Doc Searls has a great post today, entitled "Cause your own effects," in which he discusses giving advice to someone with career woes. What does he say they should do? Start a blog, of course.
Anyway, I was responding to this guy's request by email when I decided to cut the last line and paste it over here. Ü You can be the pinball or you can be the pinball machine. With a blog you can create your own machine.
Yes, yes, yes! That's exactly why I want to change the way I (we?) teach web design. I want to stop teaching them how to be pinballs in the corporate web machine, and start teaching them how to create their own machines.
I came home tonight and announced to my husband that I've decided blogs are "the way and the truth and the light." Only partially in jest. But in the past few weeks, I've gone through what feels like a genuinely transformative experience. I remember feeling the same way when I discovered e-mail, and CompuServe, and FidoNet, and mailing lists, and ICQ. All of them "social technologies." All of them changed my view of the world. (Hey, I met my husband via FidoNet. 'Nuff said.)
For the past few years, I've been living in too much of a box--interacting only with the people directly around me at work and at home. I feel like a switch has been thrown, and I have a new and insanely powerful communication channel available now--one that lets me connect with people who share my ideas and interests, one that lets me think "out loud" (which has always been how I prefer to think), with immediate feedback and reinforcement.
The connections I've already made through this medium are truly extraordinary. When was the last time I could say that someone I was having a one-on-one conversation with had just had dinner with Lawrence Lessig? Or that I was exchanging ideas about my web design course with someone at the University of Bergen? Or that a major figure in the development of software my students use every day had been reading my online thoughts?
Yeah, so there's obviously an ego thing there. (Shades of Sally Field: "They like me! They really like me!") But it's more than that. It's the thrill of finding kindred spirits--people who are enthusiastic about technology in the way that I need to be if I want to teach it well. These kinds of connections are what can keep me intellectually alive.
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