Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Scale

I ran into a parent I worked with when I was at Riverside School ... a Renaissance woman, who studied to be a veterinarian, is raising a family and immersed herself in jewelry design.  Marcella would have "trunk shows" for the staff at Riverside, with alluring gems and graceful lines ... this to fill in the time between chauffeuring children, volunteering at school, cooking dinner, ad infinitum.

We had talked in those days about creating a website for her talents.  In catching up today, I sensed that her idea of a website was the sort of online catalogue image most of us think of when we turn to the Internet.  But one of the key trends of 21st Century skills is that the Internet is about networking.  A presence on the World Wide Web is not just about marketing, or sales, or production, or results.  Marcella is not looking to mass-produce her pieces.  Each one is a personal statement.  And sharing that statement is as easy as sending an email to our personally selected list.

It made me think of our group, and about avoiding the "Speilburg Syndrome."  Let's not suppose that any entreĆ© into cyberspace needs to be an Academy Award Winning production.  Let's think of our place in the Universe, and scale proportionately.  A small and graceful, clean and technologically accessible piece is more rewarding to us and our students and our community than anything we could spend weeks working on and have crash our servers!

  

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