Month March 2005

I was pleased to discover, thanks to Nate, that Ward Cates has become a part of the AECT blogging community. I welcome Ward for a couple of reasons, he is a representative of that group of people within AECT who have the stature withint AECT to change the way blogging is viewed within the profession and also because I consider Ward to be a friend. I look forward to reading Ward’s thoughts (through his blog) and hope that there will be more like him who begin to recognize the tremedous potential that blogging can have within our discipline. Speaking of which – welcome also goes out to Sharon Smaldino. May the ranks thus continue to swell.

I have lately come to an interesting discovery as to why most education centered blogs tend to become “blogging in education” centered blogs. Not long after I started blogging I became disinterested in blogging because so much of it was inward focused on the merits of blogs in education. Once I got over that and started to focus on writing about the things that I was interested in (and finding other sources that were more focused on those things) I began to really appreciate the potential power of blogs. As I began to blog more I became acutely aware of the potential power that is lost because of the lack of participation within our professional community. Basically it comes down to the fact that the adoption rate is not high enough yet. That brings me to begin pushing for ways to get more people involved and aware of the benefits and power of blogging which means that I have started blogging more about blogging than I used to. My only disclaimer is that I am also pushing other educational bloggers to take their message back to the traditional outlets and to refine their message to be more effective in promoting the wider adoption that will really lend power to the medium of blogging. We can use the blogs as a platform to solve the issues related to adoption, but in the end we must take the solution outside of the blogosphere or slse it remains nothing more than an unproven theory of how to get people involved. Update – see Scott Adams’ Conversations about starting a blog for another good perspective on this subject.

Thank you Nate for sending exactly the message that more people in AECT and education need to hear. In Why Blog II you have reminded us of the essence of what we need to tell the current non-participants. unfortunately those non-participants will never see your message because they are not participating. My latest quest is to get the blogging community to recognize the need to take our message back to the traditional outlets of information distribution and Nate has given me the perfect example to work with.