Will Richardson’s Blog Evaluation—Two postings under consideration
Tina Luffman—EDU255

A Cocktail Party Filled With Educators
Will Richardson’s top post in this link describes how educational blogs are like going to a cocktail party. Apparently he believes that blogging can be as good for meeting colleagues, networking, and gaining new ideas as going to the proverbial cocktail party where people had gone in the past to get connected with other peers to gain insight and influence. I would argue that they could be even better. Consider all of the time and money we can save by merely reading someone’s blog over getting dressed up and going to the party.

Here in this blog we listen to a newspaper reporter interviewing a high school principal to gain the principal’s viewpoint on how this works. He believes it is a great way to gain feedback, get tips, find helpful links, and join conversations to stimulate deeper thinking upon educational topics we don’t necessarily take the time to do on our own. One point the principal makes is that blog following has made his day longer. He has to do this activity in addition to his other duties. Unfortunately this is true. We will not get more time from our supervisors when we investigate new technologies. However, many of the new ideas we get may save us time and help us to be better teachers, so we need to weigh the benefits and decide for ourselves how much time to invest.

The Web as Human Development
In this posting, Will talks about a conversation he had with his friend and former colleague Rob Mancabelli about the challenges and difficulties many have in embracing the newer technologies. They decided that the resistance is not in learning the technology as much as changing our viewpoint on transparency and privacy issues.

I have to agree that changing my viewpoint on these issues is immense. My own husband wanted us to do online banking. I balked, and he took over our family’s banking. That was actually helpful to me, but it still took some work to trust having our money available for anyone to hack into and rob. You can easily see how difficult this was for me, but he explained that it was online anyway, so we might as well have access to it and use it for our own convenience.

Similarly we as educators need to dive in and allow ourselves to be more transparent and lose some of our privacy as we teach using Web 2.0 technologies. If we don’t, we surely will lose credibility as we teach the next generation of learners, teachers, and philosophers. When we do move forward with these technologies, we will find ourselves communicating and changing as we “author” one another. This is another term that gives me discomfort, but I don’t see any means of turning back, and I am not sure it would be a good thing to do so.