My thoughts on the August Blog-in

While it isn't a direct post about the Blog-in, Nate has a post that talks about a "Culture of Maybe," and I wonder if that is the reason why we have such a hard time getting people talking. I think that "maybe," is one of the reasons that we are having this problem. People simply can't commit to getting involved in the conversation. Although, I have no idea why they can't commit...

Scott, in his contribution to the Blog-in suggests that maybe we are just the "early adopters" of this technology and that eventually people will catch up to us. While I don't disagree that we may very well be early adopters, I don't think that's the reason why. There are seven people who have asked for and have been given access to contribute to AECT's blog for graduate students (i.e., The Program). Yet, with the exception of a few posts from Nate, I am the only active contributor (and I don't mean active like regular, I mean active like none of the others have posted anything).

I also disagree with the fact that we need to be early adopters to have these conversations... Excluding all of those AECT people that have blogs but hardly ever use them and even when they do don't use them to talk to each other. I mean, when you look at Nate's blog roll down the side of his page, most of these are members of AECT, yet how much talking do we do to each other. I suppose even this Blog-in will focus upon the conversation of the half dozen of us that are normally involved in the conversation.

Also, if the statistics that have been tracked over at The Program are accurate (and I realize that there may be some room for error there), why aren't these people participating? I mean according to the stats, that blog gets 4 of unique visitors a day. Even if these people don't have blogs, they can still join the conversation. If you look at the comments to The Program since it was first created, I have made almost 20, Nate has made 4, and the remaining dozen have been made by others. That's not a great deal of participation for three to four month of activity. Why aren't any of these people participating in the discussion? I might say that it was because they didn't like the topics of the posts, but we've had four separate posts over the past three-four months asking people what they wanted us to discuss (and we haven't received a reply).

I don't know the answer, I only know that four or five or a dozen of us can't keep this up forever and that others will have to join the conversation soon or we'll start to simply drop off ourselves.

Tags: blog-in, AECT, graduate student, graduate students, graduate school, higher education, education