Educational Parallels
Zephyr Teachout is the director of Internet organizing for the Howard Dean presidential campaign.
Baseline’s article, “The Marketing of a President” says the following:
Teachout is a key architect of one of the most effective marketing efforts in the history of national politics, and the most sosphisticated online camaign to date. Using a variety of Internet tools, from the electronic journals known as weblogs to social networking sites, the Dean campaign has propelled the Vermont doctor from near-anonymity to the front of the Democratic pack aiming to replace George W. Bush as chief executive of the United States.
The lessons of the Dean campaign do not just apply to politics.
I find this fascinating reading but find myself making, or maybe I should say hoping for, educational parallels as I read. Granted a political campaign holds far greater interest than educational issues but how can we effectively heed the lessons they are learning and then in turn put the focus on education?
With the Internet, an effective capaign creates a community that will on its own begin to market your product for you. Properly done, you won’t be able - or want - to control it.
The trick is to turn the buyers on a product, concept or candidate into evangelists, willing to take action on their own to spur demand. And the recrutiment doesn’t have to cost much.
The payoff is a powerful multiplier effect that turns anyone into a potential campaign worker.
OK, we have seen the educational use of weblogs increase this year but maybe we need to think a little harder about what we want to celebrate as more educators enter the arena. When you get right down to it, a weblog is a space on the web where teachers and students can write. And then, publish quite easily! If we educators, make sure there is an authentic audience that is willing to take the time to comment, we can in turn open the door for having a purpose to write and a reason to want to make the writing better. Then critical thinking on issues is a logical follow-up. I use the word celebrate because that’s how I view our job of helping to foster that student voice. My question is how can we work at creating a multiplier effect that gets more students involved in this process?
The two most effective tools for Dean have been a Web site that allows users to set up meetings with individuals of similar interests, known as Meetup.com; and the easy-to-use online diaries known as weblogs, or blogs.
Making these tools widely available via the Internet, reather than husbanding them at campaign headquarters, means Dean’s marketers give up a fair amount of control of messages made on behalf of their candidate.
Teachout says this spreads “ownership of the campaign,”
It’s time for us to give students ownership. We have to be willing to take the risks of giving them a voice so we all can have a dialogue - I think that’s teaching at its best and if we don’t do this, who will? We get the joy of helping then write and think as they learn to be a responsible, thinking, well-informed citizen.
The blog itself is not about getting votes, it’s about activiating people to get votes.
Educational blogs are not about getting web spaces, it’s about how we use those web spaces to get kids writing and thinking.
A key way of carrying on a campaign-wide converstion is the comment area on Blog for America. More than 100,000 comments have appeared on the weblog since June 10.
If the campaign can’t handle the volume of comments as it grows, how will it get meaningful impact from the conversation?” (The staff admits they don’t know yet, but they’re working on it.)
The parallel for us is that we don’t know yet either and we’re working and thinking about it. We sure don’t have those numbers so here is where we can learn from them. I’ll be following that thread.
The whole is smarter than the sum of its parts, says Johnson. Teachout wats to know what the parts are thinking.
In the end, the weblog gives the candidate, his staff, and all the people in the field a chance to conduct something like a clueful conversation.
Indeed, we have parallels here. Never before have we had a chance for such clueful conversation. The question is, where do we go from here?
The common theme of all the technology used by Dean, says Rowe, from the weblog to the wiki, an information pooling tool that lets staffers post reports on media coverage of the campaign, is a focus on building community.
Let’s keep building our educational community. Let’s keep finding others and keep on sharing all we are learning and thinking. We can make a difference!
Zephyr Teachout has no interest in technology for technology’s sake. “We want the simplest, dumbest tools we can get,” she says. The idea is to get people working, not to dazzle the,, and to get their feedback on what could be done better as quickly as possible.
That’s what we need to remember. I think we will get lots more educators on board if we just keep it simple. I am still in awe of how much you can do with a weblog in which students and teachers are writing, posting, thinking, creating, and responding on subjects they care about. Yep, keep it simple! It works!
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