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.