Last night, Jeremy Macdonald and I interviewed Rodd Lucier and Dean Shareski for our first Curiositycast. I'm still not sure how it will turn out in the end. I've never felt comfortable with the sound of my own voice and all I hear is something pitchy filled with ands and ums and whatnot. (For what it's worth, we should have the podcast edited and ready to go next week.) However, it's not really about the finished product. The point of Curiositycast is to ask questions relating to a topic of interest. We wanted to have a human search engine where we could ask questions about topics that we know next to nothing about. Because it was interactive, I found out things about Canadian football that I wouldn't have found on a Wikipedia entry. I learned some obscure rules, like the end-of-game kicking back and forth to end a tie. I learned about the distance between the defensive and offensive lines. But I also had a change in focus. I think I had always seen Canadian football as simply CFL and CFL as a cheap knock-off of American football. As Rodd and Dean talked about the sport, I found myself realizing that the two sports evolved in different ways with neither one of them being the "cheap knockoff" of the other. I found myself seeing "different" as not necessarily bad. I hadn't considered the way Canadian quarterbacks would have to be more mobile or that the game might actually be more exciting (especially with the movement, spacing and the twenty-five yard end zones). Ultimately, it's the human side that changed my perspective. A Wikipedia interest doesn't tell me what it's like to grow up as a kid playing with the Canadian rules or going to the stadium in Winnepeg and watching a game live. Informational texts are interesting, but they lack the passion, the interactivity and the human connection that you get from asking questions to a real person. I also feel like I got to know Rodd and Dean in a way that I don't experience on Twitter. I'm still a fan of geeking out about teaching, but there's something powerful about exploring our interests and stories. For all the talk of Personal Learning Networks, last night was a time when it truly felt personal and the learning had nothing to do with teaching. Toward the end of the night, I left thinking that I might do curiositycasts next year with my students. In a narrowcasting digital world, it might be fun for students to learn how to ask questions and watch what happens when other people geek out about their interests and passion. photo credit:
toddsmithdesign via
photopin cc
