Playing in my sandbox

Recently, there has been a violent storm on an internet list I belong to – a storm all about Web 2 technology.  It resulted in some violent and intemperate words being said on both sides, and ended with a valuable member of the list leaving.  Now, why am I telling you all of this?  Because it all was about who was a digital pioneer and who were digital settlers.  So where do I come in?  Well, I am one of the pioneers on the list.  Not one of the first pioneers by any means, but I am an enthusiastic user of Web 2 technologies, and I love playing around with these new technologies.  I am an enthusiastic Twitterer – for now, anyway, until something else catches my fancy!  I sign up for lots of new technologies,  try them out, and then discard them, or use them, whichever is appropriate.  I am perfectly happy doing this, and don’t see it as a waste of my time at all. I am not the most skilled user of any of these ‘toys’, but I am perfectly willing to spend time ‘playing around’ with different applications, seeing which may come in useful.  Every so often I will throw one of my new toys out of the sandbox for others to have a look at, to examine, and to put to good use.  For instance, I recommended Twitter as a useful tool for the internet list recently, having looked at other means of communication and discarded them as not being very useful.  At the moment there are a lot of pioneering school librarians and teachers populating Twitter – with the result that when the settlers catch up with us there is a lot of traffic on the site already, and lots of people with useful information to follow.  Now when I first caught the ‘Twitterbug’, there were very few of us, but we slowly built a useful colony for others to follow.  And that is the point of ‘playing in my sandbox’.  You may find that what I am doing is totally useless, and a waste of time – that you don’t have the time to play with toys, and so why should I (the accusation on the list which caused all the furore).  However, if I hadn’t been there before you, playing with lots of technologies and seeing which ones had educational value and which did not, then where would the settlers be in a few years time?  The pioneers are not superior to the settlers – they just enjoy trying out new technologies and seeing what they can do.  They aren’t necessarily the best ones at embedding this new technology into the curriculum – they’re off finding other new technologies to have a look at.  So what I am pleading for is this: whether you are a pioneer or a settler, make room for the other.  The pioneers may drive you mad with their butterfly approach to technology, but they are doing a useful sorting and sifting job; the settlers may drive you mad with their slow adoption of the wonderful new technology you are dying for them to try, but once they do adopt it they will embed it into the curriculum in a far better way than you will.  Be a pioneer or a settler, whichever suits you - but don’t shoot at each other!