July 5, 2006

… if you’re a teacher who cares about teaching and learning.

Progressive Discourse

I’m back. I never intended to take a break, but I did. Here’s why:

My community of grade eight student bloggers became so big and so engaging that I spent every spare moment reading and writing within this community. My class community suddenly blossomed and I started seeing myself as an important part of the classroom community and no longer as a teacher who peddles content.

I became a participant in a series of dialogues. I witnessed the emergence of a semantic network, one where all links, all interactions were based on meaning. I knew that I had to devote all my energies to documenting it.

Tags: creating meaning, dialogue, blogging, social software

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… quoted by klaus

"Technocracies engender masses by commodifying the interactions between people. The blogosphere is a perfect example of how interaction has been commodified and reduced to the exchange of attention.

In an attention economy, attention is capital, and bloggers with (bigger) audiences can capitalize on that attention —quite literally, if they are using things like Google ads.

But a blogger with lots of readers can be said to have rich social interactions with them in the same impoverished sense that a person in MySpace with lots of contacts can be said to have many good friends.

In fact, I would suggest that the more attention capital is accrued, the less opportunities for meaningful social interaction are engendered, and the more entrenched one’s position in a mass becomes."

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… to help me get to SHIFT, in Lisbon this coming September 28 and 29.

If you have any ideas or suggestions, please contact me.

About SHiFT

Never before has technology been so much a part of our lives. But we don’t yet know what to expect - nor do we know how it’s going to impact on our lives and lifestyles.

What opportunities are there for integrating technologies into our daily routines? What problems do technologies solve and what problems are they creating for the future? Will technology increase the distances between people, those who have access to technology and those who don’t?

These kinds of questions are on many people’s mind. And yet there isn’t just one answer to most of them. Opening a dialogue is what we want to do in SHIFT.

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