Fire and brimstone

I spoke earlier today at the Concede User Generated Conference in the venerable surroundings of the old Palace of the Marquis de Pombal, here in Oeiras, Lisbon. In my presentation, entitled The Good, the Blog and the Wiki, I tried to paint some broad brushstrokes on how students (and their teachers) are creating and sharing content that supports their learning, both socially and academically, through a range of social media. I pointed out some of the tensions that exist between what the institution requires (course accreditation, structure, security and other formalised activities) and what the individual does (chaotic and unstructured, informal and rule-free). I gave some examples from my own recent research with students using blogs and wikis in authentic learning contexts. The talk seemed to go down well, but one of my remarks, about creativity seemed to ruffle a feather or two. I suggested that in school, we are taught to follow rules and that colouring outside the lines is frowned upon. I was of course, referring to the inherent need that all institutions seem to have of establishing order, compliance and ultimately, a lack of freedom to experiment, take risks and make mistakes.

One of the speakers who followed me remarked that 'colouring outside the lines' never helped anyone gain any course credit. As there was no time to challenge her in a question session, I responded on Twitter by stating that colouring outside the lines actually helps many students to go beyond the course requirements. I also remarked that if we don't teach in creative ways, then no wonder our students are bored and demotivated. I fail to comprehend how some people, having spent a lifetime in education, are still reluctant to give their students licence to experiment, ask the what if questions, and ... yes, colour outside the lines. If you facilitate freedom to learn, students will - and do respond, and it is often astounding what they can achieve when given such freedom.

And so we move from the mildly irritating to the absolutely bizarre.... Earlier today one of my colleagues here at the Concede conference (Anthony Camilleri) found an outrageous blog post entitled Blogging is sinful and hampers your research productivity and tweeted the link after my keynote. Now, you can take this blog post one of two ways. You could surmise that the author is being deliberately provocative and is taking a stance that is ultimately indefensible, simply to provoke debate. The somewhat archaic language and the hectoring tones are possibly a give away. All power to him if he is promoting debate. On the other hand, and this is the disturbing part - he may actually be deadly serious when he declares:

Scholars who write blogs obviously try to avoid the harshness of the peer review system and to air their half-baked thoughts through a less demanding publication channel than a peer reviewed journal. This modern opportunity creates a public bad of immense proportions as it invites an endless stream of reactions from other colleagues who do not want to live up to the publish or perish reality that even starts to exist in the sleepy European social sciences. 

Sinful, I ask you.... Good grief. I for one have never been shy of criticism, even of the harshest kind, from some over opinionated journal reviewers. I blog because of the immediacy of the medium - I can publish my ideas and questions instantly, and can receive back 'reactions' from my peers that are valued, relevant and timely. The publish or perish reality above is not a reality at all - it's more likely to be publish and be jammed with the backlog some traditional journals suffer from. You can consider yourself most fortunate if you manage to get your article published in under a year from submission to publication. The absolute irony that should not escape you is that the author is using a blog as his platform to preach this anti-blogging madness. What he is doing in a great Elmer Gantry parody, is using archaic words such as Purgatory and Hell, and rhetoric likely to bring tears to the eyes of a puritan, to hammer home his particular brand of Fire and Brimstone fervour. Either way, it's a seriously inflammatory post designed to get your back up, and it's worth a read of the brief article just to take sample a flavour of some of the lunacy the anti-social media brigade like to peddle.

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Fire and brimstone by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.