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Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
Jay Cross argues, "It's time for us to come up with a vocabulary that's not an obstacle to installing learning technology. Take the word blog. For some people, the word sets off alarm bells.... So let's not speak of blogs or slimeheads. Let's talk about Project Logs. Or Collaborative Project Documentation. Or Knowledge Logs. Or professional journals."

In a word: No. In a sentence: Web 2.0 is not marketing. In a conditional sentence: if you have to fool people into accepting Web 2.0, they'll break it eventually anyways.

Because blogging is "amateurs, threatening hackers, neo-nazis, the Drudge Report, people obsessed with kittens, semi-literates, unverifiable nonsense, spammers, porno freaks, political extremists, teen age confessionals, MySpace flirts, people who are out of control and lawsuits waiting to happen." It is all of these things, and so much more, and if you abstract them out of existence, you haven't merely sanitized blogging, you've destroyed it.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Apr 16, 2024 6:47 p.m.

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