Wow. One whiny post making excuses for my pathetic output and I get a nice whack of supportive comments and emails for my self-indulgent troubles. Slight embarrassment aside, sincere thanks to everyone for the kind thoughts — I could never give up weblogging, no matter how I plumb the depths of anxious self-regard, I would miss you all way too much.
Thankfully, others are kicking out the ed tech jams in a big way (interestingly, a lot of the same people who took the time to buck me up)… even when I’m not posting I’m glued to my aggregator, and my respect and admiration for my distributed peer group grows and grows. There’s an unmistakable energy out in the community right now, and I feel sorry for the people in our field who have yet to jack into it.
Gave a lightning presentation to new faculty yesterday, on weblogs and wikis. Boy were my eyes opened… I’ve given the same spiel (with more time) several times before, and usually to a mixed student/grad student audience. They typically showed some awareness of blogs (50% or so read blogs, and usually a handful had their own, about the same for wiki users/editors).
The new faculty – out of 32 of them, 1 put up their hand to say they read blogs. Nobody knew wtf a wiki was.
So, I gave my 5 minute overview (in my allotted 4 minute time slot)
I summarized with something like this: Your students are using this shit already. They live and breathe it. If you don’t use it, or at least understand it, you’re already left behind.
… which was a roundabout way of saying that the number of people unjacked waaaay outnumbers the number of jacked-in folks. Which scares the hell out of me.
All new faculty members should be required–required, mind you–to watch Jon Udell’s screencast on Wikipedia’s “Heavy Metal Umlaut Bands” entry. Maybe Mr. and Ms. Jones will wake up and see that something is happening here and we’d better be wondering what it is.
This is indeed the new digital divide: between faculty and students. If we wait for a generational change, we’ll be waiting until today’s 19-year-olds get their Ph.D.’s and join the academy–if there is an academy by then.
Or we can keep trying to change all this, one presentation and one intellectual at a time.
Somedays I do not see how Doug Engelbart kept from losing his mind….
It’s all relativity, Einsteins… it just does not move as fast as we expect from riding on the rails…
I’ve been pushing blogs for 2 years, and more or less gave up, and just as I did, the waves of interest and questions have risen up. I tried to make a pitch for wikis, set ’em up by the bucket load, and they hung out in the desert breeze, dessicated and dead. Then someone spontaneously picked up on a session Brian did here and ran a workshop in a wiki. We set up a nifty eportfolio tool that spent a year with 7 eports, and somewhere it hit a slope change and mushrooomed to 120+. The uptake is just never as quick as one would guess.
The generational issues and gaps will always be here, the generation in elementry school will blow the doors off the ones we are worried about now.