I have been thinking a lot lately about the nature of the blogosphere. A lot of the edublogosphere, specifically, can tend to be a bit of an echo chamber. Much of it makes me think, little makes me comment. I like to remain within the confines of my pleasant little bloglines window.
Part of it is that I just like to keep up to date with my feeds. I will admit I do a lot of skimming, because there is a lot out there that doesn’t mean much to me, since it has to do with content areas I don’t teach, interests I don’t share, or worldviews with which I disagree. I still read, just skimfully.
I make sure to mark the postings that I want to go back and read later, and some of those will elicit a comment on my part, but not many.
What it does, however, is offer me the chance to process the information and then verbalize it to someone else, typically a colleague or friend. What the blogosphere calls lurking, I call learning.
We shun lurking because it is web 1., consumerism, etc etc, but only if we discount the nature of the face-to-face impact. I can recall Will mentioning (can’t find the post now) that we need to reach more folks who are not reading blogs. Folks who are not in our little happy blogoworld.
Well, I think a lot of us are, through talking about these topics.
The best idea I have heard in a long time was Jeff Utecht‘s LAN parties during/following the k12 online conference.
I’m posting a lot about him lately. We haven’t talked in what seems like ages. He’s forgotten all about me after beers with Justin.
Sheesh. Some people. 
But isn’t that interesting? I crave the conversation, I crave the learning from verbalizing information and processing it that way, and don’t do terribly well when I have to write in a small text box (at least David lets me resize it) and at a hurried pace.
Recently, I had a really nice email exchange with Ben, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s about the relationship, the connection, not the lurking. You see, I lurk on these folks’ blogs, but really like talking to them via Skype, the phone, or telepathically.
I wish.
Anyhoo, what I’m getting at is that when folks wish for lurkers to stop lurking, we might actually be hurting the impact of our work.
We might be telling them that reading is no longer enough. I think that could lead to potentially discouraging folks from reading based on some hypothetical assumption that they will interact at some point. Imagine the educator being introduced to this new world being expected to comment before he or she felt ready simply because it was the unwritten rule? We don’t want him or her to learn that lurking is bad! We want this teacher to feel free to lounge around inside the cabana before coming poolside and then dipping the toes in the tepid water.
It takes time, let’s show our lurkers readers some grace.
Here, here…I lurk to learn too. I don’t feel selfish. I write to learn as well. Sometimes I email, sometimes chat, sometimes I sit and talk to my teammates. I wish I could spend more time writing, contributing, but then I wish I could spend more time reading (lurking) as well. I take time to think, maybe its just my processing speed. If I felt required to post to all that I read, I expect I would toss the laptop and find a different way to learn.
Great post! I’m around…working like a dog lately..and miss the conversations as well. I agree there is something in us that wants that f2f contact…or at the very least real time conversations. That is why I’m going to NECC why I think conferences will never die. We like to exchange in real time, in real places. This is also the reason why teachers will not be replaced completely by online learning. I love online learning, but without the Skype or f2f interaction, you feel like you’re missing something.
We’ll chat soon.
Chris–you said that when folks wish for lurkers to stop lurking, we might actually be hurting the impact of our work–I think not only hurting the impact, but hurting the productivity of the blogger him or her self. I lurk, I learn, I make connections, I’d love to make more–I too crave the f2f contact of skype or direct email…but I think that many of the edubloggers I love to read the most are also busy educators….I learn from them by reading, reflecting and blogging (so that others outside this circle can learn as well)–but I think if I stopped to “popin” on every contact I have on Skype, everytime I saw them I would cease to be effective in my job and would cause a distraction for them as well. I continue to like the idea of conferences both online and inperson…skypecasts, webinars, places where we can have continued dialogue and not just a post and a comments
I agree that readers get something out of the reading–not to mention that I’m sure some of us who blog lurked around online for awhile getting comfortable with it, reading, and occassionally posting before we got comfortable writing a lot more often.
I agree about the insularity too–though some of our campus reads our blogs, they still are more comfortable with email, mostly–and so the face-to-face part is a large part of getting the word out to teachers about web 2.0 possibilities. Teachers are in the profession mostly because they like people and ideas after all!
By the way, I discovered your blog via your post on Ning. Your comments there were thought provoking–thanks.
I don’t know. I tried just reading blogs via rss several times but quickly lost interest. I didn’t become a voracious blog reader until I had a blog of my own. From the outside, I always looked at blogging as a one-sided act of vanity/exhibitionism. I didn’t really understand what the term “blogosphere” meant and I didn’t see it as the giant ongoing conversation that it is. While I would never chide someone for just lurking, I think that writing blog posts, commenting on others’ posts, and reading via rss feed is all part of the same phenomenon. As teachers, I hope we all accept the idea that being a student means more than just soaking up facts from a lecture or textbook; in the same way, I think that reading blogs means reacting, connecting, analyzing, sharing.