"Blogging is the most life-changing experience I have had"
(I might have paraphrased this slightly, not wanting to incur the wrath of Will's wife, kids...)
But when you search for 'Will' on Google.com and Will Richardson comes up fourth suddenly the ease with which we can make an imprint on our world becomes clear.
Imagination
Take another example. One Red Paperclip. Another blog. From one red paperclip, a photo of which was posted on his blog, Kyle has since July 2005 managed to get a year of rent-free housng in Phoneix, via a professional recording contract, a box truck, a fish hook and various other items. He's just swapped the house for a night with Alice Cooper. Hmm. Wrong move, maybe. But by having an idea, an imaginative idea, he has now got TV crews and book deals coming his way. Heck, his imagination has got him a job.
Anime music videos provides another source of imaginative products, produced by young people. (I would add the videos filmed in SecondLife to that, too).
Old and new links
With just the old web there are over one trillion links to over ten billion pages. But the new reality is that anyone can add their own material in one click: through blogs, through wikis, through podcasts, through Google Earth, through Flickr.
"We are at a turning point in the technology industry and perhaps even in the history of the world."
Tim O'Reilly, May 2006.
Copyright and sharing
Will has just shown us the connections being made from and around his blog - you can find out what's happening on your own blog by using TouchGraph. But the only way you can share information is if it's free to share. This makes me think of LTScotland's sites and how, I'd hope, the material on them would become Creative Commons licenced in the near future. Is there a chance of that happening?
But for our students, they can show off their expertise. It might be publishing scans of written or drawn work they have produced, as Tess' Weatherbook shows us. It might be that they write creatively, part by part, until they manage to get their piece together, using the comments of others to better their writing, just as my mum's students did over at Progress Report. It might also be that the students write a coursebook just by publishing their learning log in the form of a blog: take a look at Darren's students' scribe posts.
Computers haven't changed the world, but the Read-Write Web just might.
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