gail dyer

After reading an article in Monday’s (08/01/07) New York Times about Secondlife I realised just what a great time it is to be alive. It is exciting to think that colleges and universities are setting up campuses in this virtual world. The new generation of technology allows creativity, originality and fantasy to flourish. The online communities that are proliferating encourage and promote that which was once exiled to the headspace, fantasy and seclusion.Opportunities, dreams, fantasies and talents never realised because supportive communities and audiences did not abound.Keri Facer, in her Keynote Address at BETT 2007 talked about our concepts of “originality and creativity being challenged” and Angela McFarlane in her Keynote Address at BETT 2007 observed that products of Fan Production were “in most instances ordinary and at best awe inspiring”. How many of the “awe inspiring” of by gone days have gone undetected, unrecognised and unfulfilled, living in their attic room in a fantasy world without anyone to recognise and enourage them. Social technologies allow for empowerment and recognition. They provide support and encouragement in a world removed from reality where these attributes are mostly missing. Being one of those in the attic reading and writing avidly for no audience. Secure, safe and unthreatened and unheard I find my first excursion into blogging at once scary and daunting . . . but also exciting and liberating.