Am I a Narcissist?

One of my valued colleagues was discussing blogging with me, and said he didn't feel like blogging because he doesn't feel as if he has anything to say that is all that interesting. I replied that I felt the same way until I started blogging, at which point he said this is a condition known as "narcissism." What scares me is that he's in the field of mental health!

But, of course, I've wondered before whether this form of communication is excessively narcissistic, with the blogger's entries' appearing large and the commenters' appearing smaller and accessed on a different, remote, page. You have to assume that someone wants to hear what you're saying to be a blogger. Is my ego out of control when I sit down to write these blog entries?

In the end, I decided to begin to blog, because I simply couldn't exist as a person interested in literacy and not be part of the blogosphere. Plus, I had a good picture to use. So, narcissistic or not, here I am.

On a somewhat related note, in the March 31 issue of The New Yorker, there is article by Eric Alterman that paints a very grim picture of the current state of the newspaper business. The article focuses on the Huffington Post web site as an example of how the newspaper business just doesn't get it, how news is participatory now, how people need to discuss issues and stories, and have more of a need to shape the news. Interestingly, after all this, the article has a twist ending (perhaps predictably coming from one of the temples of fact checking), that we will still need paid journalists that follow some journalistic ethics and who have the time to dig into a story.

But why do we always assume that print is beyond reproach? Can anyone forget The Weekly World News?

The bottom line is that, fact checking or not, people are not waiting 24 hours for their hard copy of the newspaper to land on their doorsteps anymore. And even if they did, they are going to want to discuss it in a more interactive environment than they've ever had before, to comment on it, and to share it with their friends, to look at it embedded with links to graphics, sound, and video. Are these new forms more narcissistic than the old forms? Maybe, but that was then; this is now. People need to "get with the 90s."

My neighbor, Jack Gieck, writes about the canal days of old-time Akron. He can tell you all kinds of things about the beauty of that form of transportation. But, is anyone going back to that form, no matter how beautiful it was?

Oh well, I better go check how this blog entry looks before I post it. And check how many comments I got on my last post.

Report Your Local Teacher!

Just back from AERA/New York City, where I saw this scary sign hanging in Times Square.

Winkle Awakes

Here's a little video that makes a point about how some things have changed over the last 100 years, but some things are still quite recognizable to Mr. Winkle.

Pathways Project

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been in discussion with folks at NCTE headquarters about writing a curriculum that would focus on “21st Century Literacies” that would be part of the Pathways online professional development program. I have agreed to do so along with Ernest Morrell, from UCLA; Laurie Henry from the University of Kentucky; and Elizabeth Beagle, a teacher from Virginia Beach. I am excited about the project, because I think we will be creating an innovative site filled with lots of good ideas for teachers; this will include some new streaming video clips. (I don’t know yet what our budget is, but I would welcome ideas for locations. We would need to shoot in early May.) Ernest, Laurie, Elizabeth and I are heading for Urbana, Illinois (NCTE headquarters) for a meeting this Thursday and Friday to plan out the curriculum. The goal that has been set by NCTE is to introduce the new Pathways 21st Century Literacies program at the Indianapolis conference. Registrants will be provided with a one-year subscription to it, as I understand it, and the four of us curriculum writers will be moderating online discussions on the site for the next school year. Let me hear your thoughts about what should (or shouldn't) be included in this important project.

Also, within the last 10 days, I’ve been asked to be one of the presenters at the Indy conference. I hope to find more details about this later this week, and I’ll communicate it with all of you.

My Comment Was So Long It Should Be On My Blog

Below is a comment that I recently left in response to Will Richardson's blog entry of March 14.

As a blogging newbie myself, and as someone who studies teachers’ uses and
non-uses of “new literacies,” I’ve been fascinated by this thread and am now
about to be one of those new voices that Will is mentioning.

Of course we all know there are so many barriers to uses of new media in traditional schools. My new teachers continue to tell me of all the familiar filters and rules and regulations that prevent them from even doing the simplest things. Not to mention that their very contract renewal depends upon their students’ performance on paper/pencil tests that are anything but current.
But what I’ve been amazed at is the amazing amount of time that blogging takes. And now we have “live blogging” in which people are writing summary transcripts of live events and then other people are logging in and then another group of people are reading this transcript, or listening to podcasts in which someone records his/her feelings about a recent live event. Not to mention watching the uStream of the event.

I know many educators who barely have time to go to the grocery store much less keep up with the 130 comments, as Will mentioned. So who ends up participating in this dialogue? People who don’t sleep? Or maybe people who are foregoing “American Idol?” Maybe that’s a good thing!
But I also think about the rhetorical constraints of the traditional blog design, and I wonder if we’ll look back someday at these early blogs as we do now at silent films. The “comments” are usually subordinate to the main blogger, in that they appear in much smaller font and without some of the accompanying audio/visual aides. I think what may happen is that, yes, it becomes somewhat participatory but in a fairly monotonous way–just from the standpoint of who is participating in the blog. How many people are going to Will’s blog (or mine or Clarence’s) who aren’t already converts or who aren’t really already very interested in this topic? I really felt for that principal the other day who defended here the banning of cell phones (even though I don’t agree with her either. So there!)

A somewhat related note: are poor typists left out of the conversation? I’m serious!

Oh well, I don’t know that any of this is really new, and I feel bad for taking up someone’s time who read it. It’s so long that I should have put it on my own blog. And it’s taken me about 30 minutes to compose this, even as I’ve got a million things to do as we’re getting ready to sell our house. But that’s a post for my personal blog.

Potato Chips and Macbeth

Yesterday, I heard from Chris Shamburg of the New Jersey City University. He does some neat work with the Folger Shakespeare Library. Look at this video clip that shows how he incorporates sound effects design (Foley) into a Macbeth unit.

Back Channel This!

This recent New York Times article has actually got me thinking in a more alarmist fashion than I usually do. The writer admits to being a techno-addict who recently forced himself to go without any form of computer technology for 24 hours, just because he felt he may be in danger of becoming a techno-addict. Of course, I don't need to do that. I can stop any time I want! I'm nowhere near the kind of hypothetical conference attendee described in Will Richardson's blog post of February 29 who spends the entire time at a conference live blogging and having back channel discussions with people in the room and across the world while the speaker is talking, even beaming reaction shots of people in the audience over Ustream. (But what are they reacting to--the speaker, or their laptop screens?) One respondent to that blog entry said he had recently been at a conference and missed half a session he wanted to see, because he was lost in an online conversation he was having about the session. (Of course, given a lot of conferences I've been to recently, I can't blame him.)

It reminds me of one of my favorite films, Being There, in which Peter Sellers plays a character who only experiences the world through the medium of television, and even carries his remote control around with him, once he gets out of the house, so he can change the channel when real life becomes unpleasant. Are the new media turning us into people who are hooked on the experience of reacting, rather than acting? Wow, it is such a relief to be blogging about this.