportunity to think through writing, a shift which will most harm students, who stand to learn a great deal through blogging. I think there is a synergy between the higher-order thinking skills that educators so value and desire and blogging; I just don’t see that same synergy with tweets.
It’s not that there’s no place for the kind of rapid fire, conversational interchange that Twitter supports; there most definitely is. But I hate to see it elbowing the kind of rich discourse that blogs engender out of the way. Seeing this happen only proves what the most fervent critics of educational innovations complain about: we run to the “next big thing” before we’ve had a chance to master the last one and before it has taken hold in a systemic way in classrooms.
I hope that maybe when the excitement over Twitter dies down, some of our best bloggers – and our developing bloggers, too – get back to the longer stuff. We need it!
Image Source: DigitalParadox, http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitalparadox/16900939/sizes/s/#cc_license
2 Comments
Lately I’ve been looking at blogs and video podcasts from Iraq and other areas in the Middle East. After reading about the situation in Iraq in the New York Times and listening to pundits discuss it on Meet the Press, I felt I was missing a critical piece of the picture. We spend a lot of time talking about the war’s meaning to America and Americans: Is it a help in the War on Terror or a hinderance? How is it affecting America’s position and credibility among the countries in the world? Will it expand into a regional conflict? But what does it all mean to the people of Iraq? I knew long ago that we had failed to “win” their hearts and minds, but what’s in those hearts and minds now? And, more specifically, how do the hearts and minds of Iraqis differ from one another: mainstream media speak of “the Iraqi people” or the Sunnis and the Shi’ites, but rarely do they take that next step and actually try to represent the diversity of thought and feeling among the Iraqis.
