Not complaining, just noticing

An author of a book on technology and teaching has an impossible task: keeping up with the technology and with the pedagogy.  Keeping up with the pedagogy is what 2nd edtions are for: pulse on the listservs of some academic disciplines, some key bloggers, a couple print resources, and teach a couple courses from time-to-time, and you can usually find out about the major directions within a couple months, especially if you add in some conferences for f2f contact.

But how to keep up with educational technology, especially applications?  Slogger that Will Richardson mentions in the blogging chapter is long gone, replaced by a internal form in Word 2010.  Unless it has something to do with my privacy settings, none of the addons work with Blogger anymore.  Google wants my eyeballs on their site so I see their ad.

GoogleGears are gone; so too are countless apps that Richardson mentions in passing.  And, rest in peach, Google Wave, replaced by Google+ whether we like it or not.

It would be easy to argue that when you deal with a company like Google, it chooses the profitable tools and discards the rest.  And to some extent, profitable means "tools the audience uses."  But in many cases, it takes the audience (especially educators who can't turn a course upside down in the middle of a semester just because they'd like to investigate a new bit of code), it takes an audience time to find an application and find its affordances: what the program allows the user to do that the user needed or now wants to do.

One of the usual ways that authors keep their books updated is with webpages, and Richardson is no exception.  A similar text from a college publisher might have an extensive online presence, complete with a quiz bank, instructor notes, and an errata page.

Richardson includes a list on his blog that he keeps up-to-date.  But he (probably not his publisher) might provide links to such updated materials in the book itself and provide a specific location (not just blog comments) where readers could add materials, sort of a Richardson-pedia.  True, there are mechanisms in ereaders to record and share our thoughts, and there are sites where we can share bookmarks and notes, but a concerted effort by the author to consolidate reader comments and link them to specific pages might easily improve the book and keep it fresh.  It has been done before: use the web in a concerted way to update and revise the book.

We experience every day the situation of information that is not linked or is not linked as prominently as celebrity "news."  If the internet dies, or needs refurbing, it may be in large part due to having good information that is not easily discoverable by an audience that could use it.  Certainly Vannevar Bush's and Ted Nelson's models of data structures that influenced Berniers-Lee's webdesign paid more attention to links (URLs) and not just nodes (sites).  We'd do our readers and students a service by having them learn not just about consuming the culture (the "read" part of the read-write web) and produce it (the "write" part) to connect information, but also to link it to other parts of the web.