Thursday, August 23, 2007

My Technology Blog Reading List

Andy Carvin has posted a list of technology blogs he reads. I find most of his selections to be way too commercial in focus to recommend to teachers. Just like we don't teach specific applications to kids, reading about technology shouldn't focus on an endless string of new startups and applications, but more basic and general principles, concepts, techniques, and um, technologies. Tools that will empower your work over the next five years. At least, that's how I approach it in my reading. To put it another way, if you were reading the equivalent to TechCrunch five years ago, you weren't reading about blogs and wikis. You were reading about the release of products nobody remembers and companies that are long gone. My short list in alphabetical order:

  • apophenia - The only blog Andy and I have in common here; I appreciate that danah is always conscious of the role sexuality plays in social networking and our perceptions of it.
  • Bill Kerr - The best old skool construtionist blogger.
  • Boing Boing - If apophenia counts as a tech blog, so does Boing Boing.
  • copyrighteous - Mako's got his hands in a lot of pies important to educators: free content, free software, OLPC. A very important young voice on the underlying philosophies off all this stuff.
  • Daring Fireball - Necessary and sufficient for Mac users.
  • dive into mark - A prototypical tech blogger; expert in syndication, accessibility, mashups; a strong and pragmatic voice for freedom.
  • Mark Bernstein - Hypertext guru.
  • Mark Guzdial's Amazon Blog - Brand new to me (via Bill Kerr). Constructionist author and academic.
  • Mark Shuttleworth - My boss. His record as a technology analyst can't be disputed. His interest in and instincts about education are strong.
  • O'Reilly Radar - Essential if you're trying to plan more than one step ahead. My career is built on a stack of O'Reilly manuals.
  • Planet OLPC - OLPC News is essentially anti-OLPC. I've never regarded them as well informed, but ymmv. Only read it if you have some kind of "balance" fetish. Planet OLPC aggregates the blogs of various OLPC developers. The best source for OLPC news is the weekly report on their wiki.
  • Sam Ruby - Another prototypical tech blogger, covering mostly the same territory as Mark Pilgrim, more phlegmatically.
  • Simon Willison's Blogmarks - Nice catch basin for news about web technologies.
  • Slashdot - The old skool way to make sure you don't miss any of the big geek stories of the day.
  • Stephen's Web - Stephen is a first class technology analyst with a fundamentally sound understanding of progressive education and a traditional academic's temperament.

2 comments:

Gnuosphere said...

I think Technocrat would go well with this list.

Wayan said...

Wow, what a great compliment: "Only read [OLPC News] if you have some kind of "balance" fetish."

Thanks for pointing out that we look at all aspects of OLPC, the good and the bad, with in-depth analysis you can't find on the pure fan-boy sites.