It’s a good morning for connections. I’ve been going through my Bloglines feeds and came across a blog from David Muir which pointed me to a blog written in March by David Warlick. The blog was an introduction to a podcast which I haven’t listened to yet but was a discussion inspired by a short video. This is an 8 minute video set in the year 2014 which describes how web interactivity might affect news and our attitude to news. I enjoyed it and I think it could be used as a good discussion starter with older pupils.

I’m looking forward to listening to the podcast of the discussion but I’m off to battle through the long grass to get the mower from the garage.

I picked up an interesting article “What’s the 1% rule?”  when reading through John Connell’s blog. Essentially, the article states that in general 1% of a group will create content, 10% will interact with it by commenting, etc and the other 89% will just view it. In fact, my own experience with trying to get teachers to contribute resources for aberNET is that I’d be very glad if 1% of users contributed. In the last year the site has had almost 600,000 visits, most of which were made to download resources,  but only a handful of people have volunteered resources.

Despite teachers’ increasing familiarity with the web, faster internet connections and more interactive content being available, they do not seem willing or able to break through the barriers which prevent them from sharing ideas or resources with others. It may be that the mechanisms to make this easy aren’t there yet and that SSDN will help, but I think that the problem is more to do with the attitudes of teachers than the available technology.

Many teachers still feel that they are expected to know most things most of the time. As we can’t, it is easy to feel insecure about our own capabilities. While most teachers know more about most things than most of their pupils, they feel that other teachers will spot their weaknesses. As long as teachers try to be the only source of skills and knowledge in the classroom this attitude will persist.

The connections that SSDN will bring might encourage teachers to see that sharing ideas, thoughts, resources and experiences will benefit everyone.

I hope that we can reach the stage where 1% of teachers contributes and 10% interact.