In all this, the one variable I wish could control is the difference between my pedagogy and that of 90% of the edublogosphere. What I’m saying is that, on any given day, I read five endorsements of school computing swiss-cheesed by faulty assumptions and, since the revolution demands solidarity (ie. “at least the message is on the streets”) they go unchallenged
A lot of the time they’re innocuous cases of irrational exuberance but other times the conclusions drawn are on the order of, “If you still use handouts, you’re a deficient educator,” conclusions which long ago heaved out the bathwater and now have the baby halfway through the drain.
Or elsewhere, I find absolute prescriptions, solutions which work great in magnet schools unregulated by standards with tablet PCs for every student and a fat pipe sucking down the Internet, but which don’t come close to acknowledging the realities faced by, say, an educator working with 37 students assisted by one campus computer lab running 17 blueberry iMacs, a single home DSL connection split across the entire school. Those prescriptions strike me, at best, as hopelessly out of touch.
What I’m saying is that it’s much easier in this tech-enamored ‘sphere of ours to write those posts than it is to criticize them. I’m not saying my rejoinders don’t demand a more objective tone (I’m saying the opposite) just that, having exhumed a lot of dusty blog posts the last few days, a lot of people seem less offended by my tone and more offended that someone bothered to contradict their majority opinion.
What I’m saying is that you can expect my tone to change around here but we will still challenge each other. It’s still open season on your sacred cows.
