Congratulations on being duped
Congratulations edublogger, you’ve been duped!
Here is a wonderful badge to put on your website.
Now all you have to do is link back to our website and you get to share this wonderful badge on your blog. That’s right, all it costs is a link to our site where we advertise college degrees or not-so-free ‘free educational resources’.
You see, we are “an organization dedicated to online education and learning technology and would like to recognize the top resources on the Internet that parallel the same goals of promoting the expansion of learning into new and innovative formats. Your website has shown its commitment to the advancement of education and this award is intended to commend your efforts.”
Translation: We create a fancy award badge, tell you that you are great, then you freely put a link to our blog or website on the sidebar, and thus every page, of your blog. We get free links and an improved Google/search engine ranking and you get a shiny badge.
Thanks for playing along.
Tags: advertising, advertising tricks, awards, badges, blogging, duped, Edublogs, educators, humour, linkbacks, netsavvy, scams
Background:
June 16th, 2010 at 12:52 pm
Thank you for raising this point – can’t ever be brought to the attention of educators enough.
I see it happening more and more and more…. soft marketing. Playing on people’s egos too. I’ve written about it but it is maddening when hard working, earnest educators (I’m not ashamed, I consider myself one) produce thoughtful lists which are overlooked by the spam of many sites that quickly throw something together and then push, push around the netiverse only for “attention” and not any sincere wish for good information to be shared.
It makes you wonder how anyone on the internet given the lackluster response of educators to these “cretins”, can really share any reliable information, especially to teachers new to the online world. Makes it even harder to wade through the crap. Here is a recent example – onlinedegrees(dot)org’s “Top 25 ESL blogs for teachers and students” -they keep shoving out half hearted, hardly researched lists, all in the name of selling campus programs. And then yes, we have the “contests” with tens of thousands of vanity hits while the blog carnivals get a few hundred at best….
End of my tirade. Thanks for posting this in an engaging manner.
David
June 25th, 2010 at 9:44 am
You know – I looked at that list a few times yesterday and I kept thinking “Online Degrees?” wouldn’t I consider email from them SPAM? Now it all makes perfect sense.
I’m fashioning a super shiny badge of my own right now.
** See what Janet has been up to… Let’s Begin, Shall We?
June 28th, 2010 at 8:08 pm
[...] I was reading Stephen Downes’ Twitter feed and he had commented in his resources on a blog entry by David Truss about folks being duped into putting a badge on their blogs or websites that promote other services that may not necessarily be desirable or worthy of support [...]
June 28th, 2010 at 11:25 pm
So, Stephen Downes wrote about this post, and in response to a comment he got from Doug Peterson, (whose own post response is linked above in comment/trackback 3), Stephen created his own badge:
I just shared my thoughts on Doug’s post and thought I’d share them here too:
It was neat to see this evolve, and yet I find myself uninterested in Stephen’s badge. I’m a huge fan of Stephen and his is one of only two newsletters I get, the other one being George Siemens, via email… but ‘wearing a badge’ to benefit from google popularity in the name of ‘free learning’ doesn’t sit well with me for some reason? Still, I respect that what it is, is completely out in the open… no one is getting duped:-)
June 29th, 2010 at 12:53 am
It did evolve a little bit and that’s kind of cool. Your original post raised a very important point and I think that that’s the true learning from all of this. Had Stephen not read your content and I hadn’t read Stephen’s, this whole discourse wouldn’t have happened.
** See what dougpete has been up to… Badges
June 29th, 2010 at 1:14 am
I still have my “Top 5%” badge from 1995, though I display such things in a very deep folder inside the bowels of a creaky hard drive.
It’s on old game, older than the web.
Nice badge anyhow
** See what Alan Levine has been up to… LearnMobs DoShops
June 29th, 2010 at 11:40 pm
Doug,
We are indeed having a learning conversation, and your blog post exemplified that your choice to ‘wear’ Stephen’s badge on your blog was a thoughtful process.
Alan,
A “Top 5%” from 1995 is iconic! I didn’t even know what the internet was in 1995. I’m in no way opposed to badges, but these top lists that David mentions above, made up or even copied just to sell campus programs bother me.
It’s all a learning process, but if we are going to preach to kids the importance of being net savvy, should we practice that ourselves?
July 8th, 2010 at 4:48 pm
[...] However, human nature being what it is, can be duped. The ego is a tremendously weak link (but I acknowledge its strength too) when it comes to throwing ourselves into things that might parade “our” cause.
What am I getting at?
Well, recently David Truss wrote about the plethora of sites offering “badges” and “free promotion”. Pandering to the lowest common denominator of online teachers – promotion [...]