Chapter 2: Weblogs

In the spirit of weblogging, can some collaborator please tell me how to italicize just the title of the text in the blog title description box?

I have more experience with WIKIs than blogs, and was a little confused to see the blog described by Richardson as the place to post assignments.  I had always thought of it primarily as a tool for dialogue.  I like the idea, stated on p. 22, that posting everything allows "transparency" --so that not only students, but administrators, parents, and colleagues alike can see how instruction is scaffolded.  When I first started using a WIKI to post class notes and handouts I designed, I feared parents or maybe an administrator or two, clicking on and then commenting about my pedagogy.  Instead, (except for a few parents who say I give too MUCH information and they don't like to read it all) I have actually found the transparency helpful in defending my compliance with IEPs that ask for copies of teacher notes or extra copies of work.  It has also helped when a parent or student has suggested that I did not model or give clear directions--the administration has been able to click on the documents and sample work posted to see that kids DID have ample documentation.  There is almost no he said/she said.

I was confused about the quote from the University of Connecticut Professor on page 29 which states that because of new technology "we read online as authors and we write online as readers".  For one thing, there is nothing new about the idea that we read to write and write to read--the internet did not CREATE that symbiosis.

Richardson also contends that blogging will somehow improve upon the accuracy of information because "even the N.Y. Times can get it horribly wrong."  This statement,  with no reference to what, speifically the Times purportedly messed up on, is what annoys me as I read. The writing is often rambling and incoherent--a little like a screen shot of a bunch of blogs bound and printed. He throws out statements such as "writing is thesis, blogging is synthesis".  Blogging can be even more monologue than previous vehicles for writing.  ANYONE can get into print and run off about anything for pages and pages.  Kind of like I am doing.  No pubisher in his right mind would pay me to write this drivel.  The synthesis assumes SOMEONE will read--not skim-- but actually read and consider the ideas in a blog. Maybe someone will respond, but it is not a dialogue unless someone is following.  And it is more often  "juxtoposition" --a postioning of a bunch of monologues near each other--than synthesis, which implies making meaning out of melding ideas.

Blogs that exist beyond what Richarson derisively dismisses as the "contirved purposes of the classroom"(31) tend to attract readers with similiar interests and viewpoints. Not unlike talk radio, bloggers tend to applaud and augment each other's existing world view. The NPR audience is unlikely to call in to Sean Hannity, and the Limbaugh fan is not frequenting POTUS.  Blogging is as likely as any past vehicle of communication to be a gathering place for validating an already predetermined view.

Most Blogging is more like the meeting of the minds at separate lunch room tables, than a classroom discussion where even kids who don't like each other or who don't like to talk to each other have to hear each other out. There is no physcial button to cut off the human conversation as quickly as closing a screen or just scrolling by ends a virtual conversation.

I DO agree that the Internet DOES allow fast fact checking to potentially control dissemination of poor information.  When the Birthers spread their FACTS about the President's citizenship, there may, I assume, have been comment to the contrary posted by the legion of everyday "editors."  This did not, however, STOP the dissemination of nonsense--or ever reach Donald Trump.

I used the power of the internet search to look up the date of the Samuel Johnson quote Richardson juxtoposes with a bunch of other points that have no clear connection. Richardson suggests that Johnson once wrote or said, "I hate to read a writer who has written more than he has read" (30).  After checking the first page and a half of google responses to my query about the origin of this quotation, the only place I could find this quote was in blogs referencing Richardson quoting Johnson.

Blogs--with their work in progress nature--invite quick posts without footnotes and careful editing.  Indeed, in an article in the NY TIMES magazine Barbara Horowiz notes that digital publishing is leaving out the footnotes she painstaking adds to her writing.

NY TIMES article on digital death of fact-checkable citations

I DID, however, find a pithy Johnson quote that seemed even more appropriate to the subject of blogging.  Johnson wrote, "What is written without effort is, in general, read without pleasure." 
I found this quote in a number of sources, so I am assuming it is correct.  BUT the internet is utimately no more reliable than a bunch of bad print sources.  Bloggers can gleefully quote the same faulty source, the way writers once spread the gospel of phrenology. It is a giant 21st century game of telephone--with the power to exponentially spread viruses of half truths.

A GOOD blog, like a good book, requires a thesis--a point. Just because something is digital, high-tech, and collaborative, does not mean our students will somehow magically begin listening to each other or critically thinking. Anyone who has ever worked on a committee knows that collaboration is no guarantee of quality or clarity.  Note the cacaphony of collaborative voices rising from the "Occupy Wall St. movement. We can throw our students into more souped-up vehicles, but the kids' brains and motivation are still required for the thought to get out of the parking lot. Fallible humans, not machines, are the drivers.  We can use the power of the pen (mouse?) to change the world for the better or crash and burn at warp speed.

Technology is a tool, not the end point. I like lots of the new tools--and think some are soon to be obsolete toys.  Heck, I even got a grant for extra bells and whistles to make my ELMO document camera more interactive.  While I have used and will probably continue to use innovations--(my work day now extends hours into a rational person's dinnertime because I do find value in time spent getting lessons and resources out through web channels) --I am insulted at the tone of books like Richardson's.  I read his text and hear echoes of  Billy Mayes hawking Oxylean.