The first thing high school Speech and Debate teacher Brenda Stewart teaches her students when they begin debate class is that the phrase, “I read it on the Internet” is not a usable source in a debate. “You wouldn’t believe some of the facts these students were coming up with,” she said, laughing. “I’ve had to start out, right off the bat, by telling them to be leery of  internet sites as credible sources of information.”

This month at WeAreTeachers, we are teaming up with Encyclopedia Britannica to offer our “Quality Counts” microgrant. We want teachers to share their favorite research project they do with their students each year and their strategies for ensuring that  students are getting accurate, quality information when so much of what they read online may be misleading or false. Let us know and you could win $200 and a Flip Video camera to show how your favorite student project that supports connecting students with reliable resources for information.

In conjunction with this microgrant, we wanted to take a minute to explore misinformation on the internet and to offer a solution to screen for accurate information.

While some sites are obviously trustworthy, you might be surprised by what is being passed along as facts and are clearly fabrications.  Take a look at this video from YouTube of a kayaker being capsized by a killer whale and then emerging unscathed.

You might think that YouTube would surely offer quality information, so this video must be real. You would be wrong. Despite the fact that the description of the video reads, ” Some people out on the ocean enjoying a Kayak ride… When all of a sudden a whale capsizes one of the Kayaks! Lucky no one got hurt! Just very surprised,” a search on the urban legend debunking website Snopes reveals that the video is a fake.

“However, this clip…isn’t the real thing,” Snopes reports. “It’s part of a Korean language version of a commercial for Powerade…noted for producing commercials using a variety of tricky visual effects to depict athletes accomplishing impossible feats of strength and and skill.”

It’s easy to verify viral email forwards or urban legends thanks to sites like Snopes, but what about the information that your students are using? In a time when so much information is free, how can you make sure that your students aren’t getting what they pay for? That is to say, how can you be sure that the content they are using for reference and information is credible?

The solution lies in the acronym CARS (Credibility, Accuracy, Reasonability, Support). The CARS checklist is an excellent way to help students discern between quality information online and inaccuracies parading as the truth:

Credibility: Is the information from a site considered to be an authority? That is a great starting point, but as we saw with the YouTube clip, it does not stand alone as a way to determine  quality information.

Accuracy: Was the article written recently? Remember, there is no one in charge of sifting through the internet and deleting information that is no longer relevant. Check your dates. Is the language vague, or does it offer specific information?

Reasonability: Does it just sound too good to be true? Does it sound excessive? Does it make sense? If not, tread lightly-it’s probably not true.

Support: Lastly, are there footnotes? Links? Listed sources? Contact information? Collaborating evidence? Without any evidence to back up a claim, it’s difficult to know if it is true or not.

If your fact does not meet the CARS criteria, you should probably keep looking until you find information that does.

We are looking forward to hearing your solutions for keeping information pertinent and credible. Have you applied for our microgrant yet? Don’t wait-do it now and be well on your way to earning cash and a Flip Video camera! The deadline for applications is April 6, so don’t wait-apply now!

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If you will be in Austin this weekend, we hope you will set aside time to join us for a TweetUp, sponsored by WeAreTeachers and Dell.  Come kick your weekend off with complimentary drinks, snacks and a chance to make new connections and meet your ” tweeps”  in real life amidst breathtaking panoramic views of beautiful Austin, TX.

When and Where?

Friday, March 12  from  2-4pm at Terrace59 at Speakeasy, Austin TX

What is a TweetUp?

A tweetup is a networking function that incorporates Twitter. It’s a way to meet people you have connected with on Twitter, and also a way to meet new friends that you can keep up with via social media like Twitter or the  WeAreTeachers community.

Who Will Be There?

Join your fellow teachers as well as these distinguished attendees from Dell and WeAreTeachers:

@lpt
@lionelatdell
@richardatdell
@kerryatdell
@fgasquet
@tallgamer
@weareteachers
@sandy5coat

What Do  I Wear?

Dress is “Austin appropriate,” think cool and casual. Jeans are fine.

How Can I Find Out More?

You can see more about the TweetUp, find our hashtags and reserve your spot at the Tweetvite.

Come kick off your weekend with your friends from WeAreTeachers and Dell. We promise a great time will be had by all as we announce some exciting news with Dell! See you there!

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Regardless of what subject or grade they teach, the goal of teachers is basically the same: to put their students on the road to being successful adults. But in the world of the special education teacher, that road can be paved with potholes, speed bumps and outright road blocks. Everyday, special education teachers around the world strive to peel the ”disabled” sticker that society can sometimes place on their students and reprogram them to see themselves not as “disabled” but “differently-abled.”

WeAreTeachers and our partner, PCI Education, a leader in special education learning, see the groundbreaking work taking place in classrooms all over the world and we want to inspire more of it.

We are now accepting submissions for our “Individual Attention, Collective Impact” microgrant, which enables special education teachers to share their best practices for reaching individual students. Additionally, all of the ideas will be posted in an online gallery to educate and inspire other teachers.

Kim G., a special education teacher in Arlington, TX feels her heart swell with pride every time she shops at her local grocery store where David, a former student with Downs Syndrome, works as a bagger. Friendly and affable, David is well known and liked amongst store patrons as well as one of the store’s most valued employees for his reliability and positive attitude. Kim remembers when David was one of her students, he was sweet and gentle, but frightened and sometimes picked on by the mainstream students.  “David was scared to talk to anyone because he wasn’t sure how he would be treated,” Kim explained, “it was heartbreaking because you knew he wanted to engage people, but he had some bad experiences and now was very leery and withdrawn.”

David’s parents were also afraid to encourage their son to shine, they themselves were so traumatized from hearing David tearfully, desperately recount the day a boy had frightened him in the school cafeteria with a lit match that they had curbed their urging that David participate in regular school functions.

Kim and her special education colleagues worked hard with David and his parents to draw him out and make him more assertive and self-determined and lo and behold, after years of gentle pushing and inspiring, David applied at the grocery store where he has worked since he finished school.

Special education teachers everywhere can relate to David’s story. Along with their special learning needs, students often come in with a special set of concerns: ridicule, fear, and uncertainty about the future. But special education teachers face these needs each day with a bold determination to help students, and sometimes parents, get to a place where they can be appreciated for their individual skills and talents.

The following video talks about how teachers at the O’Hearn School of Massachusetts are working towards this goal through the technique of full inclusion teaching.

Just as the O’Hearn School is using innovative techniques, teachers all over the world are finding and tailoring special solutions to their students individual needs.

Do you have a great special education idea that you would love to share? It’s not too late! The deadline for submissions is November 13th, so apply now! You could win $200 in cash and a flip video camera to capture the implementation of your idea and share with the WeAreTeachers community. And don’t forget to sign up to be a part of our Special Education microcommunity to stay connected with important news, blogs, and people in the special education field.

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It’s no secret that teachers are resourceful and have great ideas. With the right funding and the right idea, a teacher can start a revolution in the classroom, the community and the student. The only setback: funding isn’t always easy to obtain.  At WeAreTeachers, it is our constant goal to provide you with the support you need to be the best teacher you can be, and that is how our microgrant program was born. You give us your best ideas on an assigned topic, and we give you funding to make them happen, to the tune of $200 and a flip video camera for each of our ten grant recipients. Quantum Learning Technologies is sponsoring the current microgrant to support Student Engagement.

This summer, we partnered with Dell for a microgrant on Digital Learning and the results were fantastic. We received an overwhelming 220 submissions for the grant! You voted and picked the top ten submissions, and they became our Digital Learning Microgrant winners.

Each of these educators had interesting, unique ideas for using digital learning as an educational tool. Greg Barclay, an English teacher from South Fulton, TN won for his project “Blogging as Writing; Podcasting as Presenting.” He is very enthusiastic about how the microgrant will help his students.

“I think the act of producing podcasts will be greatly beneficial to my students,” Mr. Barclay stated via email, “Many of them do not even know what a podcast is. In addition to learning about a different kind of technology, they will also be learning about public speaking.”

For some of the recipients, the journey to winning the microgrant was as exciting as actually receiving the grant. Dallas, TX teacher and yearbook sponsor Michael Moran, whose project “We Are Woodrow” garnered the most online votes, said that the entire process was as beneficial as the grant itself.

“When something goes ‘viral,’ there is usually an element of luck, but the paths to popularity can be utilized to educate and inform. I hoped that I could use these tools to give people an opportunity to help kids. I’ll use this experience as much as I’ll use the award,” commented Mr. Moran.

Diane Davis, an Art teacher in Reading, MA and winner for her “Growing As An Artist” project, said there was added value and inspiration in looking at the other submissions.

“I loved the Shapes All Around Us project by Leigh Kraemer,” Ms. Davis explained,   “Although a preschool project, this is also a perfect art project. Rather than pointing out shapes in pictures, they are actively searching for shapes in the world around them. I could see this adapted in middle school art classes by having students search for elements and principles of art, or making color collages with monochromatic, complimentary, and analogous color schemes.”

The benefits of the microgrants have gone beyond the doors of the classroom, reaching into the entire community for winner Tanya Jacobucci, a Kindergarten teacher from Clearwater, KS. Ms. Jacobucci’s project, titled “Retired at Five- Traveling with Grandma,” connects her kindergartners with retired teachers.

“Since our project was announced as one of the winners, we’ve also had parents of our students show interest in taking the camera with them as they travel, so it’s starting to involve even more community members,” Ms. Jacobucci reported.

We are thrilled to see that the microgrants are not only helping to fund teachers’ ideas, but are reaching out to change students, unite communities and inspire teachers as well! We’ve now announced our new microgrant, a Student Engagement project sponsored by Quantum Learning Technologies, and it’s not too late to apply!

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If you could take your students anywhere in the world, where would you go? To China, to see how a country with it’s enormous population can function? To Africa, to show them that there are still parts of the world where clean drinking water is a luxury? Opening our students’ eyes to cultural diversity is becoming increasingly important in a “Flat World” environment, and fortunately, with Web 2.0 technology, you won’t be on the hook for thirty round trip plane tickets.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could connect and collaborate with another teacher similar to you across the globe?  With WeAreTeachers’ Facebook application, I Am Teacher, we are connecting teachers both across the US and on a global scale to share ideas and expose their students to new cultures and ways of life without leaving the classroom. Through our searchable database of teachers, we can provide quick, accurate matches for you based on several different search criteria.

Recently, Candace Townsley, a Gifted and Talented teacher outside Tulsa, OK agreed to connect and collaborate with another teacher internationally and allow the process to be documented for this blog.

Candace was enthusiastic about global learning projects from the start and looked forward to finding the right teacher to work with.  She connected with Shelly Terrell, an EFL teacher in Stuttgard, Germany. Shelly was also a proponent of global learning outreach, saying “[Global learning] makes students aware of global issues, dispels stereotypes, opens students to cultural diversity & motivates students to collaborate on global issues.”

They connected via Facebook chat before moving the conversation to Skype, where the discussion turned to idea sharing. “We talked about what we teach, our various school systems, and brainstormed ideas and topics that would have the students use higher order skills,” recounted Shelly.

Candace described how they made plans to collaborate on a future project, “We decided that we would work on a project to assist in dispelling various stereotypes projected upon each culture. In doing so [students] will VIRTUALLY see how students really are in Germany/America.”

They made plans to bring their students together to create a lasting collaboration that they could revisit, so they are looking to create a wiki together this fall.  (Watch this space for updates!)

But Candace and Shelly are just two of millions of teachers who are reaching across the globe, motivating, inspiring and sharing with each other. In 2006, teachers Julie Lindsay (Qatar) and Vicki Davis (US) saw the need for giving their students a sense of global unity after reading Thomas Friedman’s popular book about globalization, The World is Flat. Davis and Lindsay created The Flat Classroom Project, a project that brings teachers and classes from across the world together using Web 2.0 technology such as Wikipages and Ning. This video was created to kick off their 2009 Classroom Conference and tells more about using social learning to connect students internationally.

We want to know what you are looking for in terms of connecting globally. Take a minute to fill out this quick survey and  let us know what tools you need to get a global outreach project started. WeAreTeachers would like to track other global learning projects and share the process and learnings with the WeAreTeachers community.

If you are itching to take the first step towards creating a global teacher to teacher partnership, go to Facebook and use our I Am Teacher application to find the right match for you, and leave us a comment to let us know how you’ve used I Am Teacher to take your students and yourself on an international adventure!

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In an era when the President of the United States uses a Blackberry and computers are  becoming as necessary as number two pencils, digital technology is changing the way we live and learn.  The digital age has created an exciting new environment for us all, and innovative teachers like you are embracing and harnessing the power of digital learning to blow the walls off their schools and open up their classrooms to other educators all over the world. But sifting through all of the information about digital learning can take more time than a busy teacher has to spend, so we’ve found some great resources on the web to help you find new ways to incorporate digital technology into your classroom.

The case for digital learning is simple: your students live in a time of wikis, webinars and iChat. But how could this help them in the classroom?  This video shows what your digital learners expect of you in a Web 2.0 age.

At WeAreTeachers, we want to encourage you in your efforts to be a part of this digital revolution, both by providing you with the tools you need to keep up and through the teacher’s magic word: funding.  Through WAT microgrants, we are helping teachers get their big ideas out into the digital world-and the response has been phenomenal. Our current “Digital Learning “ microgrant sponsored by Dell, had over 200 submissions! From those 200 applicants, the community will vote to determine the top ten who will receive $200 and a flip video camera to share their project with the entire WeAreTeachers community. Have you had a chance to take a look at the microgrant applications?  It’s a great way to see what your peers are doing to bring their students into the Web 2.0 age. You are sure to be inspired!  What is so exciting about each of these teacher-submitted ideas is that they all demonstrate how digital learning empowers teachers to share their passion for reaching students in a fresh new way.

We are so proud of the astonishing response to this microgrant. What this tells us at WeAreTeachers is that you are excited about being on the forefront of using this technology, and we are thrilled to support you!

And we aren’t the only ones, many companies are hopping aboard the digital bandwagon. Everywhere you look, companies and organizations are standing up and taking notice of the need for digital content. NASA has a wonderful Digital Learning Network that was designed to help educators bring the wonder of space into the classroom.  PBS will be launching a fantastic digital learning library this fall, geared especially towards educators. The Digital Learning Commons is a nonprofit organization created with the sole intention of helping teachers find the best digital learning techniques to give their students an edge. Additionally, exciting programs are being developed like the Digital Learning Lab at UC Irvine, which is currently looking for educators to collaborate in a host of digital learning projects.

How do you use digital learning? Do you keep a blog? Have your students used wikis to research information? Have you thought about using a flip video camera like the ones we are including with our microgrants to collaborate and idea share with other teachers?  Is there an area that you’d love to see supported by a microgrant? We want to hear about it! Have you been inspired by an idea from our 200 applicants?  Your feedback is crucial, so please take a minute to leave a comment and let us know your thoughts.  We cannot wait to infuse your ideas and bring you more valuable teacher-generated content that will inspire, enlighten and empower you in the days to come!

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Image by Getty Images via Daylif

I have attended NECC every year since about 1980.  You can imagine the changes I have seen!  Each year I know it is one of the “can’t miss” conferences in education, and each year after I attend, I am reminded why.

As expected there is a ton of new information and technology shared here.
There is another layer, however — one that is less tangible, but all the more important to note.  That is the incredible learning that takes place when this many people get together with enthusiasm, passion, thirst for knowledge, and desire to collaborate with their peers.  I could only think… “Wow, if teachers are this passionate about learning from each other, imagine how their students must feel when they transfer this to the classroom”.  To take it to the next level, what if students were able to learn in this type of setting as well?  Wouldn’t they also achieve the same benefit?
This innovation and teacher collaboration is one of the reasons that we started the WeAreTeachers microgrant program. During NECC we announced the latest microgrant on “Digital Learning” sponsored by Dell. Our goal is to put a small financial contribution directly in the hands of teachers to kick off a project along with a Flip Video Camera to record it and post for other teachers.
The Tweetup was a great place for teachers to finally meet their colleagues who they had only known virtually through Twitter, Facebook or their blogs.  It was a cool way to put a real person with the “personality” you have come to know on the web.  Also, this event allowed for more exchanging of ideas in real time — a truly powerful experience.  Equal to this was the Bloggers’ Café where many more informal meet-ups occurred.
Many  attendees have been blogging about their experiences at NECC. If you attended NECC, be sure to add your favorite memories here.
Some themes I found most prevalent at NECC this year included:
o    Global Education – An example is the good work at IEARN. This concept of the flat world and open classrooms with shared experiences with other students across the world was a key discussion.
o    Philanthropic Education – An example is My Hero or other Cause Oriented Projects.  There were many shared ideas on this topic as well.
o    Grassroots Teacher Empowerment efforts – like  WeAreTeachers & Classroom 2.0.   These are two places where teachers are organizing and gathering to further the causes of global education and teacher empowerment efforts.
o    Debate over the potential detriment of the brick & mortar school to learning was also a much discussed topic.  Malcolm Gladwell’s keynote brought this to the forefront.

The official stats of attendance from ISTE : 13,574 registered attendees, 849 int’l attendees, 1,253 booths, 140 journalists, etc.
Here is a list of some of my more interesting reads from bloggers at NECC:

http://www.speedofcreativity.org/

http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org

http://preclectic.com/

www.spirobolos.blogspot.com

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/

www.amyboehman.blogspot.com
www.uenatnecc.blogspot.com

http://www.angelamaiers.com/2009/07/necc-finally-breathing.html

http://www.isteconnects.org/2009/07/02/the-definitive-necc-09-wrap-up-post/

http://en.community.dell.com/groups/edu4u/blog/archive/2009/07/07/authored-by-kari-stubbs-necc-09-from-the-brainpop-perspective.aspx

http://coolcatteacher.wikispaces.com/

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Image by Old Shoe Woman via Flickr

As some of you who have been with WeAreTeachers for a while understand, our community is a wonderful collection of teachers who enjoy collaborating, connecting, finding one another, and finding resources to help them with their important work. It’s also a place where teacher-created content can be developed, shared, or even sold.

But a place that also welcomes marketers, vendors, publishers, and other commercial partners?  My, my!  What are we thinking!  How can commercial providers and teachers actually mingle, share, even ‘get along??’  And in a network that prides itself in having no traditional ‘banner ads’ or other overt advertising for its monetization strategy?  What ARE we thinking??

This is a question we get quite often, so I wanted to address this conundrum right up front.

First, we are very clear at WeAreTeachers that our CENTRAL purpose and ‘value proposition‘ obligation is for the TEACHERS in our community.   We work every day to find better ways to get teachers connected, and to honor and support their fine work.  We work hard to provide tools and programs that support teachers at the grass roots level — not just through the institutions in which they happen to work — but teachers at the point of their interaction with students, and at the point in which they transfer knowledge and wisdom to others.  We try daily to think of ways to empower teachers, and to ensure their collective voice is heard as a powerful and compelling force in education improvement.  We try to find the very best teachers and give them a megaphone, so that great teaching and teaching ideas surface.

For ‘Marketers’ in the education industry?  WeAreTeachers also has an important value proposition for them.  Namely, we believe there is an enormous need for providers of education content to connect directly with end-user practioners — called ‘teachers.’  And we believe technology — primarily via social media tools — has a lot to offer to facilitate that connection.  While many companies are beginning to understand this need, most lack resources or expertise to understand how to connect properly and appropriately with teachers through social media.  There is great tempation to just utilize social media marketing to ‘sell at’ teachers — and little expertise or understanding of how to promote a brand and, at the same time, genuinely have meaningful conversation with (and add value to) these teachers.

Is this because the education industry lacks great people or great products?  Of course not.   Rather, it’s simply that this level of end-user connection — particularly through the on-going engagement today’s technology represents — is just something most companies have little experience in utilizing.

That’s where WeAreTeachers comes in.  We look carefully at the needs of teachers — and we listen closely to our community.  Then we seek corporate sponsors to help fund and support things that really matter to teachers.    Like MicroGrants for supporting creativity.   Or a scholarship program to support inner city learning.  Or a MicroGrant to support environmental education.

We also seek ways to help marketers in the education space connect with teachers during the product development phase.  Soon, we plan to launch a program to ask Teachers what they really NEED to be better teachers, then connect that need directly to the companies who have the resources to meet that need.  We also connect teachers using particular commercial learning programs to one another — in WAT Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) — to encourage best practice sharing, and collaboration.

We’re still learning, but we hope to find the careful intersection of ‘WHAT TEACHERS NEED’ and ‘WHAT VENDORS MIGHT PROVIDE’ — and to connect those dots that also promote proper and useful conversations and sharing between end-user teachers and those commercial providers who publish great content.

What a wonderful thing if we make a dent in this arena!  We think its about time that all the stakeholders connected!   And what better place to make that happen than in the online community called WeAreTeachers?

I’d love YOUR thoughts about this!   Our commitment to the community?  We’ll work hard to bring on the very best commercial partners, and to facilitate the very best conversations and programs to support great teaching and learning.

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We’ve just started a new program at WeAreTeachers — MicroGrants.

We designed this program to be consistent with our philosophy and commitment to this important community:  Namely, we want to put teachers at the center of the Web 2.0 world, AND we want to work hard to be sure EVERYTHING we do has some value to the community and its members.

We were inspired by the idea of Micro-Loans. . . and the notion of what magic can happen when even small resources are placed in the hands of people who are in a position to make an immediate impact.  You may have heard of Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh, the current Nobel laureate.  Yunus said the tiny loans distributed in the developing world, most of them to women, have already lifted 100 million people out of direst poverty and brought them the dignity of running small businesses, many of which eventually create jobs for others. These simple, sustainable businesses – weaving, raising chickens, selling groceries in small shops – are proven development vessels that can be launched with loans as small as $100.

SO — we considered — What might happen if we — through our relationships with businesses in our network — could secure corporate sponsors to help provide small grants directly to teachers, then track what they are able to do with this direct resource.  What happens when a real TEACHER — with a super idea, has enough money to, say take kids on a field trip, or buy some microscopes for a classroom, or a musical instrument for a Mariachi band?  And what if we also provide a simple Flip-video camera and ask him/her to let us know what happens with a video story?

We are pleased that our first such MicroGrant (sponsored by Alchemy Systems in Austin, Texas), is providing resources to promote Creativity.  We want to know what great ideas teachers have to keep creativity alive in the classroom — especially given the current focus on basic skills and testing that is crowding out the arts and other creative curriculum.

Here’s how it works.  Unlike other education grants that take an advanced degree and hundreds of hours to seek, our grant form is a single page form.  We don’t want big documents, just big ideas.  Once your idea is submitted, we’ll post all the entrants, and ask the WeAreTeachers community to vote — in true Web 2.0 form.  The best ideas will be selected, and winners will receive $200 to make a difference for kids, as well as a flip-camera to record their success.  We’ll ask teachers to submit their videos back to the community, so that great ideas can be shared.  Cool, eh?

We are looking for other MicroGrant areas you’d like to see us fund. If you are into creativity, submit for this grant.  Or send us a note and let us know what other areas you would like to see funded.  We’ll find a corporate sponsor, and keep this program going.

Small resources can make a huge difference IF applied where the ‘rubber meets the road’, and we think that’s right in the hands of our best teachers.

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I just returned from a wonderful (and EXHAUSTING) experience at NECC (National Educational Computing Conference) in San Antonio, Texas.  It was an uplifting, engaging, fascinating experience.  A reminder that the very best teachers are also amazing learners, and constantly working to improve their skills and their engagement with peers. I was utterly fascinated to watch teachers who have spent the last year teaching in ‘flat classrooms’ around the globe meet each other face-to-face for the first time.  Avid education bloggers, ‘twitterers,’ and consumers of on-line information were all around, and virtual communities and engagement morphed into real friendships and meaningful discussions and relationships.

Tonight at home in our new ‘analogue’ community, I also had a wonderful experience.  We have just moved (after 25 years in the suburbs!) into a new urban community.  This new and evolving space occupies a former city airport, and is built as a green, community-focused place.  Our home is a level 5 (LEEDS – Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) home, and our yard, like all the yards in our neighborhood, is a tiny little space landscaped with Texas native, low water plants.  But right across the street we enjoy a 32 acre shared green belt, being designed by the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower folk.  And throughout the neighborhood are bike and walking trails, little lakes, and tons of shared green spaces.

The amazing thing is not so much the physical space but what is happening to the people who inhabit it.  Tonight, for example was ‘splash night.’  This is something a few creative parents thought of, and just organized and made happen.  Each Wednesday in the summer, the community picks a spot to gather, and someone brings a sprinkler, water toys, chalk, scooters, etc.  Someone else generally brings wine and beer for adults.  All the kids play in the water, while adults enjoy the conversation, and life in general.  And there are many, many other examples in our community of similar ad-hoc activities springing up weekly.

It occurs to me that this is amazingly like the virtual communities, non-conferences, NECC Un-Plugged, mash-ups I’ve seen or participated in recently.  There is no organizing ‘committee.’  The schedule is pretty random.  Most of the ‘planning’ is done on our community b-board online.  People just naturally volunteer to take on all the necessary roles to make the event happen.  Of course, there is sometimes some grumbling or suggestions for change or improvement, but overall, there is an amazing sense of shared purpose, values, and good old fashioned neighborly love.

Not unlike our discussions at NECC – this wonderful phenomenon is not about the physical place (or the technology).  Rather, it’s about the PEOPLE, and the community that the human experience represents when that community connects in meaningful ways.

So maybe – just maybe – what we are seeing with the growth of on-line community and engagement might also be happening in our ‘real’ worlds.  That is, us humans may be reaching out to one another – to share the human experience together, to learn to live more completely as a group versus as an isolated entity.

Now wouldn’t that be just loverly?

Peace, love, Woodstock to us all.

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