This blog doesn’t have a very long history (since late, late December 2009…), and as such, I have passed a few simple mileposts. I am well past 100 posts, and decided that I should look over what I done. I started this particular blog with what I considered to be reasonable goals (i.e. reasonable then, they seem rather pretentious now…). I wanted to cover some of the things I thought were of value, and in that sense, I expected to have some sort of ‘school 2.0-technology blog’… Sheesh, the hubris of youth!
While many aspects of these topics and much of the technology interested me (and still do!), I found some subtle, and relatively dark perspectives. For instance, I spent some time looking into many forms of technology, the people who were covering it, and even some of the vendors and suppliers on the internet. I found two things which were unfortunate. First off, I found that the plethoras of websites which cover these issues are merely catbirds sitting on the fence. An example of this relates to my experiments with the Atlas Gloves… I had many problems and could see that I would have to hack the java code (to a degree far beyond my interest level!). After looking over all of the web-sites which proselytized them, I found that not one of them did anything other than to collate interesting work other people have done…that was it, to tests, to examinations of the technology, just dilettante-like ‘coverage’.
The other sad thing I found out was that in some of the areas I was looking into, such as hardware and software which could be used in a classroom, was filled with suppliers who didn’t seem to understand what to do about quality assurance in products. I happily found one gleaming exception (3Pinteract of New Zealand, which looks to be a solid, honest company which produces some great products!), but on the main, I found a lot of internet ‘get rich quick’ schemes.
As a consequence, I have slowly been changing the focus of this blog. I started to examine the concept of blogs in a broader sense. Originally, I had intended on creating a lot of content which was based upon my digesting and re-spinning online content, but I started to realize that there is so much content out there, of real value, that almost anything I would be doing would effectively turn into a haze of noise surrounding these resources.
I realized that the prime content which bloggers can bring is based upon what they personally bring to the table. I have seen hundreds of ‘cooking blogs’, which cover what that person actually did in his or her kitchen. I think that this is a fine example of what could have value in blogs. On the other hand I have never been too interested in printing my personal opinions, other than as a means to accomplish some other tasks as a writer. And it was here where I found what may be prime reason for blogging…
Questions…
There are so many sites out there which presume to tell you what is going on, what is new, what is cool, to tell you their opinions, and to give you answers. I think that it is more interesting to think in terms of asking the right question, rather than to merely get the answer. I have found that questions are one of the primary (only?) ways to get to the truth (whatever that may be…right now…). And as a teacher, I always try to get students to think in these terms. As a consequence, in this blog, I try to come up with a few new questions every day. I have a few rules, this whole production can only take 30 minutes of my time from the moment I open this word document to my loading the results onto my blog. This keeps me relatively honest, in that if it takes much longer than that to pose a question, you need to start over!
So, for the random reader of this blog, (i.e. anyone other than the small coterie of regular readers…very small…but greatly appreciated!)I suppose I should come up with a question for today…
I suppose the overarching question to examine would be to consider whether asking questions is the sole method to get to the core of a problem… What greater value is there in inquiry? Since the internet has so much factual information, is asking questions of more value to students now?
More later (obviously…)
