This is my 125th Fragment since I started posting here on 10 October 2017.
Will it be my last or will there be another 125? Or perhaps a number in-between.
You see, unlike a book that is literally bound by its covers, a blog - or any social media for that matter - has no pre-defined limit on content. So it lends itself to an endless flow of words, a constant revision of ideas, and always the possibility of just one more post.
So what if I had known from the beginning that I could only post 100 times? How would it have changed the why, when, and what of each Fragment?
This is the question that Ben Grosser inspired me to ask this week when I came across his project Minus. In his own words,
Minus is a finite social network where you get 100 posts—for life. While you can reply to a post as often as you like, every time you add to the feed, it subtracts from your lifetime total. When you reach 0 posts left, that’s it. No exceptions.
And this led me to another set of questions.
If our schools only had 100 posts allotted to them, what would we actually say? What are the stories that we would tell? How would we determine what is important and what is nothing more than an endless stream of empty content?
These are not easy questions to answer. But I suggest that one possible starting point would be to define what we actually believe about how students learn and begin to name the elements that make up a “good education”. Because if we fail to do this, then I fear that our posts will continue to drift aimlessly across a never-ending sea of value-less content.
Interestingly, there is plenty of guidance on offer around the internet on how to generate endless content. But I’m still wondering whether, in the end, we wouldn’t be better off limiting ourselves to 100 posts and making sure that each one will make a lifetime of difference.
Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash.
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