Bricoleurs and Disruptive Technology Educators who want to work with serious technology and literacy have to improvise their way out of trouble (or into more trouble).Levi Strauss coined the phrase bricolage as the ability to improvise with whatever tools one has available. The key disruptive technology that is developing quite nicely are blogging clients and servers. Seeing that blogging technology can maybe help develop literate and sharing virtual communities of teachers and students, it is easy to understand why an educator would take a leap of faith and want to try it out. If one likes Manila, Movable Type, or Post Nuke, one needs access to a server or convert a box into a server, a static IP number, a DNS name, and network access. Even before the pedagogical use of the technology is even attempted, getting all the technological pieces together can be a chore to downright impossible. Did I mention TIME? Time to piece the plan together, time to understand the technology, and time to plan to introduce it and use in the classroom. Did I forget, time to plan a good rational to bring to your technology coordinator, your network administrator and any other administrator from whom one needs a signature to go to the next step. I salute educators like Pat Delaney, the digital librarian at Martin Luther King Middle School in San Francisco, who has volumes to write on this topic, for finding a way to get his students online. http://interactiveu.berkeley.edu:8000/Delaney/ and http://www.bayareawritingproject.org.

One wonders how farther along more educators could be if administrators, network administrators, technology coordinators, were more understanding and gave educators a bit more freedom and support to find digital publishing solutions that enable learning communites to share their story to new audiences. It is a damn shame since these pioneering troubleshooters are usually not compensated for the time on task, trying to bring authentic student writing to the fore, into the light.

Thanks to Chad Dickerson of InfoWorld Magazine, who wrote a great article in the September 9th issue on fostering creativity and introduced me to the term bricolage.
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