My wife and I were joking last night about just how much the edubloging community likes to think it is the greatest thing since sliced bread, doing great things for kids and moving the conversation about learning on to greater things. When I first started blogging, she kept asking me why I was always Blarbing and talking about other Blarbs. She likes to kid me that everything is 2.0 this and edu-something that. Well, being the funny woman that she is, my wife came up with the absolute best conference title of all time (plus a great subtitle and tag line).

Edublarbification: A 7.0 conference for a 2.0 world

Tagline: If you can figure out what it is, then you can come, virtually.

While this was always a big joke (which I didn’t stop laughing about for a long time), it got me thinking about just how much elitism there is in the edublogosphere. I noticed it when I was at Educon last month. There were a lot of references to the fact that “we get it” and others don’t. I engage in elitism whenever I use the word “we”, in fact. As if there was a community that I could possibly speak for… Every time I use that word, I am essentially saying that there is a “them” as well, all of those people who aren’t in the community.

As inviting as we (and I) try to be, I never really get the feeling that we get there. We seem to expect a certain level of devotion to “the cause” right off the bat. I’m not convinced that a little bit of elitism is a bad thing, but I do think that when my wife can lampoon it so easily and be so spot on with the sentiment that I see so clearly in the words that we write and the studies that we perform, it is hard to not believe it isn’t a little troubling.

So, I guess my questions are these: Do we need an event in the edublogosphere that will take us down a notch? Is there anything that will make us stop believing that “we” have the answer? Why do we constantly search for something new to know, so that we know something more than others do?

(Or, was it just a funny joke at our expense?)