Is the web (2.0 and all) just old wine in new bottles? Yes, some of it quite good, but the larger question is this: is the new bottle even a bottle? I see weblogs, wikis, social bookmarking, podcasting, vcasting, streaming, mashups, ad nauseum (take a look at Emily Chan’s Ehub if you want to get dizzy about all this) as a potentially new, highly decentralized, folksonomic learning …process? You can put old wine in it, but I think it was meant to hold ambrosia instead. The whole container metaphor breaks down as it did for a group of teachers I tried to work with this weekend on greating podcasts. I made the point that for any of these new techologies to be useful that they had to be easier, faster, cheaper, and better than what was already being used. I had an epiphany as I said this: this can’t happen. What I was saying was that they had to make the tools fit into the dominant administrative tool–schools. This is like trying to use the claw part of a hammer to cut steak. Yes, it works, but is that the best use for that tool?

Our tools have pushed beyond the ability of the existing institutions to adopt them. School is a zero sum game as it is practiced today. There are efficiencies to be had, but none so revolutionary that current administrators will be able to “fold in” Web 2.0. (I am sorry to use that term, but it is the only shorthand word I know to describe the networked zeitgeist.) Look at the fear most administrators feel toward weblogs. Weblogs demand freedom of a larger kind than schools know how to give. Many of us have simply routed around that fear and become a conduit by which students can exercise that freedom, but it is risky business professionally and personally. Yet we do it. Why? Because in our gut we know that this is where our students will live in their future. It is a sin to let them out into that world totally unprepared.

If schools cannot adapt (they haven’t yet) and there is a new metaphor (bottles no more, perhaps webs), then wht must we do? I think we are called upon to do what in our hearts we have always known. We must tell a new story and weave a new cloth that fits our new identities and that holds all of our tools.

The Kansas U. podcasts are what they are. I doubt they are a stepping stone to a new and better learning place. We don’t have any idea yet where that place might be. I think that is the most frustrating part of being in the middle of a revolution. You have enough perspective to see that where you have been is not prologue to where you really need to be. It is there to be seen, but your brain cannot process it. If I may engage in some hyperbolic analogy, I feel like Moses must have felt: the Promised Land is out there, but we will never live to see it. Long may we all live, long may we keep on.