No, don’t worry, this post is not about blogging per se, and you won’t find a tedious Slideshare slideshow below pointing out the obvious or the ubiquitous YouTube video by Commoncraft. Blogs have an enormous potential for schools, but that is not what this post is about. This ground has already been well trodden.

This post, as all my posts, has two primary purposes: to help me understand and to make me reflect. The fact that you are kindly and patiently reading what goes on inside my head serves another selfish purpose: you might do some reflection of your own and you might share it with me.

I am immensely grateful to everyone who reads my blog and, particularly, to those who have interacted with me through it by pointing out what a fool I am sometimes or what a good idea that other thing was. Mostly the former, I have to admit.

This is precisely what is so good about Web 2.0: the reflection, the sharing, the collaboration and, most importantly, the learning.

This is why I find it so disheartening that some bloggers, who have spent a huge amount of time blogging about blogging and how beneficial to us all it is, suddenly start talking about there being too many bloggers diluting the conversation, or too many bloggers who fad on the latest gadget and don’t really care about the pedagogy behind it.

I, for one, don’t quote straight out of my doctoral thesis when writing a post. I don’t set out to teach, I set out to learn from the experience of writing about a topic and from you. 

I am also capable of reaching my own conclusions about pedagogy and will not begrudge someone the fact that they blogged about the newest web gadget and did not write a dissertation about its pedagogical value: I am just happy that that person was willing to share that information with me, I can then decide whether it actually is of any use to me, without pretentiously criticising the format in which the information was delivered.

In addition, I don’t think that a blog should be used as a platform to spew out quasi-intelligent rhetorical questions or magniloquent platitudes, such as the above mentioned you’re diluting my conversation, we need revolution, not evolution or, my favourite, if you don’t understand what I am talking about, you’re missing the point.

After all, we can all ask questions, can’t we? It’s just that I am rather more interested in the answers. 

As far as blogging and Web 2.0 are concerned, my philosophy remains unchanged: cuantos más, mejor – the more, the merrier. Don’t you think?

This post is tagged blog, collaboration, web 2.0