Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are
2 min read
Over at weblogg-ed, Will Richardson has a post about, among other things, how teachers are increasingly networked outside their district, but not inside their district. As I see it, this is a pretty natural progression, and one that can be loosely compared to how people understood and used the web.
To paraphrase and expand on my comment on his blog:
From Will's post:
But one thing (again) that has really been sticky from EduConn was the idea that local connections support local culture (as well as a few other things, such as leadership, of course) and vice versa.
In many ways, this mirrors how the web itself was understood, and how use of the web developed. Initially, you had large companies creating user silos tied together with an internet connection -- anyone remember Compuserve? Then, people fled these companies and started working on the "real" web, and built sites to connect with "the world" -- Then, as more and more people gained experience on the web, we saw a shift in focus, and people started building web sites to connect with their Neighborhood Association, or specifically for their apartment building -- sites like Craigslist show the power of micropresences, or sites with an intensely local focus.
I sense the same type of pendulum swing in education -- as people get more accustomed to the presence of the tools, the focus will switch to local use. Not surprisingly, this dovetails with work happening around interoperability fueled by open standards, and a safe secure means of maintaining an identity on the web that has grassroots support, as well as support from some of the major players --
