Ed Tech Reading Group?

I’m just finishing up Kevin Kelly’s “What Technology Wants” (I highly recommend it!) which led me to ask on twitter if anyone else who had read it wanted to connect to discuss it.

"The Kids Reading Together" - CC Attribution Share Alike Some rights reserved by Valerie Everett I didn’t get much of a response but I’m not giving up, and I thought I’d float the idea of a semi-formal “reading group” here to see if I got any takers. I know this seems pretty old school, and certainly if it was just a question of finding anyone else in the world who had read a book I’d just finished that would be simple to do, but context matters. Even if the reading group ended up being comprised of myself and one other person with some shared context, that would be a great step forward from reading some of these books on my own.

And while I called it an “ed tech” reading group in the title, I mean this in a VERY broad sense. My personal practice as an educational technologist is informed by many different perspectives – critical theories of technology, cognitive science, non-dualism and integral studies, emergence and the new science, and various approaches to critical pedagogy too. Part of the fun of forming a group like this is figuring out what to read together – those lists are by no means the only things I am interested in reading with others, but if you see something in one of them you are interested in tackling, let me know.

I don’t read very quickly these days. Or rather – I read so many different things at once that I don’t end up finishing them very quickly. Partly I’m hoping that doing readings as a group can help a bit with this, but I’m also no reading group fascist – we’re all working adults with lots of responsibilities, but if you find that reading, especially in topics slightly outside your field, helps inform your practice, then I’d love to head from you. I don’t have any firm idea on what form this group might take – a couple of google hangout chats? A group blog? We won’t know until we start. Drop me a line, either email or preferably in the comments below, if this seems like it might be of interest. – SWL