Please, this has to stop. You have to stop reducing your ideological opposition to its most loathsome members. It’s an easy way to gain sympathy and traction but you’re undermining yourselves and you’re positively driving me crazy.

Right now, as I type this, some School 2.0 blogger is pasting up a poster on her blog’s brick wall denouncing the lazy, lecture-driven, intellectually-abusive, technologically-ignorant teacher. Happens every day and shows up in my feed once a week.

Happened a few days ago, in fact, and it’s intentionally going unlinked because the author is typically such a class act:

“Sit down, shut up, and learn,” is no longer an acceptable model for effective classroom instruction.

Maybe some of the teachers who consciously (or unconsciously) parrot that ethos have yet to retire. Maybe their ranks are still thick but, if they exist and if they’re as obstinate and stupid as you School 2.0 bloggers have established them to be (over and over and over again) then you will not change their minds. Even sadder, none of them read your blog.

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Also: Why Crash Isn’t As Good As You Think It Is

A few weeks ago I posted this diptych, the only intent of which was to illustrate my gripping inability to see left and right from my students’ perspective.

A commenter hinted at a metaphor beneath the surface, one which eluded me until coupla days ago when Christian Long literalized it substantially.

Christian takes Creative Commons to Threat Level Midnight, completely remixing my original point and launching those photos on a faraway journey to School 2.0 land, where one of largest predators is the one-way dynamic between teacher and student. Christian holds my diptych up as an example of this kind of passive learning (he means no offense and none is taken; it’s a selective look at my practice) and asks what the future of learning would look like if similarly put to photographs.

It’s an evenhanded critique of traditional education, so evenhanded, in fact, I have to seize the moment to point out how other School 2.0-ists prop up their agenda by slinging mud at the traditional speaker-audience model.

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I can’t really get a handle on Stephen Downes. Is he for this emergent 21st-century school? Against it? Is he after something far more anarchic than either of these? These are all rhetorical. Whatever his ideology, I really appreciated his recent deconstruction of a post by Doug Johnson. Johnson’s only offense, from the perspective of this School 2.0 skeptic, was leaning too heavily on jargon and coded language when explicit terms are necessary now more than ever. (Maybe this is what Christian would call a Trojan Horse post.) Repeatedly over the course of his post, Downes asks (essentially), “What do you really mean by this?” which is a question that always leaves me grateful to the asker.

That lady is kind of a frightening avatar, if you ask me, but damn if tteach! isn’t the first time I caught the School 2.0 chills that seem to afflict everyone else on an hourly basis. I have such high hopes for this. Ditto Scott’s recent open letter to Sec. Spellings. [via Eric]