I’m from Google and my wife is from Yahoo. Yet we both get the same headlines every day. Actually she has Yahoo as her start page while I use Protopage as mine. Her news is right there in Yahoo. Mine comes from RSS feeds at places like Slashdot, Digg, Newsvine and assorted blogs.
Yet we both get the same headlines every day.
I don’t watch the news on television, so I don’t know for sure they are running the same stories. My guess is, they are. Apparently there are only twenty headline-worthy stories in the world each day, and everyone picks them up.
The same is true of the blogs I read. If anything comes out in educational technology, someone picks it up in Twitter (which I’m still having a hard time grasping). Then a few people blog about what they saw in Twitter. Before the end of the day there are fifty versions of basically the same “you’ve got to try this” new edtech thing.
I think that’s the main problem. Too many people are dipping their toes into so many new technologies that no one is taking the time to really understand how most of them can change what we are already doing. I’m going to do like John has done. I’m going to take control of my own professional development and plunge into something for a while. Maybe some of the technologies I’ve sampled can make a real difference for me. I feel another series coming on.