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How Many Bloggers Does It Take to Post About an Online Conference?

Submitted by Steven Burt on Wed, 2007-05-23 10:56.

This morning I was scanning through my feeds from various edtech blogs to "see what was afoot in the old ed-tech echo chamber." Perhaps simiilar to Tom , I tend to peer into the seedy underbelly of so-called ed-tech bloggers with rather copious amounts of trepedation .

In other words (and, I suspect here I'm just re-stating the obvious) most of the time, looking at what the majority of these blogs offer is not a matter of finding out about interesting tools or resources, but rather a slow and somewhat baffling ride up a Conradian-stream of "I link to what you pointed out so that I can post about what he said so that she'll point to my post about his post."

Make sense? It's very modern, I guess - some would say central to "21st Century Learning Skills"; you know, the Web 2.0 stuff. When I used to teach HOD (note: early 20th century) to my 12th graders they struggle with just this sort of "literature"*.

So, why am I prattling on this way? I guess seeing no less than eight (virtually identical) posts about the K12 online conference in less than two minutes left me a bit agog (and more convinced of echo-like chamber of the so-call Ed Tech Blogosphere). Witness here , here , here , here , here , here , here , and here .

I'm sure there are more.

Isn't there a better way to do this? I know, everyone wants to "get it out to their vast network of readers" but its beginning to feel a lot like turning on the evening news and seeing Katie, Chuck, Wolf, along with John all talking about the exact same thing (with the same imagery, same text, same, same, same). If this is what "new journalism" is all about (even at its fringes) then, as the saying goes, it seems much too much like a revolution that I can't dance at; so I'll just pass.

*With regard to Conrad and HOD, to me HOD and other early 20th century writings novels (like those of Joyce, for instance) really are central to understanding contemporary literature; however, most blogs (inclucding ed-tech blogs - gasp!) are not (nor are they scholarly) though they often claim to be.

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How many EduBloggers?

Submitted by Steve Dembo (not verified) on Thu, 2007-05-31 13:22.
Thanks for the link! My work here is done... Ok, seriously though, I have no problem with it. In fact, I'll take it a step further, I think it's imperative that people do it. How many people are still brand new to the blogging world? Most of those people have never heard of del.icio.us, or Flickr, or Bloglines and so on. If we took the attitude "Will posted about it, so everybody knows about it now" then I think we're going to short change many many people. Text is cheap. Aggregator space is cheap. And if you don't like it, that's why we're using aggregators to begin with. Just move right along. I do see where you're coming from, but I think it's better to err on the side of broadcasting info too much, than to have people not know about it. *shrugs* So long as you keep linking to me, I'll keep doing things that tick you off :)
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