Problem??

I suppose I'd better get round to renaming my blog description. The 15 year old bass player is no more, the 16 year old bass player however is just getting started. Another year older... and hopefully another year wiser. As I'm sure you've noticed this is in fact my first post since February, so I'm sorry for the delay!

I've had many thoughts spinning round inside my head about Web/School 2.0 since my last post, and hopefully I can get them all typed up and posted in the next while, but for this post I'm going to cast all those thoughts aside and focus on one which only really occurred to me when I began trying to get back into posting. As you all know, I'm relatively new to all this myself and still have much to learn about blogging, web 2.0 and such like, and as I've now discovered, this puts me at a slight disadvantage, especially because of the age I'm at.

Personally, I find bringing myself to put my ideas into a post a big challenge at times. I mean I'm generally very lazy, but aside from that there always seems to be something which crops up and manages to drag me away from my keyboard. The only way I can seem to bring myself to keep posting is with a little self discipline, a little bit of nagging (from Mr. Winton) and by keeping all musical instruments locked in their cases at all times... a small price to pay in order to broadcast my opinion to the web I must say, but it's still difficult.

This could be a major problem with the School 2.0 idea. Especially if introducing the idea to pupils at Secondary/High School level. The fact is, many teenagers just seem to be able to find any excuse to procrastinate, or avoid the slightest slither of work altogether. So the more I think about it the more this could cause problems. I mean, there's no point in teaching people about these facilities and making them well known if only a fraction of people actually go away and find the time to use them. You may say that I'm going down the wrong road here and that it is School 2.0, and that these facilities would be implemented in Schools and the usage monitored there. However, I'm going to argue and say that this is not quite the full point in these tools. Yes, hopefully they would be used in Schools widely if brought into use, but part of the main idea of School 2.0 is a more independent and personalised focus on learning. Allowing students to find things out for themselves, and learning from their peers... without teachers constantly standing breathing down their necks. Quite simply, some of this learning would need to be done in personal time for School 2.0 to be totally effective, as there are just not enough hours in the School day for blogs to be written, wikis to be updated, blogs to be read, information to be found, discussions with peers to be had... as I'm sure you can already appreciate.

So, as I've now realised, mainly through my personal experience, the use of these tools and their effectiveness is not really what needs debated anymore... surely by now people can start to appreciate how they can be used and what good it could do in education, if not, that's what the teaching end of School 2.0 is there to cater for. The challenge is in fact finding a way to make using these tools more like a daily habit, Not something which is almost seen as a menial task, or a chore, but something which just seems to happen, something which can be enjoyable to an extent. This may seem like a big hurdle, because making any form of work seem enjoyable is something which many have tried... and many have failed, but when working with computers and tools like these which, in the end are multipurpose and not just used for work I think it is possible.

I can only currently think of one logical approach to tackling this problem, but after looking at the length of this post I think I'll save it for another day...

The Bass Player