More Awesome Teaching Techniques

Because a number of people are working with ATT program and consider it valuable, I'm usually not going to use real names for the people and stuff that make up the program. However, one of the things I'm supposed to be doing is, and I quote, "Establish a presence on the Ning," which clearly needs no further explanation.

What follows is an excerpt from my Ning presencing, talking about whether people really use all the social networking stuff that's out there. I had made the point that, unlike people in my generation, it never occurs to kids that they will ever lost contact with anyone they want to stay in touch with.

It's also a matter of what technologies you have and what you prefer to use. My kids and their friends all use Facebook, but most of their real communication is by texting and IM. My older daughter does a lot of collaborative schoolwork using IM, which is a relatively old technology but one that does what it does very easily and very well. I've been blogging and reading blogs for several years now, and the only reason I don't use Twitter much is that I have an old cell phone, so I can't really take full advantage of it. That'll probably change when I get an iPhone or a Droid or some such thing. I'm not sure if Twitter is the pulse of the Internet (someone else with Ning presence had made that statement) or the flavor of the month. It's way too early to know.

Going back to my original point about not being concerned about the ability to stay connected to people, as you can see, I have a bird, Eric the bird for you Monty Python fans. (Non-Ningers will need to look at my Facebook page to see what I'm talking about) Eric can be frightened by many things, blue file folders inexplicably being among them, but the one thing he is definitely not afraid of is falling. He's a bird and he can fly. It just doesn't occur to him that he could fall.

Finally, on another point, anyone who feels inclined to jump headlong into the pool of information would be well advised to read Amusing Ourselves to Death, by the late Neil Postman. I think I might re-read it myself.

The Postman book is terrific but not easy reading. One of the points he makes is that most of the information we get now is devoid of context and unconnected to anything else (for example, news about some kidnapping in California or political events and speeches done to look good on TV rather than to contain anything useful).

I'm kind of rambling all over the place here, but overall my point is that, given the risks and rewards inherent in the medium, the principles with which you guide your use of the Internet should be consistent with your principles as a human being. Note, this means actually knowing what your principles are, a piece of self-knowledge well worth seeking. For me, that means knowing what's private and what's public (easy to do because I do it in the classroom every day), and being able to discern the difference between the things that are important to me and those that are not, and to dismiss the latter as meaningless noise.