Here are some high-points from Dave Sifry’s February State of the Blogosphere report, based on analysis of Technorati’s search statistics:
- 75,000 new weblogs are starting every day
- 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after they start their weblog
- 2.7 million bloggers update their blogs at least weekly.
- The blogosphere is 60 times larger than it was 3 years ago.
In the second part of Sifry’s State of the Blogsphere (Part II), he describes a new feature called Explore.
Why not use these authoritative bloggers as a new kind of editorial board? Watch what they do, what they post about, and what they link to as input to a new kind of display – a piece of media that showed you the most interesting posts and conversations that related to a topic area, like food, or technology, or politics, or PR. The idea is to use the bloggers that know the most about an area or topic to help spot the interesting trends that may never hit the “A-list”.
The list of topics comprise 65 items, from Advertising to Wine. Conspicuously missing (in my opinion) is education. I’ve noticed this in a number of technology and new media conversation communities. There is a lot of talk about the technology and the exciting potential impact on society, but no one seems interested in talking about what it means to education.
To be fair, I hacked the URL for the Technorati Explore feature to force education, and it came up. However, most of the posts dealt with immigration, religion in school, and Hillary Clinton. If we can break through the labels th
at are pasted across the school buildings of our minds, and actually see the classrooms that this new information environment enables, then I think it’s all people would want to talk about. It’s probably my own narrow point of view, but a compelling story about teaching and learning is needed — now.
Nice phrase “the school buildings of our minds.” Yet, isn’t blogging about education a little bit about taking the conversation to the widest possible audience. And if so, isn’t then the debate about education going to be simplified into these larger/mundane issues? Large audiences generally use these portal issues to get top the nuts and bults of a discipline.
What do you envision a education blog focusing on? And for whom?
Yes, but these larger/mundane issues are not breaking through into the classroom. They’re about school choice, redistricting, funding (or not funding), building policy, etc.
The education reporter for the Raleigh News & Observer has a blog through the paper. Of every posting I have read (and I’ve read most of them), he has never talked about anything going on inside of the classroom.
I suspect that the 12 or more years that we spent in classrooms, being taught to, read to, shown, and demonstrated to, sat in desks in straight rows, and taught how to be good students, has left no room for imagination. Our classroom experiences were so structured and so intense, that there’s no room for anything different.
This is why we need to figure out a new story about the classroom, one that is so exciting and compelling, that it will shatter our old images of the classroom. We need for the classrooms of our memories to seem like they were in the dark ages — which is kinda how our kids think about it, I suppose.
thanks, Thomas.
The Explore feature is a great one but there is not one for education! That is a great dissapointment. I have been frustrated from the “junk” I get on technorati when looking up education. We need a better way. For now, I will follow bloglines, delicious bookmarks, and read news from my favorite bloggers (including you!).