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Please don’t vote for this blog!
30 CommentsThe edublog awards are upon us again. Whilst I recognise that some might say it highlights and rewards the efforts of many within the ‘edublogosphere’, I can’t help but think there’s a lot of back-slapping going on. That’s not to say that those who end up winning (or are even nominated) don’t deserve to be recognised, it’s just that I loathe the cult of celebrity.
So, unlike others who may prostitute themselves for your vote, I’m asking every single one of the 800+ RSS subscribers and the additional visitors not to vote for this blog. Even better, abstain from voting altogether… :)
Published on November 3, 2007 · Filed under: Uncategorized;
30 Responses to “Please don’t vote for this blog!”
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Damian said on November 3rd, 2007 at 4:39 pm
Reverse psychology – a brilliant ploy! ;-)
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Yeesh. When did this blog become the moral monitor for the edublogosphere? Yeah, don’t worry about my vote, Doug. My RSS subscription neither.
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Hi Dan. Moral monitor? Erm… no.
It’s a shame you’re not going to be reading my blog any more, but then I’m not writing it for you (or anyone else) in particular. I’ve considered removing yours from my feed reader now and again (you are somewhat self-congratulatory) but then you do have some interesting things to say about education now and again.
I’ll remain one of your 398 readers – for the time being… :p
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Doug,
I wouldn’t worry about being removed from Dan’s or anyone’s RSS. It’s not like he has much to say most of the time and, you’re bang on, his self-glorification is nauseating. The rare nuggets that might be sifted out of all the c^@p isn’t worth it.
You have a great blog and I respect the fact that you write for yourself, exploring education in your life doing so in a way that isn’t self-congratulatory or egoistic but real.
I happen to agree that the circle of the edusphere is small with a rather small number of people carrying the discussion although it is slowly growing. I find there are more people joining the Ning groups than outright blogging which is good. It gets teachers into web2.0.
Keep it up Doug! -
Thanks Kelly – a positive comment like that one is worth several ‘Eddies’! :D
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Wowza, R. Kelly. For someone who dislikes Dan so much, you sure have a habit of following him around. To cut you off at the pass, guy: I follow you around cause I like you hella. Hella.
For serious, though: what’s more self-congratulatory or -glorifying than a blog about education – a practice that REQUIRES an audience – written solely for your own self? I’m not trying to disrespect your respective blogs, only saying that this type of posture casts a real dubious light upon anything else you say AND what you preach with respect to the classroom. I’m not a teacher, but I’m sure that students – or other teachers, in the case of a super – can recognize this incongruence without any effort whatsoever. Spite is the enemy; self-righteousness – no matter how modest it may appear on first blush – is suicide.
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I’m agreeing with Damien – v.good psych.
I’ve run & helped run the awards for the last 4 years now – and one thing it ain’t is a celeb fest. We are really proud that the awards consistantly introduce blogs and resources who aren’t very well known to a wider audience – & this year we’ll be releasing a de.licio.us feed of ALL the nominees by category to help that process along. Just to be clear – we are about sharing our collective insight, building on resources and, of course, the partying. Hope to see you at the awards – you could stage yr own boycott!
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@Michael: The points you made were invalid:
a) I don’t ‘dislike’ Dan – I just think that he perhaps needs separate blogs for work and play.
b) I’ve never said that I only blog for myself. It’s Miguel Guhlin who argues that one should do this – my position is that if you’re blogging for yourself, give up and buy a journal.Obviously I’m blogging for an audience, but it’s a general audience, not a specific one! :)@Josie: Nothing to do with psychology at all, I’m afraid. I mean what I say, and say what I mean. If you’re collating them as a del.icio.us feed, why do you need a ‘winner’? Doesn’t this foster a competitive instead of collaborative spirit? :o
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It fosters both. I don’t see competition as necessarily divisive – we’re trying to use the awards as a way of structuring community building. We put in a lot of time and effort every year in an attempt to build a useful resource for the community – everyone who nominates and votes is helping build it with us. Edublogland is intrinsically a collaborative enterprise – we are using the awards format as a way of giving shape to the landscape and offering an accessible entry to the millions of blogs and projects out there.
That said I’m not going to get upset if some people view the Eddies as an elitist event (I certainly don’t, otherwise I wouldn’t be involved)- rather I’d encourage anyone who holds this view to contribute their own events and resources to the pot. Â
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I owe you more than that brief kiss-off back there, Doug. Here’s exactly what I find so disappointing recently about your blog:
WHEREAS there are those (like Miguel) who use a blog as a device for personal education and any readership or influence they gather after that is strictly incidental …
WHEREAS there are those (like me) who blog for a readership, who edit posts and author resources because they want to make the tough road easier for other people, who see awards and subscribers as an opportunity to help more people …
… there’s you, the guy who wants the latter but pretends self-righteously towards the former, the guy who decries culture of celebrity, a culture of backpatting but who points out (via the top-right of his blog) everyone’s who’s ever patted his back.
You’re the guy who’ll deride me for my “for your consideration” post, who’ll deride me for posting a subscriber count, but who isn’t above posting his own version of each.
You’re the guy who calls a kid a smart-ass and then punctuates the insult with a li’l smiley face, as if that changes anything.
In other words, you want it both ways.
I can deal with a guy from column A. I can deal with a guy from column B. I can’t deal with a guy from column B who wishes he was in column A and then calls ‘em all prostitutes.
Calling it hypocritical is too easy. It’s plainly passive-aggressive and it doesn’t surprise me to find Kelly coming to your defense.
Kelly wishes his blog had a larger readership but doesn’t want to deal with Miguel’s criticism that his posts (which comprise long typo-ridden paragraphs) are difficult to read so he says, aw, screw blogs, blogs are out, Ning’s the place to be.
You wouldn’t mind an award for your efforts but won’t admit that your lousy ‘netiquette the last few weeks makes any nomination a tough sell so you say, aw, screw awards, awards are for celebrity cultists.
I get too much of this from my students to invite it into my feedreader.
I’ve got some column C tendencies myself, Doug. I’m no stranger to the Internet flame-out. I lost a bunch of subscribers and their respect awhile back, just as you’ve lost mine now. To win ‘em back, I had to apologize (I suppose you think you’re all square with Arthus) and then continually prove my top priority was contributing value to the eduboc, rather than scoring cheap points.
If that’s your priority too then I’m sure it won’t be long ’til someone I read regularly links up to something great you’ve written and I’ll have the occasion to re-evaluate my nonsubscription.
‘Til then.
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Dan, whatever. As for the netiquette the last few weeks – what in the world are you talking about Dan? Obviously your still not over the little tv thing from a few months ago. Don’t understand why you can’t get over that.
Michael – it just happens that we have a few similar RSS feeds. I read to gather knowledge and look at things from various perspective. I’m not sure why Dan reads other than to make caustic comments. As for your comment about audience, if you do actually read my blog, you’ll notice that I spend most of my doing reflections about my role as an administrator. Something I would encourage all my teachers to do. I do keep a journal where I examine my growth but the blog is another place where I work through various points of growth. Comments are a bonus.
Doug, you do some great things and it’s been interesting watching your progress. Keep it up. -
@Dan: Not much point replying to you as you “don’t read my blog anymore” but here goes…
You’re setting up a false dichotomy by calling people either ‘Column A’ or ‘Column B’. I don’t see why anyone has to (or would want to) fit neatly into either category. Calling me ‘Column C’ (something you’ve just made up) and then accusing me of having a personality disorder isn’t exactly ‘netiquette’, as you put it!
As for pointing out people who have ‘patted my back’ – yes, I do keep a record of some of those at the top-right of my blog and on this page. I appreciate the positive comments I get from people, which are worth a lot more to me than meaningless awards. I’m deigning to respond to your schoolboy debating/arguing skills, although I really would have expected better from someone sets themself up as being so intelligent via his ‘look at me!’ blog. ;)
@Kelly: I think Dan’s trying to make his Feedburner stats do a rollercoaster. He’s certainly going to be on a downhill section if he continues as he is at the moment… :o
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[...] again, I’ve had the pleasure of exchanging barbs with Dan Meyers over at Doug Belshaw’s blog, I ran into Dan spreading joy and love again on the subject of the Edublog Awards. [My thoughts [...]
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[...] 5, 2007 Once again, I’ve had the pleasure of exchanging barbs with Dan Meyers over at Doug Belshaw’s blog, I ran into Dan spreading joy and love again on the subject of the Edublog Awards. [My thoughts [...]
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LindaH said on November 5th, 2007 at 10:31 am
Hi Doug, my Classroom Displays blog was nominated in the Audio Visual category last year. It did not win. It came 3rd but it still did the blog some good. More people got to hear about the blog, people who had a bit more influence than ordinary teachers and TAs (my blog’s normal audience). This meant that some LEAs and Colleges started to link to the blog and they in turn told more teachers, education students and TAs.
Winning, for me simply wasn’t much of an issue. My blog was never going to win pitched against some brilliant edupodcasters (is that even a word?)My usual audience had never even heard of the Eddies and only a few took the time to vote.
For myself I found some interesting stuff in the nominees, some of whom I still have in my feed reader. I couldn’t tell you who won so I do find myself drawn to your argument that it might be better to not make it a competition.
As for subscribing to your feed, as a good action researcher I was taught to seek out dissonant voices. It’s engaging there that we find the most learning :-) So I’m here to stay! You’ve got me thinking about the Eddie’s and I’ll probably do a post about it. A good moment for a bit of reflection. -
Doug, I didn’t compose that reply over a matter of minutes, but your response is essentially one quick, “Oh I’ve got lousy ‘netiquette, have I? Well, you’ve got lousy ‘netiquette!”
Which may very well be true but it certainly doesn’t change anything you’ve done in the last couple weeks here or at ITM.
Whatever it is they say about ignorance and bliss, I guess.
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Kelly Christopherson above said thatthe edublogosphre is rather small. I disagree. It currently consists of more blogs than most people can read. Hence, most people read only a subset (which, mistakenly, they assume is the entire edublogosphere).
Here is the list of feeds harvested by Edu_RSS, which gives you an idea of the size of the edublogosphere. It should be noted that this is by no means a complete list, focusing specificaly on those who write about education (and mostly, online learning).
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Don’t worry, I won’t. Not after the names you call a friend of mine!
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This post and many of the subsequent comments have been written by people I read regularly, and whose input I appreciate on my own blog. So it’s a little uncomfortable to see things get so down-and-dirty.
I would just like to say that I think – as small as Kelly indicated the edublogosphere to be – there is room enough here for all of us with all our quirks and foibles. No individual should get to say what constitutes a valid approach to blogging.
I don’t have a problem with the notion of the awards, I think it raises the profile of blogging per se and it always brings a few previously overlooked gems to my attention. That said, if Doug doesn’t like the idea, I think he should be allowed the space to say so and to give his reasons for saying so. It’s the conversation in the comments that I find discomfiting.
I take my hat off to Josie for her measured response. No hissy fits, just philosophical pragmatism.
I have noticed that the remove of the written medium sometimes results in people saying things they wouldn’t dream of saying in a face-to-face situation.
Hmm. That might make an interesting research subject, now that I think of it…
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I’m honestly amazed at how much discussion a two-paragraph ‘microblog’ post can cause. But anyway…
@mrsdurff: Would you care to elaborate? :)
@Karyn: I think that Dan took personal exception because he seems to be campaigning for the best new blog award, and he probably realised that I posted this fairly soon after reading that post. I’m still a subscriber to his blog – it’s up to me who I subscribe to and why after all – but I’m glad I don’t have to work with him day-to-day… :o
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Stephen Downes,
This being the case, I would then suggest that because most blog readers do have a very small subset that they read, what are the chances of a comment becoming widely read? Could it be that bad publicity is better than no publicity? Now, it seems that there are several well known bloggers, yourself included, that belong to a number of subsets and are widely read by a large amount of people. What impact does one of these people talking about a blog have upon the readership? I realize that to keep the readership one must have a particular quality of writing.
When I refer to the blogosphere, you’re right, it is a small subset to which I refer. However, this subset seems to include a large number of the presenters and writers that people refer to in their own writings but your point is well taken that, indeed, there are too many blogs for one person to read. I guess I should have been clearer in describing the idea.
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[...] Doug Belshaw has been taking it on the chin for a few things lately. (Must of been his week!) If you go over to his post regarding his thoughts about the awards, you’ll see all kinds of comments from those who have very good points about why the awards are important to, well, the other stuff which has nothing to do with the awards. The main point, however, is pointed out by Karyn Romeis’ I don’t have a problem with the notion of the awards, I think it raises the profile of blogging per se and it always brings a few previously overlooked gems to my attention. That said, if Doug doesn’t like the idea, I think he should be allowed the space to say so and to give his reasons for saying so. [...]
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[...] Doug Belshaw has been taking it on the chin for a few things lately. (Must of been his week!) If you go over to his post regarding his thoughts about the awards, you’ll see all kinds of comments from those who have very good points about why the awards are important to, well, the other stuff which has nothing to do with the awards. The main point, however, is pointed out by Karyn Romeis’ I don’t have a problem with the notion of the awards, I think it raises the profile of blogging per se and it always brings a few previously overlooked gems to my attention. That said, if Doug doesn’t like the idea, I think he should be allowed the space to say so and to give his reasons for saying so. [...]
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Well, if it were up to me, Linda H would win an award for the most adult behavior and commentary. Nice to see someone staying on topic.
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Audrey said on November 8th, 2007 at 3:19 am
Now all I want to do is vote for you. Yea Dan!
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Audrey said on November 8th, 2007 at 3:21 am
DOUG… I meant DOUG… YA for Doug! Doug for president.
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I feel like I just walked into the ugliest faculty room in the country.
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Teaching Generation Z » Blog Archive » The Edublogosphere Is A Big Place/ The Edublogosphere Is A Small Place said on November 10th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
[...] “must share/see/use” resources are so instant and seemingly powerful. A spat between antagonists in the comments section of a blog post can equal a controversy and because the names are so [...]
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Kimberly,
Faculty room? I was thinking more like 4th grade playground.
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I’m going to close the comments now as this is getting a bit silly. I think everyone has said their piece…
