Poet Ponders the Digital

Like most educators interested in technology and pedagogy, I have followed the digital revolution down many dead-end paths. We want to believe in publishing (and sharing) for the masses, but I'm less convinced today than I was twenty years ago that the masses want to share serious ideas. The masses want to share kitties, their latest meals, breaking celebrity gossip, and photos they will regret sharing almost as soon as the images enter the data stream. Blogger. Facebook. Twitter. Tumblr. I have five semi-active Blogger-based blogs. My wife and I have a less active writing blog. I have Facebook pages for the blogs, Twitter feeds, and two Tumblr accounts. The traffic to the blogs is in decline, from thousands of weekly visits to a few hundred. The Facebook pages are also trailing off, as Facebook seeks to charge for promoting content. Twitter just annoys me, with an endless stream of automated tweets. I do have one account from which I follow real people posting real,...

I have always preferred to work alone, despising group work. Apparently, I'm not the only person to realize group work is absolutely not better  than working alone:   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all Pedagogically, I've always thought that groups allow students to avoid improving some skills. When I assign a group project, the best design student ends up doing the layout and design. Yes, that makes perfect sense and results in the best grade, but it doesn't help the student most in need of practice. Sure, we should play to our strengths on teams, but school is also about improving your weaknesses. We must balance letting students focus on their favorite tasks and skills against the need to get students to do what they don't realize they can do. Teams allow too many students to avoid work, while other students end up doing extra work. I want to work on my own, most of time, and that's ...