Thing #14 Technorati and other things I don't understand.

OK. The video of the Technorati people was, to me, more of a thing about blogging in general, and less about tagging. I tried looking at "School Library Learning 2.0" through Technorati but felt as if I was an univited guest listening in on random conversations that had been going on for months. I guess I don't get it, as usual.

While we are here, let's look at Dan's understanding of Blogs. A bunch of people, either semi-annyomious, or blatently out for a buck (newspaper columnists) post a stream of consciousness, 24/7. There is little citing, less proof that what they are saying is anything but drunken musings. Our own people in my school district (God bless them, they are the most knowlegeable people I know!) post constantly without giving their names.

It seems, from what I gathered from Technorati, that blogging is now what the Internet was 15 years ago. Anarchy. Anyone says anything they want, sharing their opinions, but not having to back anything up with facts.

Yet, in my reasearch classes in college, and in what I teach my students, we must have some sense that the source is legitimate and not just another student who could be making it up as they go (like me).

If blogging, and its close cousin, Wikipedia, are so wonderful, why is my school district spending so much money on dull, corporate databases that can back up everything they publish with citations?? A 5th grader who writes a paper about the presidential election based on what the other 5th graders in his class tell him, is probably going to write an interesting paper, but I doubt much of it will be relevant.

I get that I am supposed to be sampling blogs for new ideas and procedures, but I'm kinda busy working with my students right now. What I am doing in my library seems to work. The teachers respect me (they don't understand me, but they depend on me), my students love me, and I have some evidence that I am effective.

Using facts from Texas Education Agency, I can prove my effectiveness.

I was the Sterling City ISD librarian for 6 years. The high school was exemplary all six years, but not before I got there, or after I left. In fact, now, after 3 years, they are just acceptable. They also do not have a certified librarian anymore!

I have been at Treasure Forest Elementary for 3 years. before I arrived the school had never risen above acceptable, and at one point was almost unacceptable. In my three years, the school was "recognized" for 2 years and is currently "exemplary".

See, I made the difference!


See, what I have been seeing just these past few days reminds me an awful lot of what we used to do in the Army. Listen in on other people's converstations (Ever read The Puzzle Palace ?). But there was so much stuff out there, and you didn't always know who was talking, and it was just as easy for the other side to salt the airwaves with garbage and send us looking for boogie men while the real bad guys laughed themselves silly over how much trouble they were causing us. The National Security Agency can probably record every telephone call in the world, and store it on the biggest computers in history, but it takes a whole lot of analysis to find what is truly important. Most of it is not.

And the above paragraph is one of the reasons why I wear hearing aids today, too much listing to static in the hopes of hearing a really good morsel, like Gorbachev wears lace underwear! That's all my wife wanted to know.

Maybe this summer I will come into the Media Center and sit at the feet of my mentors and make sense of the blogosphere, but I will worry about that tomorrow, at Tara, after all..........