Here are some resources from Scott Leslie's wonderful keynote presentation this morning at the 2009 Teaching w/ Technology Idea Exchange.
Some Primary Resources
Presentation Links
Check out the new look at edublogs. A blog isn't just for journaling anymore.
If you click the "10 ways to use your edublog to teach" logo on the front page, you will find a good idea list of various ways to use a blog.
If you are interested in more in depth information about teaching blogging and social software in general, read this report on a course given at Teachers College, Columbia University, entitled Teaching Social Software with Social Software, taught by Ulises Mejias.
The syllabus for the course is especially interesting. Also, do check out the ed&tech blog links he has. Great collection.
The ideology of The Wisdom of Crowds has been at the center of some controversy lately, what with the various MySpace (2,3) and Facebook incidents, and the recent Digg and Livejournal debacles, and the continuing wikiphobia and fear of the Internet.
So it was with some glee that I came across a reference, while reading some Lionel Trilling essays this weekend, to an essay by Matthew Arnold entitled "Numbers; or The Majority and The Remnant,'' one of the Discourses in America published in 1885 in the wake of his tour of the United States in 1883-4.
His argument is essentially this: History shows we cannot depend on the wisdom of crowds, but for every crowd there is a Remnant of those who retain an interest in The Serious. This Remnant is always necessarily a small but influential layer of a culture. When a culture is overtaken by The Crowd, it will fail, because the crowd "lacks principle, lacks persistence," and The Remnant will alone carry on the culture, if it can, but it often is not able to because it is simply too few in number.
This is not a new argument of course, but Arnold has a new twist on it that suits the American experience.
While many cultures - Athenian Greece, the Judea of Isaiah, the Rome Empire, and medieval and modern France are given as examples - fall into dissolution even with the presence of a superior Remnant, Arnold holds out hope that America, where the Remnant is small relatively but large absolutely simply because we have so many people, may save America from the fate of its predecessors.
And the symptoms of that fate include:
A life of comfort and craving for amusement were encouraged in every way, and the interest of citizens was withdrawn from serious things. Conversation became more and more frivolous....
He's referring to 4th century Athens, but it has already happened to 21st century America as well.
Even more insightful is his description of the danger of loss of the influence of this Remnant and the conquest of a culture by the Majority. In a culture controlled by the crowd such as in America,
...the danger is in the absence of the discipline of respect; in hardness and materialism, exaggeration and boastfulness; in a false smartness, a false audacity, a want of soul and delicacy.
Was there ever a more perfect description of everyday life on many social networks, with their ubiquitous "U suck ! I rule !" mentality ?
In fact, I would say that while it may be that Arnold's Remnant arguably provides for cultural survivability by reaching an absolute number, it may likewise be that The Majority paradoxically insures cultural demise by reaching an absolute number, too.
Certainly any veteran of a social network experiencing massive growth - Facebook and Second Life leap to mind - will have been witness to this very phenomenon: at a certain point these communities begin to attract more people to them than the community can absorb effectively by teaching them the proper norms, rules, behaviors, and ethos, to become successful community members.
Has no one in social software networking noticed that communities simply can't keep getting bigger? That there is an optimal size?
In his book Good Work, E.F. Schumacher once proposed that the optimal size for a business was about 350 people: much larger and you couldn't actually know everyone.
Why should an online community be unlimited in membership simply because its technology can now scale when its communal nature can not?
Captain Cook was a blogger.
So were the scientists and other Gentlemen in his crew, even some of the mates. They didn't have the word blogger yet, but they were writing something part log, part journal, part essay. And what they blogged was the raw material for published books: very influential books.
I just finished the wonderful biography by Nicholas Thomas, Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook.
One of the major themes of Thomas' view of Cook is his growth and transformation as a person and a writer during each of the three voyages, especially the first two. Cook is transformed by his personal experiences of managing first contacts with other cultures, and it is reflected in his journals.
He starts as a prosaic logger of voyage realia, but develops into a reflectic, aware writer, using his journals to help him come to some understanding of the novelties of cross cultural contact.
Of course, there are differences between the late 18th century journal and a modern blog: privacy, for one.
But the differences are not as much as we think.
It was evident that all the journal writers on Cook's voyages talked to each other and interacted with each other about the issues in their journals. They write drafts, then change them later in light of such conversations.
And when back in England, the journals are collected together, read and scrutinized by committees, and then edited into books -- some telling the officially sanctioned stories that the Admirality wanted to promulgate, and some not.
As the raw material of popular books, these journals became enormously influential in creating the perceptions that fueled empire: New Zealand was understood to have an already complex indigenous civilization and so was bargained with by formal treaty, hence Waitangi Day; while the "savages" on the eastern coast of Australia did not (and to some, still do not), hence the treatyless Invasion of Australia.
Did we mention the myth of Tahiti as a tropical sexual paradise?
But most of all, the journals of Cook show us the complexities of real life, of a real person dealing with unprecedented experiences the best he could, belying the superficial symbols of Cook as either The Bringer of Civilization or The Corruptor of Paradise.
In the future, will the blogs of today become primary source material for historians?
Yes, if they can be found....
This work by Randy Thornton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
