A Blog about Blogs
A Blog about Blogs
Saturday, 15 December 2007
The winter break has begun and the campus of the College is strangely quiet, with all the students either having returned home or else away travelling in various parts of Asia.
And yet, I know that our students will still remain in contact with one another - perhaps not as intensively as they were when on campus, but keeping close contact nonetheless. In this electronic age, distance is not the barrier to communication that it was just a few years ago. Communication through e-mail and Facebook continues unabated, and this week the students in the UWC Linking Group at the United World College of the Atlantic in Wales announced the establishment of a blog site for students all all the UWCs to communicate with each other - http://www.unitedwords.org.
Pleasingly, the blog site has already attracted a number of contributions, and the range of contributions is expanding from its initial core group at Atlantic College. One thing I have noticed, though, is the somewhat heavy and even pessimistic tone of many of the contributions. Our young people seem to be carrying a huge weight of concern about world affairs on their shoulders. Concern is admirable, but so is optimism, which is often necessary to provide the hope that forms the basis of positive action.
Then again, perhaps this is nothing new. The students who are attracted to United World Colleges tend to be drawn from the more concerned and articulate young men and women of our planet, and so a focus on our global futures is perhaps an inherent part of the ‘UWC student’ profile. I was interested to read one posting on the UWC Blog site that included a sobering video based on Bob Dylan’s classic ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”. This song, originally written in 1962 - just after the Cuban missile crisis - was a commentary on the aftermath of a nuclear war. The video posting imaginatively updated Dylan’s lyrics to refer to a broad range of challenging, contemporary global issues; not bad for a 46 year old song!
In a significant way, blogs represent an authentic democratisation of information. Anyone with access to a computer and a free account - even a UWC student - can post their thoughts to a hopefully interested world to read. This is one of the factors leading to the explosion of information these days, together with websites, Wikipedia, Facebook groups, and so on. The danger, of course, is that without the peer review or other editorial checks which most books and printed articles endure, the reliability and authenticity of all this freely available information is often questionable. To take just one example, I was looking at a Facebook group this morning on global warming, and I came upon the discussion of Al Gore shown HERE - have a look and you will see what I mean.
Of course, no-one would search a Facebook group in preference to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (I hope!) for reliable information, but Wikipedia is a grey area in this regard. Wikipedia is more widely available to students than Britannica, being free, searchable and accessible without leaving the room to anyone with internet access, and yet despite the claims to the contrary, it is easily corrupted and manipulated, both accidentally and deliberately. For some people, starting a sentence by saying “Wiki says...” leads to a rolling of the eyes even before the sentence finishes, and often with good reason.
How we discern truth is one of the great philosophical questions of all time, but it takes on an immediate and practical reality when we read many blogs. But not this one of course :-)
AFTERWORD: By the way, I found out this week that LPCUWC has been identified as one of the world’s top 50 schools as measured by the number of students sent to ivy league universities - and one of the very few schools outside the US to make the rankings! The information is on the Wall Street Journal’s website; not a blog - so it must be reliable :-) The details can be seen at http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-COLLEGE0711-sort.html.
The normally busy front entrance to Li Po Chun United World College is strangely quiet now that the winter break has started.