“I was in a meeting this week with a group of “educators”. We were talking about Communities of Practice. I mentioned blogging several times in the meeting. At the meeting’s end, one of the participants approached me and said, “Every time you mention blogging I get annoyed. It is only a fad and will never affect education.”

I believe that it is not a fad. I believe that Blogging, and its wider family of Social Software tools, will not only affect education but will shake our entire society to the core. I believe that our descendants will look back at its arrival the same way that we now look back at the advent of the printing press.

I believe that Social Software is a vector a return to an old culture. ”

http://smartpei.typepad.com/robert_patersons_weblog/2005/02/going_home_our_.html

I can hardly imagine what 50 years of a blog culture will do to our world. Can you?

I don’t think that cave dwellers OR tree house dwellers understand the implications of blogging technology. I do not believe Gutenberg could have foreseen the fallout from his printing press either.

That’s what makes blogging so fascinating (and frightening). Just think of the reformations that followed the invention of the printing press and the millions that were murdered for differing ideologies. The 15th century ‘Renaissance’ had a dark side which reveals a power struggle between intellectual freedom and government/church control.

Sound familiar?

But I see this attitude a lot with technology and how ill-informed opinions are spouted like facts.

I love Moodle, I hardly use it, but I love the concept, the delivery, the open-ness. I am a Moodle fan from afar and I hope it continues its trajectory of success.

My trees and cave message had nothing to do with Moodle, but people who in one stroke, just dismiss blogs based on a few visits to a few examples, or just outright snobbery. It comes from people who have not spent much interaction time in these rich environmments, and it is ludicrous to paint such broad brush strokes over such a wildly varied landscape.

I would not argue there are no vain, stupid, vain, pointless blogs. Maybe there’s a lot of them… but to dismiss all the potential based on the loudest examples is folly.

I am not going to argue quotations and citations and know little about the “graphomania” you describe in your link, but to me, you have just proved my point. You boldly state as a “fact” that blogs are ALL THE SAME JUST AN EGO OUTLET, and that I refuse to accept.

But hey, it is a free world, and I can be just as wrong as the next guy. However I admit it. Freely. And for that matter, I could get a rat’s behind if anyone reads my blog- I use tis for my own journaling, tracking ideas, and I search my blog on a daily basis to reference ideas and resources I wrote about years ago.

and then the argument “Come out of your trees” does not bring much to the debate about the nature of blogs : http://www.wouarf.com/blogtk/index.php?2005/05/24/25-une-nouvelle-forme-de-graphomanie-la-bloggomanie