Learning Spaces

This weekend I was watching a little TV (my graduate class is done and my wife was working a night shift, so after the kids were in bed I indulged) and surfing the web. All of a sudden there was a flurry of tweets between two people I follow. They were arguing about school design. I watched in fascination as these two educators tried to push and pull at each others and tease out of each other what each stood for.

One of the educators was Christian Long. He has the distinction of being the very first blogger I ever seriously followed. His posts at Think Lab about how school spaces support and encourage learning were amazing, and he linked his posts full of awesome connections. I am sure that I found half of my initial blog roll through his blog. Without ever knowing it he taught me how to be a lurking member of the edublog community.

The other one was Ira Socol. He is one of the most recent members of my blog roll. I follow him because of a personal rule of blogging. If I run into anyone's posts twice in two different contexts I subscribe to their blog. I first ran into him when he blogged about a visit to HCHS. Then Will Richardson tweeted out a post of Ira's. That is when I also found out that he lives right here in Holland, Michigan.

Everything was going along just fine until a tweet that read, "@ChristianLong No, what was most impressive was the vision of school which drove those design choices. http://is.gd/c0a8t" The link goes to the post about the school that I had some input in designing. I did not have a large input, but I was in several meetings. I lay absolutely no claim to any final design, but I know that the people who designed the building were influenced by articles and ideas that were formed years ago by my reading Christian Long.

Ira followed up today with a great summary of the discussion. To me this demonstrates the power of blogging and twitter. I am sure that neither of these men knew that they were connected so closely. I never would have known if i had not been following them both on twitter. What an amazing connected world we live in.

Posted via email from Jim's posterous