When being more connected makes you less informed.I've always been a news junkie, rarely listening to music on the radio when I can listen to news. When the TV was on it was usually on a 24 hour news channels.
Enter Web 2.0
Now, because I readily have news, blogs,
podcasts, videos, etc. all sent to me with minimal effort, I have not watched or read or listened to a traditional news source in a
looooong while. Every time I tune in, a commercial starts or a story I'm not interested in. So I fire up the
iPod or feed reader and pull up something that I find more engaging.
I thought it something of an informational nirvana - few ads, compelling content and all tailored to my schedule.
And yet, I've been recently wondering about what I'm missing. I don't mean the ads of course, but the information that I used to pick up with traditional, passive, media. When I'd flip through the news paper, I would invariably see stories that I wouldn't have been looking for, but because they're there read, find interesting and ultimately make me more informed. I wonder that because it's so easy to narrow the information stream that comes to me, am I becoming less knowledgeable about what's going on beyond my news reader.
One resource I use that helps is
Digg (or better yet,
Digg Swarm.) The problem is, it's not local stuff and is still pretty tech heavy in content. I haven't decided how this will all pan out yet, but in the mean time, I think I'm going to start reading the paper again.
A big thank you goes out to Will Richardson for the mention of The Tech Curve in his latest article in District Administration magazine.
Also a great big thank you goes to Cheryl Oakes who mentioned my students on the Tech Learning Blog referring to the interview they did on the latest WOW20 podcast.