The 2010 Edublog Awards have raised some excitement as well as some good natured jabbing on Twitter. I’m watching the whole spectacle from the outside and find it very entertaining. Meanwhile, I think my Summer holidays will be sucked up by frantic attempts to save nominated people and their blogs/wikis/whatever to my Google Reader, all the while wondering aloud and in a panicky internal voice, ‘How can I keep up with all these people?’ and ‘How can hope to emulate, even on some small scale, the work and reputation these people have built up?
I enjoyed reading this blog post, and can identify with the polarities warring within whenever any kind of acclaim is bestowed upon one. John Spencer, we have a lot in common.
Last night I sent out a tweet mentioning being nominated for an Edublog Award. I then erased the tweet, but it had already become public knowledge on those crazy ether tubes that fill up our make believe world. I had pleaded publicly and I regretted it. Then I added a badge and mentioned it at the bottom of two blog posts. Then I felt like an arrogant fool and so I thought about erasing all of that.Here’s the deal: I want to win. This feels oddly foreign, since I don’t tend to be all that competitive. I chose individual sports in my youth (if running as hard as you can is considered a sport) so that I could compete against my own personal records. One of my greatest personal accomplishments involved finishing among the bottom of the pack in a marathon.
And yet . . .
Ego and the Edublog Awards
I want to spread some of my ideas and values to a larger audience. I want people to get past the Waiting for Superman mythology and recognize that it’s about humility and transparency and authenticity. (And all the while, I’ve got this ego thing that I can’t shake) On the darker side, this is the explicitly arrogant belief that I have the answers (even if the answer is that no one has all the answers). On the positive side, I think I have something worth saying. I think I’ve been sharing a philosophy that counters much of the screaming in the mainstream media echo chambers about teachers and education reform.