Middle Adopters – Seeing ‘the second wave’ as an audience.

Fingers full of paint flipping over a keyboard propped on my lap, on an evening following a day that actually smelled like spring. Spring that brings all the little jobs that need to get done, Spring that brings the leaves out of the trees we planted last year (hopefully). It’s our first spring in our first house. A very, very special time. And a time for my computer muscled body to remember that those muscles are actually made for doing something other than typing…

Had a great chat with Bud Hunt tonight, just before i put brush and roller to my stairs.  He was asking me, quite rightly i think, what it was exactly we were trying to do at the barnraising. He pointed out that Tadge O’brien, over at Monroe, has a fantastic resource in his edtech wiki. During the shows many other fine pieces of work have been mentioned, most of which are detailed in the barnraising modules. Why then, if we knew these things existed, were we trying to do it all over again? (I must interject here, and say that Bud put all of this in a far better way, and i hope he forgives the crude way I’m abusing his fine conversation to work towards my point)

Let me start with some premises for background.

1. The Read/Write education is in its infancy.
2. Those who were there at the birth, are, by necessity, defining the conversation.
3. They are also defining the terms of the conversation.
4. They are empowered by this position of… er… power.
5. This empowerment, to some degree, separates them from the ‘second wave’.
6. The second wave of people are the ones who ‘learn’ the language. (different from the ones who created it)
7. When one is ‘learning’ something, one vaguely expects those things that one is learning to ‘work’. As opposed to someone who is ‘creating’ something, who is a little more prepared to ‘test’ something.
8. These waves overlap, and some people have their feet in both pools, in different circumstances.
9. People who quibble over details the first time I expound a theory are not very nice, and should be more patient.
10. That overlap, EVENTUALLY, solidifies, and the item, like the telephone, becomes a standard of everyones practice.

And now premises for creation of learning ‘items’.

1. Audience, in everything, is critical.

I remember the first time I started to program in CSS. I was in the second wave, we were already at CSS2, and there were already very serious experts at it.(those guys still blow my mind, anyone who says webdesign isn’t art…) I was going around, pulling down pieces of stuff from different sites, looking at the code, pasting some of it into my own little test site to see how it would work. I was coming into what was a mature environment (for the internet) and as I would appear very uncool asking simple questions like, “waddaya mean cascading…?” or “How do i make my page center?” i just lurked around until i could find bits to start with.

When I take a look at the three or four sites that taught me the admitedly elementary webdesign that i do know, a couple stand out. The listematic, a fantastic show by example site supported by the grand master of css, w3schools, and glish, the layout site. With these three websites, I learned enough to design and sell a website or two over the years. Take a look at them. They all share one very important quality. They show you EXACTLY what you would need to do, in a basic way, to be successful.

As a ‘second wave’ learner to css, that’s exactly what i needed. A way I could succeed automatically, without fear, without the chance of failure (beyond my little bouts of inattention. Second wavers want to be able to see where they’re going to get without asking alot of questions that they know the first wavers have heard a zillion times. They want to show up, copy and paste, and then make it happen in their own lives.

This is what i would like to see happen for new media education. I would like to see a copy and paste solution for a classroom wiki project. A copy and paste solution for blogging with your students. These things, these copy and paste solutions are the markers of a mature medium. Once things can be easily copied, they are really part of the mainstream. And for my part I want the read/write web to be part of the mainstream. I want students to be producers of knowledge. I want them to be able to control the media that is trying to control them.

All that to say. The second wave is the audience many of us are seeking. We need to produce for them, not for us… until we all blend into the same, and those separations wont matter anymore, and blogging will really be the same as calling someone on the telephone.

Author: dave

I run this site... among other things. View all posts by dave