Day: 20 May 2006

Of Snowballs and Pearls

There’s always some stimulus to write a post about something. It may come from something you read, something that comes up in physical conversation, something you see while surfing the web, whatever. And sometimes it’s none of these, it’s your personal muse.

I tend to think of this stimulus, this spark, as the thing that sets the snowball off. And I wish I had a word for it, like pearls have nacre. I don’t want to use nacre because likening blogs to pearls feels a bit presumptuous. Yet stimulus and spark and root and words like that don’t feel right either.

The sense I’m trying to capture is one which shows the opensource and shared and emergent and free and growing and energetic and creative nature of ideas in blogs, something that snowball captures well. What do we call this thing that starts a snowball? Doc, anyone else, any ideas?

Four Pillars: Preparing for Generation M

I’m sure you’ve done it hundreds of times. Gone on a random walk around the web, triggered by something you saw somewhere. Well, it was my turn yesterday.

I was getting my head together preparing for a long-delayed post. WordPress Dashboard up, the specific New Scientist article (that triggered the post in the first place) beside me. Sitting comfortably. Fingers poised, hovering above remote Apple keyboard. About to press Write Post.
And then off I went like a distracted cat. No more “elegantly poised to strike” mode.
Photo Matt had posted something about WordPress Accounts, and for some strange reason I had to take a look. Blogger’s cramp? I hear you say…. Wishful thinking -)
And that journey took me here. A conference on Connecting and Collaborating in Ottawa.

Subtitled Online Tools for the Classroom.

Take a look at the agenda. I have no idea how good the conference was, the quality of the presenters, the content, the attendees, anything.

But the agenda was enough for me. If this is now mainstream then Generation M is here. Now.

Maybe Clarence Fisher or Judy Breck or someone else knowledgeable about what’s happening in this space, (maybe Nolind Whachell?) could comment.

I am amazed. I don’t think we can get boards of public companies to attend conferences with that kind of agenda. Nor governments.  Maybe this is happening all over the world, and I am completely unaware. I’m not proud, I’m quite happy to be proven completely uninformed about this sort of thing.