Earlier this year, I read Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger (2007, Times Books). If you’d like to help support the cost of my website, you can buy it from Amazon.
Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
I’ve used a number of quotes from this book in writings I’ve done, and as I had to put it away today, I thought I’d do a mini-review for educators.
Should I read this book? If you’re an educator, and don’t quite understand why other educators are pushing read/write, Web 2.0 tools, then yes, I think you should read it. Weinberger weaves a complex tale with a lot of detail about the state of information and organization of that information in a semi-historical context. You begin to understand why “digital” information is a different beast, and that organizing it, finding it, and making use of it, presents new challenges.
Before I read this book, I already knew what he had to say, basically, but I wanted some confirmation. This book supports the use of folksonomy as a method for organizing digital data. It’s in part why I’ve purchased software on my own personal computer (let alone use folksonomy-powered Web tools) so I can apply tags to everything.
Everything is Miscellaneous explains why things are different in a digital domain: they don’t have to live in just one place. True, this book isn’t written for the educator, per se, but there are many tie-backs to our roles in education for the book to be useful. If concepts such as blogs, playlists, metadata, and keyword tags are all mush to you, then this book will likely make sense of these. This is not a technical book, it doesn’t show you how to start blogging or anything like that, but it paints a scene where the world is a place of contrasts: old-school organizational systems versus new ones powered by technologies such as social networks, blogs, Amazon reviews, and more that we can easily find online today.
If you’re trying to come to grips about why learning online might have importance for your students, this book will help support your inquiry. Of all the books I’ve read recently on these topics, this one was probably the strongest single one I’d recommend. And now, it comes out in paperback.