Monday 12 May 2008

I was reading Donald Clark's blog about how much more public life's supposedly become and I thought of myslef. I’ve been fighting my tendency to fight personal transparency. My need to veil my life, my habits, my likes. My discomfort (disgust) for being too open to the world, too traceable, too public. I’m an e-Learning educator; I need to have a public/accessible online Anamaria. I need to socialize and share and learn and network. So far, it’s seemed like a reasonable price to pay, considering how much I’ve learned (and hopefully have helped others learn). So I blog (in English and in Portuguese), I’m on Facebook and Orkut. I’m on SCoPE. I read (with great pleasure) some edubloggers I have come to admire. Yet, every now and then, this weird suspicion comes to my mind… how public, transparent, open is this new world where I’ve come to be a constant visitor (and eventually a contributor)? And of course I don’t ignore the fact that it’s accessible to anyone with an internet connection. I mean open in terms of providing different opinions, opinions I don’t immediately agree with. How transparent is a world where apparently all inhabitants share the same core values, the same basic opinions about education and learning? Sure anyone can disagree—and some do in fact write about their disagreements, but, in general, I’m still protected by a cozy community of peers much like in my private life… Shouldn’t I be openly/transparently networking with those whose opinions I despise? I particularly liked a sentence I found in elearnspace where George Siemens says, “A few good cynics are always nice to have around”. Where are the cynics in the edublogosphere? Perhaps I need to look for them in the private, obscure, offline world?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think we fall into "group think" sometimes in the edublogosphere. I recently blogged about that a bit. http://brandon-hall.com/janetclarey/?p=692

Anamaria Camargo said...

Hi Janet.
I certainly hope so :) I've been reading Mark's blog with interest too. I have also been finding well balanced, more profound real DISCUSSION in E-BCNZer
Cheers.