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The Ed. Tech Dominance of the Edublogosphere

By Justin Bathon

Scott McLeod (an education technology theorist - is time for your own wikipedia page Scott?) over at Dangerously Irrelevant (a godfather edublog) has put a list together of the Top 50 P-12 Edublogs ... at least as ranked by Technorati authority. It must have taken forever to put together the list and I applaud Scott's efforts. But, the list is dominated by Education Technology blogs, as Jon Becker noted in the comments, which I agreed with. This has triggered Jon, who is also an ed. tech. blogger although he occasionally writes on legal issues, to write a post on his blog about the Ed. Tech. Echo Chamber. As a friend to Scott and Jon, I want to share some thoughts from a non-education technology blogger's perspective.

First, I 100% agree with Jon on his assessment of the education technology blogosphere as an echo chamber. The education technology field online has become so large with so many bloggers that it has become somewhat of a self-contained community, at least to an outside observer like myself. As a generalization (and with knowledge that there are many exceptions) an Ed. Tech. person will write something which gets commented on by ed. tech. folks, gets referenced by other ed. tech. people in their own blogs, and then there may be a Twitter conversation on it and finally it may even be the topic of conversation at an education technology specific conference, of which there are many but NECC is next. All of this is perfectly acceptable behavior and education technology is a healthy, functioning, twenty-first century social network. Something to be proud of, actually, and I can only dream of the day when educational law will look the same.

But, here are the rubs:

First, as far as I can tell, the ed. tech. field sees as Goal #1 the spreading of education technology knowledge to all k-12 educators which will help students learn. Well, when you are twittering, it is hard to bring in non-education tech. folks. It is a struggle just to get K-12 educators to visit blogs. If it were not for Google, I am not even sure how well we would be exceeding at that. To expect them to participate in Twitter conversations is unreasonable - so those conversations are 100% insulated conversations.

Second, largely the ed. tech. field seems to be expecting new bloggers to come to them. Why? Isn't that the opposite of Goal #1 above? When you see the blogosphere as a competitive marketplace for ideas, other bloggers on different topics (who will probably not be giving you Technorati bumps) are competitors, no? Why promote another's blog, especially a non-ed. tech. blog who is not going to reference you back? To me, that is the exact wrong way to visualize the education blogosphere if your goal is to nurture new edubloggers so that they can in turn help their students.   

Third, the dominating ed. tech. social network is scary to outsiders. If you are an insider, this is probably hard to understand, but you scare people. New non-ed. tech. bloggers are wide eyed and enthusiastic and think they are on the cutting edge of technology and get to share their ideas about X subject with the world! Yeah! They got themselves a new .blogspot web address and are using a standard template and then they see something like Scott's post yesterday. 50 blogs all with Technorati ratings over 100. Or they visit a page and see something like the visitor location tracker of Students 2.0 (pictured). Or the visit the professionally designed techLEARNING blog. Or they see that Education Week is now picking up bloggers. Or, yes, they see your new Voki, Jon.  Then they learn of this thing called widgets and aggregators and podcasting and this and that and the other and it starts to get a bit scary. I don't blame ed. tech. folks for always pushing the envelop and wanting to try new things, that's their job really, but it makes for a pretty scary learning curve that I am sure is discouraging to new bloggers.

Now, again, I am just making (over)generalized observations as an outsider with a Technorati rating of 20 (So, according to the edublogosphere, I have little authority anyway).  I have learned a lot personally from the ed. tech. blogosphere and I pass along these constructively critical comments as a friend. But, I do not think the Ed. Tech. Dominance of the edublogosphere is a necessarily healthy thing. It is concerning to me that we are primarily using Web 2.0 devices to ... talk about Web 2.0 devices.

Full post as published by Edjurist on June 05, 2008 (boomark / email).