Blogging is dead! Microblogging (ala Twitter) has replaced it!
Microblogging has “jumped the shark” and is going down hill while blogging is returning!

If you haven’t heard both of those sorts of statements lately you’ve almost certainly heard one of them. There seems to be some sort of idea that there is a zero sum game going on here and that for one of these platforms to grow the other has to diminish. I don’t buy it. Not completely. I do agree that both take time away from the other on the part of both readers and writers but I think what is happening in real life is that the size of the pie is growing. That is to say that more people are participating.

People who are not of the type to write a blog are on Twitter (and Plurk etc). There they are discovering interesting blogs as often as they discover interesting microbloggers. People who do blog are expanding their reach and also the range of input they are getting by participating on twitter. The future is for people who are active in both worlds and who connect the two worlds.

Both of these platforms have their advantages and disadvantages. neither can completely replace the other. For example I Twittered today “The role of debate in learning The comments are important. This is the edge that long form blogs have over Twitter.” The message links to a blog post by Mark Guzdial who is a fairly prolific blogger and occasional Twitterer (@guzdial). He expressed a number of good ideas is a well thought out and detailed way. You can’t do that in 140 characters. But more than that there is a continuing discussion, at length, in the comments. You just can’t do that sort of detailed discussion in Twitter. For people interested in this topic (and almost anyone in STEM education should be) it just doesn’t get much better than this. Plus as a blog it is less transient than Twitter messages so you can come back to it again and again.

Twitter is great for quips, short bits of information (like links to blog posts), status updates and even the random pithy idea. Conversations are possible as well but you’re just not going to get the depth of discussion that you can get in a blog post with comments. I love Twitter for the quick sharing of information. I get and send a lot of links myself. (In fact I collect many of them and post them on my computer science education blog once a week) I see the blog and Twitter as mutually supportive. Twitter is a lot more to me than a platform for promoting my blog (though I do my share of that). I suppose I am blogging less often lately. This blog clearly has been suffering a lack of attention of late for example. But I don’t blame Twitter in the least. Rather I credit Twitter with keeping me going though what I see as a blogging slump caused more by too much blogging for too long. Twitter has helped me not give it up completely. For others it may well be different of course. Life is like that.

What about you? Twittering more (or less) and blogging less (or more)? Or have you avoided (or given up) on both?

PS: You can follow me on Twitter @AlfredTwo and I hope you will and that you’ll let me know you’re out there.

Imagine you were a school teacher and the room you were teaching in didn’t have any heat. So suppose you call up the maintenance people and say “it’s 32 degrees in my room. The class fish tank is ice. The students can’t learn and I need you to fix it.” Imagine then that the maintenance person says “well we’re pretty busy here. You’ll have to work around it for a while. In the mean time if you find out what is wrong and it doesn’t take too much effort for us to fix it we will. Maybe.”

Never happen right? Someone would get fired pretty quickly. The school board would be in a tizzy, parents would be calling the school and the newspapers would have a field day.

Now imagine you are teaching computer science and the tech support has locked down the computers so tightly that your students can’t compile or even save their programs. You call up tech support and say “my students can’t do their projects because the systems are locked down so tightly that they can’t save their work.” And tech support says “well you’ll have to find a work around but if you can find a solution that doesn’t take too much effort for us to do we’ll fix it. Maybe.” That scenario seems to happen all the time. You would be amazed at how often I get email from teachers looking for solutions that tech support is unwilling to do any research on themselves. The people whose job it is to make the computers work so that teachers can use them to teach refuse to correct, or even look into, problems that are making life difficult or close to impossible for teachers.

Is it as bad as no heat in the building? Probably not. But teaching computer science or programming without being able to save and/or compile programs is like teaching writing without students having pens and paper. It’s like teaching reading without books. It’s like teaching how to speak a new language without allowing anyone to talk.

Do you hear any irate school board members? I don’t. How about irate parents? Me either. Are the newspapers covering it? Not that I can see. But I’m irate.  I just don’t know how to solve the problem. So in the mean time I do what ever I can to help teachers find solutions that tech support will either implement or allow teachers to implement. I do what I can to find workarounds and alternatives for them. But really we need to solve this problem in a way that scales.