Zack Lee has taken his blogging up a notch in recent posts. I loved reading his latest:

I happened to stumble upon these two articles on how klout is being used as a metric for hiring somebody as well as a metric for student grades. They were gut-wrenching and nauseating reads to say the least but I’m trying to wonder why?

I can relate to the feeling. How do you recover, Zack?

 I had a moment of wandering and an urge to check the Recent Changes at the UBC Wiki.

Hey, that’s what I do when enveloped by despair too! Zack soon stumbles on a remarkable group course project for a Curriculum and Pedagogy class, on teaching critical media literacy. Fantastic stuff, heaps of useful resources and information. But beyond the quality of the material is a sense of authentic engagement. As Zack astutely puts it, “I didn’t know what to expect, nobody was trying to sell me something, nobody’s trying to game the system, nobody was trying to make me listen to them because they want to be important. I just started to ask myself ‘What is this?’ and thus with wikis, it becomes a rabbit hole journey that goes deeper and deeper.”

I’m still fuming a bit about some recent interactions with a couple of peers. Their striking indifference to the power of student-created knowledge resources made me uncharacteristically upset. It’s not as if people haven’t been underwhelmed or even contemptuous of things I’ve argued before, and it’s not as if those responses were typical… But Zack’s thoughtful post came my way at a perfect moment.