Richardson Final

I have now finished ready Will Richardson’s Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts. I am playing catch up. No matter. What I really want is to read each of the push back books because I’m a Luddite and I don’t believe anything Richardson says. That’s not quite true. I admire his excitement for all things about the Read/Write Web. I agree that that is probably where most of my students are, or will be soon. I’m not there. I don’t like it and I don’t care for it. I hate social networking because it’s no substitute for real relationships. I hate email because it’s short, and fast, and convenient and thoughtless and it ties you down and allows idiots to defer decision-making to others more competent. I want to browse where my eye fancies and reduce the volume of information I am forced to receive. But I am living in the past and I have to help my students join the present, and so I will try to work up a little bit of enthusiasm for Richardson. But I’m not there, yet.

RSS and the Social Web

I’ve known about RSS for ages but I’ve never tried it. No curiosity. But I understand its utility to aggregate more stuff than I would know what to do with and so with that thought, I might consider trying it in a very limited way. At first. I can imagine that it would be useful to obtain numerous POVs for a single subject of interest in one place, but having said that I don’t think that most folks are genuinely interested in multiple POVs anymore. I recognize that RSS and some of the functions of the social web, such as cloud bookmarking have a utility that is unique to the online world. Their efficacy lies in their ability to draw down content, filter it, package it and present it for ever more efficient consumption. That’s a cool thing to have. But I harbor deep suspicions about the educational efficacy of such facilities. I tried to explain what I found troubling about RSS and social networking in class but I think there was either a disconnect or else I don’t understand both or my arguments were not clear. So, to clarify. I love the news. I love being able to know what is going on in the world. I do not watch the news on TV anymore (too short, too shallow, to simplified). For years now, I have turned to the internet for news. I have, five general news websites bookmarked, and one tech news site. I don’t subscribe to any of them. I checked each of them everyday, sometimes twice or three times daily. The sites are: BBC news, The Guardian, The New York Times, NPR National Public Radio, and Stuff.co.nz (New Zealand news online aggregator). Sometimes I go looking for what I am interested in. Sometimes I will follow a story across all five sites. But a lot of the time I browse. That’s what my browser is for, right. It’s like all five sources are delivered to my door and I’ll sit at the table on a Sunday with all the sections spread out before me, enjoying what I might learn or discover: Because a lot of the time I don’t know which story, will quicken my pulse. I browse because I want to find what I don’t know about. I look for stuff which I would never have found through RSS because I didn’t know it existed.

I took a look at my bookmarks: a lot of them are articles that struck me in a particular way and I wanted to be able to go back and read them again later, or because they set off a useful train of thought. In a way they are stories that discovered me. I couldn’t have found them without the leisure of browsing. And just because they attracted me once doesn’t mean I would want them to lead others “like” them to me. One of the reasons I still buy books in a brick and mortar store is because of the opportunity it affords me to hold something unexpected in my hand. Amazon doesn’t do that. It shows me what I’m looking for, or what others bought eventually, or what others like. Amazon doesn’t get in my brain and figure out that I am an eclectic reader.

I like Richardson’s enthusiasm but I don’t believe it is healthy. I think about how many of my colleagues in the class have never edited Wikipedia or posted on a blog, or collaborated on a wiki: and we function just fine. Better than average if any of the push back texts speak a modicum of truth. I have seen what high schoolers are like. I recognize that most of them never read even one percent of what I did at their age. I could write poems in chalk around them while they saunter to the café. I just don’t think that anything that Richardson advocates will benefit them as much as he says, especially when their lack of reading, their content knowledge ignorance and their lack of intellectual curiosity leaves them clutching at straws when they have to string more than two sentences together. Blogs, wikis, and so on are cool tools. They bring the world outside of the classroom in, in a uniquely immediate way, but they are still tools. I don’t see how anything posted online by students is of any value to anyone, even themselves. I view these tools as no more than mirrors to their vanity, occasionally a healthy thing to peer into, but just not nearly opaque enough for them to see inside themselves and figure out just how much they don’t know and how important it is for them to read about things they would not have found alone. As a language arts teacher, I view my job in a traditional sense. Richardson might argue that I will lose the kids. If they can’t connect to the language that we have inherited, then, to a great extent, they are already lost. And it’s therefore my job to find them again. Blogs and wikis may help that some, but certainly no more than a coffee-stained, dog-eared, second-hand, 1984 edition of Lord of the Flies would. (Push back text influenced post)(The Dumbest Generation).