Day Twenty Eight - literacy, voice and being a cynic

Day Twenty Eight

Four weeks!  I have now been writing at least 500 words a day for four weeks, in fact my average is around 680 words a day, so that is around 19,000 words.  Pity they were not very good ones, but it’s the process, .... oh the process, I keep telling myself this.

Thank you if you are still here, Google tells me there is about 35 of you still turning up to read this. I am grateful.   I guess there are three days to go after this for my month of writing.  In one of those, or a final post challenge post, I will write a bit about what I feel that I have learned from completing the challenge.

Today I am going to break the rule about writing short posts on one topic. That is the advice given to keep readers anyway.  It is probably correct but I have never been very good with rules, always have seen them as a sort of challenge laid out for me.

Literacy

I wrote a post about literacy a few days ago, on Day Twenty Five.  Then the very next day some research came out claiming that Finland is the most literate country in the world.

The paper can be found here - http://www.ccsu.edu/wmln/

I am glad to see that this list took a broad approach that included factors other than just reading tests, but a number of factors that include behaviours and resources.  It is also interesting to see how the scores change when the focus is narrowed to specific areas of literacy such as here just test scores or for number of libraries.    For those interested in the UK perspective of the results it was covered in the Guardian here.

Yesterday, all tech troubles seemed here to stay

(With apologies to Lennon and McCartney)

Diogenes of Sinope, one of the original cynics, sitting in his barrel!

As Dr. Slowbow pointed out in his comment on yesterday’s post, I was pretty cynical yesterday and in my reply to him I explained a little more of the context behind that.  This has had me back thinking about ‘voice’ again and the balance between cynicism, skepticism, humour, irony and sarcasm and being plain old grumpy.

I have not really come to any conclusions yet I guess.  I know that I read a range of blogs on Ed Tech that for sure have their own voice.  To compare, for example AudreyWatters and Steve Wheeler – very different in voice and also in their levels of skepticism and even balance between positive and negative.  Yet I feel a place for them both.   Then there are those in the middle and that like to provoke and play devils advocate.   I guess they do tend to be consistent, whereas my problem is that I am rather inconsistent, with a tendency to the negative and cynical I guess.

I have also aware that it can be really easy for comments to become defensive too easily.  I want people to disagree and challenge me as I really believe that is how I grow, but I also feel almost compelled to defend myself and I have to try and hold back from that sometimes (often without success) but I also realize that people who comment may not want to be drawn into a debate or discussion (and some, like me do!).   What I am trying to say, not very well, is that it can start to feel like a zero sum game of scoring points in the comments section if you are not careful.

I just realized that I have drifted into starting to reflect on the overall experience of taking on this challenge, but as I am now already over 620 words I am going to leave it there for today.