Today is Day 1 of The Bamboo Project’s 31-Day Comment Challenge. I don’t know that I will be participating (I’m humiliated by my poor performance with NaPoWriMo last month) but it’s not a bad idea at all. If you don’t neglect your blog as often as I do, Alan’s Pledge of Blog Abstinence where you take a week off from your own blog and contribute only through comments on others’ blogs (blogments… or, if they are good, perhaps blaugments) is a related good idea.

[photo by Kris Krug]

I’ve long used this famous quote from Leaves of Grass to explain (and explain away) my rather marked inconsistencies:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large—I contain multitudes.)

I feel a need to justify my inconsistency because most of the people I follow and admire could be fairly grouped together based on their amazing surety. If they knowingly contradict themselves or, as I sometimes do, forget their former position and come to something new, it’s not something a lot of them (with some obvious exceptions) choose to share with the rest of us. For reasons that aren’t relevant to this particular discussion, my mental model has been one that not only equated consistency with being “right” but put changing one’s mind in the same class as intellectual weakness.

So I found myself glued to the monitor when I discovered that the Edge World Question Center’s annual question for 2008 was “What have you changed your mind about and why?”  Seeing so many incredible thinkers sharing details of sometimes sweeping changes of mind was inspiring. If they’re OK with it, why shouldn’t I be? This thought, in combination with my recent experience at Northern Voice– where I had the opportunity to learn from so many peers, colleagues and intellectual idols whose passion is clear and strong without being dogmatic– has proven to be a heady and unnerving potion. Some part of me has been opened up that was formerly barely open a crack. If you know me, you might find this literally unbelievable, but I was actually hugging friends– and not just as a barely-tolerated gesture, but the real thing– and making sure I got my share of the hugging action. I hadn’t willingly hugged another person in that way, recognizing deep, Platonic kinship, for years (except for one glaring exception that happened at at Northern Voice last year)!

So here are some things I’ve changed my mind about relatively recently– some exceedingly large and some small and unremarkable:

• It’s OK to need people. I have a lot of weaknesses… refusing the benefits of friendship doesn’t have to be one of them. Even lone wolves and introverts can have friends… they probably need them. Ultimately tied to this is the realization that:
• I have something unique to offer. I’ve done a lot of teaching and given a lot of presentations. I know I have a minor talent for it. But only recently have I begin to believe that my work has lead to a powerful and unique (or very rare) combination of skills, knowledge, and obsessions.
• Tackling the big problems directly isn’t necessarily an act of hubris. What do Lawrence Lessig, Barack Obama and Barbara Ganley have in common? They’re all willing– in very different ways and approaches– to tackle the big, abstract problems. I have to reconcile my  belief in transformation and innovation with the acts of the individuals that can make that happen.
• The power of individual talent and genius shouldn’t be overlooked. I believe in the power of collective intelligence, social networks and group sense-making (thus it follows that Andrew Keen and Lee Siegel are dorks). That being said, many of the things I love most– such as great works of art– are the product of immense individual effort by often less-than-admirable individuals. In our understandable rush to realize the power of the social, let’s leave more than just room for these misfit impulses to operate… let’s embrace them. Then each of us can embrace them within ourselves.
• The possibility of the Divine… and my need to make sense of that possibility even if it means uncomfortable changes follow in my life.

What have you changed your mind about?

I came across Conrad Glogowski’s edublog while searching for existing material on learning communities and Third Places (turns out we share a similar theoretical framework in this area), and have remained a fan because he regularly provides very concrete, useful details and artifacts of his approach to teaching usually reinforced with examples of student work.

In "Towards Reflective BlogTalk" he shares a useful practice, examples and a handout he’s developed (The Ripple Effect) to encourage students to engage with (and thus reinforce) the blogging environment in their classroom:

While not always unfamiliar or far out on the cutting edge, I also applaud educators sharing their "fundamentals." It’s amazing how often these philosophies and principles turn out to fulfill a critical need for readers. In that category I put Conrad’s first shot at his stages of Creating Learning Experiences:

Sylvia Currie, a Northern Voice co-panelist, is getting the word out about an interesting (and timely) online seminar:

Seminar: Blogging to Enhance Learning Experiences February 12 - 25, 2007 Facilitated by Michael Griffith

How are you using blogs to enhance learning experiences? Blogging is becoming a familiar activity in our daily lives, and many educators are integrating blogs into their teaching practices. This seminar is an opportunity to share our blogging experiences and to discuss effective strategies for teaching and learning.

Access the seminar directly: http://scope.lidc.sfu.ca/mod/forum/view.php?id=400
To contribute to discussions and customize your visits to SCoPE you will need to self-register http://scope.lidc.sfu.ca

SCoPE is an online community hosted by Simon Fraser University. Discussions are moderated by volunteers in our community, and are free and open to the public. We expect and welcome newcomers, latecomers, and passersby. Please spread the word!

I love what SCoPE is doing and need to spend some non-lurker time there! [tags]edblogging, seminar, scope[/tags]

Congratulations, huzzahs, kudos, etc. to Doug for Borderland’s nomination as an Edublog Best Teacher Blog 2006. Well deserved.

I love hearing about edublogging success. Here’s a great one from a seventh grade teacher regarding her students and their interaction with “the world at large.” Seventh graders, interaction with working scientists and high level journalists… as the teacher puts it:

Frankly, I expected to see the benefits of blogging in terms of students connecting with one another. But I never expected to have them connect with the world at large so quickly.

D’Arcy Norman’s edublog reading list is now available through Blogbridge’s Topic Guides service. What’s not there is almost as interesting as what is… the echo echo chamber chamber lives lives but somehow the information gets through.

The Teaching Hacks wiki contains some very useful resources on a number of usual social suspects– social bookmarks, RSS, folksonomy– as well as some that are not discussed as frequently, like GeoTagging. Highly recommended (even if post-secondary educators aren’t a recognized group there) along with the Teaching Hacks blog.

Audio files for the recent Bloggercon IV are available from the official site and Doc Searls has live notes available for each session.

Some former colleagues of mine have posted a presentation on blogging in libraries for HigherEdBlogCon. Topically, it’s the same kinds of things I and others have been talking about and presenting about for a few years– and the sidebar navigation looks and smells funky– but it’s worth a read to see very simple, brass-tacks ways that blogs are being used to help create and share collaborative knowledge and awareness. I particularly like the English Liaison blog, which would ideally expand into a multi-faceted community of outreach and topical info.

It’s nice to see an institution I’ve been a part of make positive technological changes, even if most of the ideas are only starting to take hold years after I’ve gone. My former employer, the Rasmuson Library, has never been exactly technologically-averse, but like many libraries they’ve typically been oriented towards the top-down, hierarchical provision of information (at which they have excelled for a long time) rather than embracing the community aspects of the Internet.

I’ve been blogging for a long time– long before there was a term blog or software to facilitate it. Many of my first blog entries were composed while standing behind the Media Desk or from my office when we created the first Instructional Technology center on campus. I mention this because my orientation to technology has never been about a typical Geek’s fascination with new toys, but about communication and information… and how the Internet could facilitate sharing and access.

Part of being a technologist is watching your own projects eclipsed, replaced, and dropped as you move on to other things– while I was at Rasmuson I created a wide range of projects designed to expose hidden resources to the public and make information web-accessible: the first web-based media catalog, an online periodicals review system (which resulted in my first publication and conference presentation), an “infobase” that was kind of a library directory meets experts database, and a “smart” Interlibrary Loan system… not to mention bringing the first LMS to the campus (I sometimes regret that), hosting mailing lists and discussion forums for classes, etc. Most of these have been replaced by bigger and better things: out of the box solutions that didn’t exist then, and new systems with expanded capabilities. I see that as something to be proud of.