Only the most foolish and myopic observers will see these trends and happenings as proof of ‘the end of the blog’. The blogosphere is alive and well and, indeed, maturing into something that, at its best, can add even more now to the sum of human knowledge and welfare than it did in its first decade. Twitter in particular has, I believe, had an interesting effect on the more traditional kinds of blogging (how odd it is to be able to term a phenomenon as young as the blog as ‘traditional’). Some of those who were swept up by that mid-decade burgeoning of blogs have pretty much abandoned their blogs altogether and now inhabit the Twittersphere instead – they have realised that the 140 character ‘limit’ is no limit at all, and they have grasped the intriguing freedoms it offers with both hands. Again, those who dismiss Twitter as a bastion of trivia and ephemera completely miss the point. However many bloggers are now working with a combination of their blogs, Twitter, perhaps Facebook, and myriad other tools – but for the bloggers, of course, their blog is still the central component. At least, that’s how it is for me.

So, what is the blogosphere becoming? How is this maturing of blogging manifesting itself on the ground? I glanced through a large number of still-active and vibrant blogs (all of which I follow daily in my RSS feed) and I took a quick ‘temperature’ of what I saw. In there, I could see bloggers using their blogs effectively for a number of significant purposes, and often for more than one. These include:

• chronicling and commenting on a journey (metaphorical, emotional, virtual, personal or whatever)
• a vehicle for personal expression
• a tool for channeling vanity and ego into productive (or even simply interesting) creativity
• a focal point – or one of a matrix of focal points – for a conversation, a debate, an argument
• developing a genuinely critical voice in one or more knowledge domains
• a highly effective network-building instrument
• a medium for high quality journalism and comment
• maintaining a simple personal or family diary
• building and maintaining contact with customers, friends, colleagues, whoever
• an outlet for scholarly writing, thinking and research
• a platform for political, ideological, philosophical, religious, anti-religious ideas
• and, of course, a conduit for a whole world of thinking, practice and ideas in education

The list, even on the basis of my quick perusal of that tiny portion of the blogosphere that I inhabit, could go on and on – and I am sure that fellow-bloggers could quickly expand the list many times over.

And interestingly for me, I am beginning to feel a slight resurgence in interest in blogging, especially as I travel to various parts of the world. I am beginning to wonder if the blogosphere is about to see a second bounce start to happen….I hope so.

Blogs are alive. They are spirited, passionate, intriguing, emotional, informative and a window on humanity. I’m more than happy still to be a blogger.

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogosphere, microblogging, social technology

How right she is, although I am sure she is also aware of the deep and complex arguments that surround such a seemingly simple statement of fact. School will never ever be ‘out’ again given that digital and networking technologies have rendered the walls of the school invisible and are rapidly disrupting the notion of ‘the school day’. And the implications for the definition of school itself are profound. Many will continue to defend the age-old and venerable form of this particular institution, but it is a definition that cannot survive in its current form for very much longer.

Technorati Tags: dina pule, school, change, education, technology

McLuhan was contemplating the nature of the world that had been created by the printed word, and the quite different world that he was able to discern, long before most other commentators gleaned it, one that was in the process of being created by the electronic age (as he termed it). He observed a necessary dislocation between the two, just as there had been a dislocation between the oral culture that prevailed in the era of the manuscript and the radically different culture brought about by the arrival of the printing press.

McLuhan’s thinking, arising as it did in a relatively early stage of the development of electronic media, and certainly long before the advent of the Web and the social technologies we see today, is complex and challenging, built on wide reading, and, if anything, even more pertinent today than it was in 1962. Those who dismiss McLuhan’s work as deterministic miss the point: given the time in which he was writing, it is clear that he was able to see further ahead than most at the time and that his thinking was inevitably broad-brush in character. Read McLuhan as a kind of predictive poetry and he starts to make much more sense.

The culture engendered by the manuscript, McLuhan argues, was an overwhelmingly oral culture, a world in which poetry and song were as one, in which learning meant listening, memorizing and passing on, and in which the notion of copyright, the personal ownership of intellectual property, was quite meaningless (since the only way that the creativity of one could be preserved was by its accurate re-creation by others).

It must be evident to anyone but the most stubborn and died-in-the-wool that we now find ourselves at an equally profound moment of interplay. The shift from the culture of print, with all its myriad consequences for the nations and societies that have been the organizational basis for human society for many hundreds of years, from the now-passing period of mass reproduction of intellectual creativity, to the slowly-crystallizing-but-as-yet-amorphuous world of digital bits, with the myriad consequences that will undoubtedly shape human society for an unfathomable period of years, decades or centuries to come, is happening, and right now.

I have no doubt that we are once again at a moment of interplay between worlds, at a moment of dissolution and resolution. The least useful reaction to this shift is to decry, and to continue to wish longingly for the deferment of, change, hoping for the perpetuation of a world that is already shimmering and fading in the haze caused by the ever-increasing torrent of bits. The most useful reaction is, of course, to make the best of it that we can. We humans have always been able to adapt to profound change in the past, and I have no doubt we will do so again.

We know now that Socrates was wrong to bemoan the coming of the written alphabet. We know now why the Catholic Church detested and fought against the effects of the culture of print. Even in these early stages of the digital era, it is interesting to watch the writhings of those who are already finding the inevitability of change most uncomfortable.

I believe that Education is sliding with ever-increasing rapidity towards its own moment of interplay. The institutional, political, economic and cultural forces of tradition and orthodoxy in education are doing their best to hold onto what they have built over the generations, but our age-old understanding of such well-worn and seemingly immutable categories as the school, the teacher, the university, the curriculum and, of course, the student is about to shift – is already shifting – under the weight of change. The foundations of the school as we know it go deep down into the ground on which our societies have stood since at least the start of the industrial revolution; the depth of those foundations mean that the school will survive for a long time to come.

But the school’s thick walls and deep foundations are, of course, quite invisible to the torrent of bits. The learner – a category that need never again be restricted in institutional terms – is increasingly free to learn what, when, how, with whom he or she wants, and for whatever reason he or she decides. The school or the university (or the Government or the Church) will hold less and less sway over the learner’s answers to such critical questions. We can already see these categories dissolving in front of us – how they will resolve themselves in the digital era is a question we can only as yet guess the answers to.

Just as forms of disintermediation are already hitting other areas of human interaction and commerce – newspapers, music, travel, etc – so it must happen in education too. I’ve been thinking about what that process of disintermediation might look like in education, and I believe it will take a much more complex form than the relatively simple forces playing on these other areas. I’ll come back to this soon.

Technorati Tags: Marshall McLuhan, gutenberg galaxy, oral culture, manuscript, print culture, digital culture, disintermediation

From the Bloomsbury Academic website:

We’re committed to publishing the best scholarship in the social sciences and humanities – and for the content being as widely accessed as possible.

Our research publications will be made available online on a Creative Commons non-commercial license. Unlike open access journals we are not looking for authors (or their research funders) to pay for the publishing process. From mid 2010 they will appear on our new platform in html. Until then PDFs will be posted on this website. At the same time we will be publishing in traditional print book formats as well as ebooks with enhanced functionalities.

The debate over whether or not free availability increases or decreases sales rages on, not just in publishing but also in the music and film industries. Pilot projects in academic publishing indicate that book sales are not harmed, and authors are happy to reach a wider audience.

Because research and teaching are inextricably linked we’ve purchased a superb backlist of upper level textbooks from the Arnold/Hodder collection to complement our research-led publications. These were not conceived to appear on CC licenses and will be available for sale only. However, we are discussing a few experimental models where we’ll be opening up content as much as possible online. Please subscribe to our e-Newsletter for more information as we work on this.

We welcome feedback on our publishing model.

It is gratifying to see a reputable publishing house such as Bloomsbury dipping its toes in the waters of open publishing and open scholarship. It is equally gratifying to see them link these issues, correctly, with wider issues in education. I will watch their steps in this broad area with interest.

The video is the first part of a talk from Cory Doctorow, on a visit to the Bloomsbury offices, in which he offers his thoughts on the issues of ‘publishing, e-books and pricing”, with a few other bits and pieces thrown in besides. The rest of the talk, in 10 minute chunks, is on the Bloomsbury YouTube channel.

Technorati Tags: bloomsbury, e-books, open publishing, open scholarship, cory doctorow

We get home on Saturday 17th July. Already, I feel fully rested and ready to take on another year of working, blogging, travelling, reading, writing and….oh….a host of other ‘ings’ that I can’t think of right now.

Whether you are already on a summer break or you still have that delight to come, I hope yours is every but as pleasant as ours has been

Technorati Tags: personal, summer vacation, summer break

I first met Stephen at Cisco’s Public Sector Summit in Stockholm in December 2005 and got on with him very well indeed, helped I think by his own Scottish roots, but also, simply, because he proved to be a very nice and affable man indeed. We’ve met a couple of times since then when I’ve been out in Australia.

According to The Australian, Stephen is returning to the private sector from whence he came before joining the DET. The private sector’s gain is most definitely the public sector’s loss in Australia.

Technorati Tags: stephen wilson, cio, nsw, det

….it was the same in the 1960s. There were a few voices in Washington who asked awkward questions, but in the main there was no public debate about the wisdom — never mind the ethics or the feasability — of the war in Southeast Asia. And so the killing continued until — eventually — the US bowed to the inevitable and scuttled.

John Naughton on the striking similarities between the USA’s prosecution of the war in Afghanistan and their conduct during the war in Vietnam in the ’60s and ’70s.

I heard an American colleague, a former military man, say (and I paraphrase):

Our problem is we do not have a foreign policy; all we have is a powerful military….

Andrew Sullivan, in his column in The Atlantic, quoted by John in his post, says much the same thing:

One suspects there is simply no stopping this war machine….

One suspects he may be right.

Technorati Tags: war in afghanistan, vietnam war, john naughton, andrew sullivan, the atlantic, US foreign policy

In a much-quoted paragraph from the Treatise on Human Nature, Scottish Enlightenment Philosopher, David Hume wrote:

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.

Essentially, he was saying that there is no necessary connection between an ‘is’ and an ‘ought’, between the descriptive and the prescriptive.

Carl Sagan, in the video above, says:

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.

It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the only home we’ve ever known: the pale blue dot.

Having established the fundamental insignificance of our species in the cosmos – difficult to disagree with – he reaches the entirely humane and compassionate verdict that we therefore have a deep responsibility to preserve and cherish our little pale blue dot. I agree with him. But others could take the same demonstration of our conceits and decide that it really doesn’t matter, therefore, what we do with the planet. I see at least as many examples of the latter every day of the week as I do the former.

An interesting example of Hume’s point, I think.

That aside, Sagan’s video is well worth spending six minutes with – but it is marred by its dependence on a series of images that have been pulled from the monstrous distorting lens of Hollywood: fun for movie fans, but a superficial note in a serious message. A sequence of images of real people rather than performing mannequins would have been more convincing.

Technorati Tags: carl sagan, david hume, pale blue dot, hollywood

A great resource for book lovers!

Technorati Tags: bibliophile, books, online education database

Free schools are a side-show. If they want to persuade us otherwise, the message for the Department for Education is: must try harder.

So says BenC on his blog, pencilandpapertest. He offers an excellent critique of the Department of Education’s very own ‘dodgy dossier’ that pushes the Tory notion of free schools. Definitely worth a read.

Thanks to @rachelala for the link via Twitter.

Technorati Tags: paperandpenciltest, michael gove, department of education, england