One-Trick Pony

One-Trick Pony - "Thing 2":

500 blogs a day? Why?

Why would I want to read 500 personal diaries of anything, even if they were "filtered" for content, until I had the reading skills to isolate what mattered, or unless I were doing specialized research?

Who and what does the filtering? Am I the only one troubled by the illusion of "open" information that this creates and the potential for mind- and content-control on a massive scale? Science fiction will surely catch up with this eventually...

Our students are not "there" yet--they just get the illusion that they are from this type of superficial experience (see the recent Atlantic Monthly article about why Google is distorting reading habits). Reading pedagogy will also have to evolve to accommodate the addiction to self-revelation at any cost.

I assigned a Spanish "Wordle" for the first time, at the suggestion of a MILI Blogger colleague. It appears to be a "one-trick pony"--amusing but quickly exhausted, even by my lower-level students, who were already asking the following: "How do I do accents?" and "How come I can't put in pictures?" and "Is that ALL there is to it?"

Indeed.

This suggests that "Wordle" is a self-limited tool--a one-bite experience, a one-trick pony, however entertaining it maybe.

Blogging applications? More to come...