Thinking about time

• Do you find yourself with too much free time to devote to your family, hobbies, or charity work?
• Do you feel like you’re wasting time reading books, taking walks, or working on a Master’s Degree?
• Is your mind so demented that you believe people want to read your every waking thought?
• Do you want to come home from a full-time job and then work some more? ...

If you answered YES to all 4, Congratulations... you have what it takes to blog. And it is quite possible that you are a moron, slightly creepy, and in a word… breathtakingly odd (sorry, two words… and there is no chance I want to ever meet you in person). from The PrincipalsPage blog

One of my favorite quotes come from Annie Dillard who writes, "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." Seems like quite a number of bloggers have been reflecting lately on how best to spend their time.

• Mr. Wham at Grocery Store Feet, complains, "Still, FIRST SEMESTER IS OVER!! I didn’t get what I wanted to do done at all."
• Dr. Bell is timing the boot speed of different operating systms to save a few seconds and writing "..the music box in my head is playing another old song, Pete Seeger's "Turn Turn Turn." Only the words I am hearing are instead "Time time time," as in I never, ever have enough!" (I've noticed lately that I use the time it takes for my computer to boot to check my e-mail on my iPod. How sick is that?)
• Will Richardson is "rethinking [his] online reading habits" and has deleted most of his RSS feeds. So have I.
• And Paul at quoteflections (one of the feeds I did NOT delete) first decided to stop blogging completely and then relented, stating that "I have changed my slogan from daily to regular."
• When I twitted that I was using an early release from school to work on presentations, my "friend" Keith Curry Lance commented "Some people are a waste of a snow day!"

So how we spend our days is how we spend our lives, eh, Annie? I've been thinking a lot lately about how I use my writing time. In an old column on time management  I once asked:

Is this a job that will have a long-term effect?... too often, the minutia of the job pin us down, like Gulliver trapped by the Lilliputians, and we make small progress toward major accomplishments. Remind yourself that that the big projects you work on often have more impact on your students and staff than the little attentions paid to them. Spend at least one part of everyday on the big stuff.

Am I following my own advice? You have to know that I have about 6 primo hours of writing time each week - Saturday and Sunday mornings. It's the only time my brain really works well enough to think very hard about things. (I suppose that is why I can blog any old time...)

Which leads me to ask which sort of writing has the potentential of making the greatest contribution to one's profession - books, articles or blog posts? I'm leaning toward the first. The first of my poor, sad books has not been revised for a dozen years.

I can't stop blogging - too much fun and too addictive. I like writing articles and columns, and it is still a thrill after all these years to see one's name in print.

But this year I am revising at least one book.

Hold me to it!

(Calvin and Hobbes cartoon found at http://www.cgu.edu/pages/792.asp)

Poking the wasp nest

Above is a list of a portion of the e-mail/comments I've received on the last couple Blue Skunk blog posts. When I feel overwhelmed by comments, I describe it as "poking the wasp nest." And even after three years of writing here, I am poor at predicting where those nests might be.

I DID have an idea that my dissing blog awards and rankings might cause some disagreement. Since the objections both in comments and on Twitter were significant, I thought I would reply to some here, rather than just in the comment section of the original post...

1. My objecting to awards and rankings is just sour grapes.

Not really. The Blue Skunk has been nominated for a library Eddie. And I appreciate it.

http://edublogawards.com/2008/best-librarian-library-edublog-2008/

I'm in Scott McLeod's list of top 50 education blogs - sorta in the middle. My Technorati ranking is 22,604 when I checked just now. Now that sounds pretty bad until you consider there are over, what, seventy million blogs being tracked. Will Richardson's Weblogg-ed, right at the top of the educational popularity list is ranked at 9,292. Now before I start weeping in my pillow with rank envy, I'll do some math. At 22,604 out of 70,000,000, the BS is in the top .0003% of blogs. At 9,292 Will's blog is in the top .0001%. I am not sure if a .0002% difference is even statistically significant (or that my math with that many decimal points is any good.) For me, I am just amazed at being in the top .01% of blogs. Heck, I'd be amazed to be in the top 50%. (As I like to remind my son, I WAS in the top 90% of my high school graduating class.)

2. The Powers-That-Be recognize awards as a tangible accomplishment.

I suppose. Awards and rankings could be used to buff up the vitae, tenure app, or grant app, too. But do people really blog with this purpose in mind?

3. So, would you turn an award down?

I suppose I should turn any down now that I’ve been snarky about it. But probably not. But I honestly have to say that I value comments and compliments from individuals far more than any award.

4. Awards are a means of making "discoveries" of new blogs and bloggers.

Point taken. I don't know that I've see many new bloggers on the nominations, however.

5. The awards are just done in fun.

Fun for the winners; possibly dispiriting for those not chosen. (As Mom said, "Sure it's all fun til somebody gets hurt.") Kohn says that rewards also punish.

6. It's important to be aware of your ranking in order to strategize for maximum readership (and resulting impact on the educational community).

Peter makes my argument for me in his comment left on the post (go back and read his whole comment):

One makes change by acting and speaking in a way that captures people through reason and their conscience. Caring about how many people are listening is a distraction. While it's true that more people listening *may* mean more influence, to set raising readership numbers up as a concern/goal is totally misguided ... If you want to make change, then why not spend time doing something that's actually effectual, rather than spending time being concerned over one's own popularity ranking? Hell, doing nothing is more productive.

7. Doesn't ClustrMaps also invite competition and comparison?

I'd not looked at ClustrMaps in this light before, but I can see the possibility that it might be used in this way. I’ve kept it on my site more as a reminder to myself that I do indeed have international readers and to be aware that I am always writing through a US-centric lens. Oh, ClustrMaps gets wiped every now and again - sort of humbiing to start afresh.

8. Don't we fundamentally "reward" people at the deepest level with our admiration and respect? Even in our writing, aren't we arguably competing for respect for and dissemination of our own ideas? Isn't that a good thing? (from Elizabeth)

To me, competition will always mean winners and losers. I don’t see that sending one blogger a note of admiration or respect in any way makes losers of those to whom one does not send such notes. Are we competing for the acceptance of our own ideas? I’ve always thought I was adding to a pot of ideas from which really good ideas could be formulated. I guess I just can’t get the blood lust going here. In the wild kingdom, my DNA would not have had a chance...

I am going to go back to some of Kohn's arguments about extrinsic motivation via rewards...

Rewards can punish those who do not receive them - See #5 above.

Rewards can rupture relationships - If I link to or comment on your blog, might I be pushing your rank above mine, make you more popular, more award-worthy? Am I cutting my own throat if I help you make your blog better?

Rewards ignore the reasons for a desired behavior - Is blogging about improving education, having fun, and debating the issues .... or winning fame and recognition?

Rewards can discourage risk-taking - Might I be less likely to take a controversial or unpopular stance if it might mean losing readers? Might I avoid trying a different style of writing or type of post if it would cause people to drop a subscription?

Rewards can actually discourage desired behaviors. -  There must be something distasteful about blogging if it is only about rankings and awards.

So awards and ranks probably won't bring about the end of the world as we know it. But let's not grant them any more importance than they deserve, either.

On ranking, awards and other nonsense

You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself. - Anne Dillard

• Jason Priem has developed a very interesting "interactive, animated tagcloud of the top fifty edublogs" at <jasonpriem.com/feedvis>. It's a masterful piece of programming.
• Scott McLeod at Dangerously Irrelevant does a full-bore analysis of educational blog rankings and the rise and fall of their "authority" status.
• People's gettin' excited about the Eddie's blog awards. (Cathy and Joyce, anyway.)

But I just don't get it. What is the purpose of awards and rankings? Do we really need them in this long-tailed communication medium of blogging? In fact, might they even be counter productive?

I would certainly label the Eddies as a form of extrinsic reward for bloggers. Depending how they are used, rankings are the same. And as Alfie Kohn’s classic book Punished by Rewards: The Trouble With Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’S, Praise, and Other Bribes (Houghton Mifflin, 1993) demonstrates, rewards can punish those who do not receive them; rewards can rupture relationships between students and between students and teachers; rewards ignore the reasons for a desired behavior; and  rewards can discourage risk-taking. But the single most devastating conclusion he draws from his research is that rewards can actually discourage desired behaviors. (from my take on Kohn's book here.)

Do we actually want competitive blogging? How many of Kohn's negative behaviors may well be (or are now) demonstrated among the edublogosphere because of rankings and awards? Don't bloggers most write for their own intrinsic reasons - to clarify their own thinking, to record their daily observations, to reflect willfully, to share selflessly, to constructively converse with those of both like and unlike minds?

I suppose pissing contests are just human nature. But comparing the size (popularity) of mine to the size (popularity) of yours seems the antithesis of the "I'll share mine if you share yours" world of personal learning networks.

Do blogging awards and rankings have any positive uses?