Crimes against the language (or, Adventures in Jargonland)

I've now heard that thing I did today was called a "webinar." This is exactly why I don't like this kind of thing very much. The word seminar is defined (among other things) as a meeting of people to discuss a particular topic. It says nothing about the venue. Should we have called it an audinar if we had it in the auditorium? Or we could do it outside and call it a lawninar.

So the purpose of the program is to help teachers use 20th century techniques, specifically web-based social media tools, but anything that, according to the moderators, moves us away from our current paradigm. This is a problem for me because my brain is set to automatically shut down if someone ever uses the word paradigm. Look it up and tell me if you know what it means after reading the definition. Nobody knows what it means, which makes it extremely useful if you want to sound impressive without actually saying anything.

This is kind of how things went. The program is called something along the lines of Awesome Teaching Tools, or ATT (it's not really called that, but that's the spirit of it) and they keep talking about all the awesome things we'll do and using lots of impressive-sounding buzzwords, but nobody ever actually tells you what those things are. The one time someone asked about a specific thing they said they weren't going to tell us for a few weeks.

You can look at this two ways, certainly an Awesome teaching technique is to let everyone figure stuff out on their own, to have a voyage of discovery. Of course the cynical view is that there really isn't anything and that we'll just make it up as we go along. It reminds of an obscure Monty Python bit where this woman comes on a talk show to discuss her theory about the brontosaurus. She goes on and on and on about how wonderful her theory is until the interviewer finally has to stop her and ask, "So what is it?" And she responds, "What is what?" At which point you can't help but assume that there is no theory, she just likes talking about having a theory, (that's actually an incorrect assumption because there is a theory and it's brilliant in a Python kind of way, but that's beside the point)

So I spent 2 hours doing I have no idea what, and I guess there are worse things. But I'm not sure I want to manage transformational change around the new literacies in order to grow as a f2f professional learning team. But that's just me. Or maybe I'm already doing it and I just don't know yet. My head hurts.