I’ve just finished a keynote for the ITL Summer Institute in Westport, Connecticut. In the audience was Bob Greenberg, a teacher in Stradburg, a Class Blogmeister. Bob has his students blogging many of their assignments. He also reported that his students were engaging in blog-versations through the site outside of class — unrelated to the assignments. This isn’t really a new story, just another example of how students, as communicators, are empowered with audience.
What I hadn’t seen before was a business card that he designed and printed for his class. Students get cards, which they can then take home to their parents, hand them out, so that the community has a paper link to their ongoing blogging.
At this minute, I’m listening Bill Derry, the main architect of this event, whom I’ve not seen present before. He just talked about how, in a sense, our personal experiences have been invisible to the greater society that we live in. He said, it’s like we were the invisible man, who could only be seen when wrapped up, or painted with make up.
Through blogging and other collaborative community tools, we are able to carefully paint our individual experiences, bringing them to view to our society. The potential value is that sometimes our individual experiences and activities can be of value, especially in a time of rapid change.