Reality vs. Virtuality: Balancing academia with teh intarwebz persona

[reclaiming]

It has been a long time since I've kept up an LJ on a regular basis and I was hesitant to come back at all. I have come to the conclusion over several years of blogging that I have no particular wish to share my life with the world. I do, however, confess a strong desire to write with more depth and passion than the robotic prose required for

Comments

[anonymous]

I totally agree with the general message here, I think that as an educator you have the right to maintain, or, in this case, reclaim your individuality, in this new world of cyber-collective-unconsciousness. As blogging becomes more and more mainstream, the old stigma of revealing your inner thoughts online is being pushed aside in the interest of the sharing and spreading of knowledge, which in my opinion doesn't have to be, and in fact should never be, cold and impersonal, but rather open, personal, and inviting. Even in the classroom, I think that it should be stressed that while the educator's job is to convey a certain set of information and knowledge to students, it is always a little biased, always a little skewed, simply because the educator is not objective - they are a person, too. And I think that it's important to stress this fact to students, because the educator is not all-powerful or all-knowing, they are merely a conduit for learning, and the most important factor in this is that the student does doubt, does seek, of their own accord, in the interest of obtaining a more well-rounded and less subjective point of view. And I think that, being an educator who is aware of this fact, you can be a better educator (than for instance my 11th grade science teacher who obviously thought he was god's gift to oceanography). As a book I once read put it, "if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!"
So in short, snoogans, sorry for run-on sentences, and omfg u has cuet haircut :o

~SeiReTSYM