David Weinberger points out in "scary google"that google knows more than you think:
1. Go to google.com 2. Type in your phone number, in quotation marks 3. When it finds your name and address, click on "Maps" 4. You are here.
Meanwhile, what happens when you look at the collective mind of the surfers around you? Rob Flickenger writes in O'ReillyNet about "Tapping the alpha geek noosphere with EtherPEG".
It never ceases to amaze me how willing people are to believe things that are frightening--and how skeptical they are about things that are good.
Case in point. I really enjoy Joi Ito's weblog, but he recently posted a link to the fear-mongering "Aspartame is poison" site. This site tosses around plenty of frightening numbers associated with the risks of ingesting aspartame...but none of them are from reputable, peer-reviewed sources. So I searched on aspartame in PubMed, and found at least two articles from peer-reviewed medical journals that refute this.
So why is it that we're so much more inclined to believe the bad than the good? Self-preservation, because we're less likely to be disappointed? Odds, because we've had more bad experiences than good? Or something else? I don't see this in my kids nearly as much as I do in adults--they're generally skeptical of threats ("mom's probably wrong...that steam doesn't look hot enough to burn me"), but optimistic about positive outcomes.
In his comment on my "balancing acts" post, Joi Ito suggested that I read Ten Tips on Writing the Living Web, so I did.
Yum.
I love the term "the living web." I remember back in '93 when the web was being born, and it felt so new and changeable and full of promise. Commercialization and professionalization of the web has changed that...but blogs seem to be bringing that sense of wonder back.
Clearly, I need to find a way to begin integrating the concept of the living web into my teaching. I'm tired of teaching web development as a mechanical task, rather than a creative endeavour. And perhaps the key to getting them to write better is in fact to get them to write more often, and more quickly, with less riding on each word that they provide.
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