Diggs as Memes

I wrote a little piece on my teaching philosophy before this one. I mention the word meme there. I did not invent this word. It was the British biologist, Richard Dawkings, that invented it. I believe it was in his book "The Selfish Gene". The idea of meme, became a meme. A meme is an idea with staying power. It does not have to be an idea, it could be a catchy tune, a wizzle sound, anything we choose to keep in our mind. After writing my teaching philosophy note, I went to digg.com

It hit me. I guess this is a simple idea, and very likely other people have had it already. Definitely some people, like the inventors of Google, are making a lot of money out of it.

We navigate our environment of ideas, ecology of ideas, as I write in my note; with the help of guides. In the case of my teaching philosophy note, the teacher is the guide in memeland. A student won't listen to us, if what we say does not survive in his mind. He may be reviewing in his mind the last cheat codes he downloaded for the game he is being playing in the Internet for the past week. He is far away from right-handed rules and magnetic fields. The result is that the memes I was trying to sneak in, in his mind don't make it. Of course I may just be a bad teacher, and nobody will listen to me anyway. But assuming that I have done everything professionally expected of me as a good teacher. I am still an actor in the ecology of the mind of that student. I have to produce relevant science, relevant to the student not only to me.

Digg.com is another tool used nowadays to navigate the cultural landscape of memeland. The beauty of this tool, is that there is no teacher. We are all teachers and students in diggland.

I sadly report that none of my postings has made it to the top ten.

I suppose that even the captive audience I have at school, is not listening to me much more at school. Digg.com is a meme testing ground. When my memes make it to digg.com, I can be more confident that my classes will be more memorable.