Ed.Tech and Desire

Schools, Web 2.0, and the specter of desire is a nice mind-bender of a post. I'll quote too much of it, because I think these two paragraphs really show the contrast between old views of educational technology and the emerging view:

"It's not about storing and delivering documents, obtaining and protecting content, reproducing the class and department structures, restoring the Ozymandian authority of the pedagogue, driving students back to books, adding a human dimension to the chilly mechanical, regaining their attention, or fighting for brand and relevance. Pederson's rumination casts us back to some of the desires which knitted learners and teachers together in the first place, and still draw us into the same space. Listen to the fluidity of that swarm of desires, and think about how the Web 2.0 platform easily enables them to embody and proliferate.

Such desires are productive, constructive. We don't enter the classroom and await for Freire-free content to pour into our heads; instead we post, comment, search, and agglutinate into clusters aimed at getting knowledge. We publish our thoughts and findings in venues more finely grained, rapidly responsive, and far more broadly accessible than the scholarly paper or presentation, from wikis in process to sequences of archived blog entries. The open, social nature of the new Web means this experience is shareable, and hence replicable, and also driven by desire - I can point to a multiblog, multicampus discussion, then add to it in another entry, garnering feedback from still other audiences., a thing not at all possible with face-to-face classrooms or BlackBoard."

Via Stephen.