I’ve repeatedly waxed rhapsodic here about the potential of Web 2.0 to change the way we think, learn, and engage the world. A lot of this hope evolves out of the potential it offers for collective thinking and learning. An example of such potential realized is at the center of the US Attorneys scandal.

Talking Points Memo, a weblog operated by three men out of a small office in Chelsea, has pushed the story since early January. They’ve produced original reporting, but have also depended a great deal upon the participation of their readership in tracing the contours of the scandal. Here’s a piece from the LA Times that details TPM’s process.

TPM’s work has employed collectivized information gathering and sifting. After noticing that several US Attorneys were being replaced late last year, TPM’s editors deputized their readership and asked them to send relevant clips from local newspapers. TPM aggregated the clips, revealing a pattern of politically-motivated firings. Two weeks ago the Department of Justice released more than 3000 documents related to the purge. TPM asked its readership–most of whom had been following the story for two months–to sift through the documents and discuss their findings online. The staff followed the threads to identify which documents to highlight, and built a timeline of significant events and players in the scandal. TPM has owned this story, out of a combination of editorial leadership and reader participation.

The big media outlets who originally paid little mind to this story are now on top of it, thanks in part to TPM’s muckraking. In this process, the editor/reporters there have modeled some ideas that I think are central to the integration of technology into teaching at the college level:

1. By empowering their readers to contribute, they’ve magnified the impact and worth of their enterprise.
2. By funneling the flow of information through their own expertise, they’ve shaped the potential chaos of many voices into purposeful and concrete journalism
3. By identifying themselves as journalists who work through a blog rather than bloggers who do journalism, they’ve influenced their field without letting the power and newness of the medium overwhelm their mission

Each of these points has a corollary in technological pedagogy. Technology at its best can augment what happens in the classroom, sharpening lessons, expanding fields of discussion, and magnifying student engagement with the materials under consideration. The teacher’s role in this process is central, and the employment of technology should be in support of a firmly defined pedagogical goal. Finally, just as good journalism is good journalism whether in print or on screen, effective teaching is effective teaching whatever the medium. The core rules of the disciplines still should dictate how technology is and is not used. This last point is important to revisit time and again because the power of the medium threatens at times to overwhelm the content that’s explored through it. TPM shows us that with a firm goal and high standards, it needn’t.

This is the best time of the year. Spring is in the air, and so is madness. March Madness, that is.

I’m not embarrassed to say that I am a college basketball fanatic, though many in the academy (and my family) probably think I should be more than ashamed. For hoops nuts like me, the past week of conference tournaments has been mere prologue to the main event. This is a week in which I must work conscientiously Monday to Wednesday to make up for the distractions brought by the first days of the tourney, Thursday and Friday. No matter how hard I try to be responsible, buzzer-beaters and Cinderellas will inevitably wind their way into my consciousness and push to the side any sense of duty. I’m not alone. American productivity won’t be aided by the emergence of March Madness on Demand, an online viewing tool that rescues diasporic fan-bases from the frustrations of CBS’s regional programming while threatening to undermine bottom lines everywhere. Every one of the games in the first three rounds is available for online viewing, for free. CBS advertises the service as for those “stuck in a cubicle” during daytime games, and the video player even features a “Boss Button” which you can click to immediately transform your desktop into an Excel spreadsheet. No kidding.

As irrelevant as all of this may seem to the regular goings on here at Cacophony, there is a link… there are many, many links, actually, and you can follow them to learn everything you want to know about college hoops and the tourney, and to research selections for your bracket challenges (the FBI has estimated that more than $2.5 billion changes hands in NCAA office pool betting).Fans of college basketball, like many people who invest ridiculous amounts of time in their passions, have firmly ensconced themselves in the blogosphere. College hoops bloggers range from the sabermetricians who focus on statistical analysis to the homers who obsess publicly about their teams. Many blogs offer predictions for the tourney, others aggregate the day’s hoops news and etceterata. One offers a petition that argues CBS should fire their obnoxious and analytically-underwhelming color analyst, Billy Packer. A site I read every day combines many of these approaches: Big Ten Wonk is run by an Illinois fan/American History PhD/stats-maven who offers 7-day a week blogging during tournament time under the heading “A Wonkalypse Now.” He regularly works Hegel and the Frankfurt School into his analysis. If I remember correctly, the Frankfurt School last appeared in the tournament as a 16-seed in 1989, and almost knocked off UCLA.

Beyond justifying how I’ve spent a lot of my time over the past few days (and months), this post is meant to show one example of how the blogosphere and Web 2.0 have welcomed and nurtured a cacophony of voices around a topic. In the process, they have changed how people relate to to the world of college hoops. The blogs above and the gazillion online college hoops forums have allowed passionate fans to express themselves, engage and connect with others, and learn more about the game they love. The pulse, flavor, and core issues of college basketball are accessible in a trip through these blogs. March Madness was around well-before these developments; they’ve just made it madder.

According to psychologist Jean Twenge of San Diego State University, the “self-esteem movement” and new media are a combination that threatens to undermine the American social fabric. Twenge is the lead author of Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–and More Miserable Than Ever Before, a study that has gotten a lot of attention this week. A team of researchers led by Twenge used what’s called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory to measure changes in the level of self-regard in over 16,000 college students since the early 1980s. The NPI asks students 40 questions, including “If I ruled the world, it would be a better place,” “I think I am a special person” and “I can live my life any way I want to.” From 1982-2006, the results of NPI inquiries suggest that American college students have become much more narcissistic.

I haven’t read the study, nor, really, do I plan to. As I learned in one of my first graduate school courses, it’s much easier to criticize a book you haven’t read than one you have. I have though read a lot of the reporting on the study this week, and while I think there may be something to the notion that Americans have become more self-involved, I wouldn’t put it on the younger generation (narcissistic link: they need help to consume critically), I wouldn’t date it to the 1980s (thank you, Dr. Freud), and I certainly wouldn’t accept on its face Twenge’s simplistic notion that “current technology fuels the increase in narcissism. By its very name, MySpace encourages attention-seeking, as does YouTube.” That is only one of the things these sites do, and to disaggregate that from the other processes at work is to miss the forest for a tree.

Here’s a link to an interview with Twenge, and a response by a certified Generation Me’er (I thought they were Generation Y?). I think the second interview complicates the first a bit. These things are certainly worth talking about, but I don’t think they’re worth getting overwrought about. Kinda like these developments:

One note that may, in fact, contradict what I’ve just written: the AP story on this quoted a young woman from University of Vermont saying most of her contemporaries are politically active and not very self-centered. If a reporter has to go to UVM to get that perspective, maybe we are in trouble.