back to blogging

It has been a long time since my last blog, but I am trying to get back into it. Many things have changed for me and I will get into all of that at a later blog, but first I have to start here.
I have been trying to keep up reading a couple of different blog postings (and truth be told, doing a horrible job of it) recently. One of my favorites is Will Richardson's blog. His book on Web 2.0 tools was the textbook for one of my classes I took and I was able to meet him and get his book autographed during the NECC conference in Atlanta summer of 2007 (he was presenting there). Anyway, he has a recent post which talks about the plane that had to emergency land in the Hudson River. One of the people who was on the ferry in the harbor took a picture and posted it to his twitter page. There was a reporter from NPR that was apparently searching on twitter for people who were involved with the accident and came across this post. A few minutes later, the picture was on the front page of NPR's web page! Apparently the guy who took the picture (and wrote the twitter post) has spent the last week or two during the talk show circuit - enjoying his 15 minutes of fame. You can read the post to get a better picture (no pun intended) of the events which I am talking about. After reading Will's post, and subsequent discussion, it really occurred to me that this is the world that we live in now. Just minutes after an event happens, people are there and are able to present information that we could have never gotten before. Much of that information can be uncensored (a scary proposition in more ways than one). And, on top of that, national reporters are picking up on the average person's contribution and making it news worthy. That alone is worth the price of admission.
What is really pretty amazing to me however, is that as an educator, we have to prepare our students for this world. As a digital immigrant (albeit one with hopefully a small accent) this series of events seem amazing to me. To my students, probably not so much. The capability is right at their fingertips and we are encouraging them to use it as much as possible. The idea that anybody in the right place at the right time can get noticed is not a new concept. Now it just may be true that ANYBODY can be in the right place at the right time!