Networks over Nodes

A few hours with Will Richardson spread over the past few days in London, helped me feel for the first time in a long while that "I'm not alone!"

In my work as an e-learning teacher and consultant, I was already aware of del.icio.us, Twitter, WetPaint, blogs, wikis and the many GoogleTools we tabbed through to consider the salient points of building networks; New to me was the fact that these many tools could be networked themselves, drawing upon common content courtesy of RSS.

Even so, what stood out most powerfully for me, was the fact that so many present in the room had so few questions about the relevance of what we were doing. Even Will's 'wait time' failed to illicit many questons or comments, due in large part to the fact that so many of us were on the same wavelength. I was physically immersed in a community who not only 'got it', but seemed to agree that we had to do what we could to connect with one another, and to bring others along for the ride in harnessing the tools.

Will's blog post of today put it very well I think:

It’s different now, somehow, than it was a year ago. It’s more immersive. It all feels deeper, closer somehow. Even more important. Maybe it’s just the glow of the prospect of being home for a month. Or the buzz of spending a couple of days with some folks who seemed to, on some level, get the fact that this really is about more than learning the tools. It’s about creating connections, intellectual connections, for sure, but potentially more.

In a year that I've traveled a fair bit in promoting e-learning across southern Ontario, I appreciated the fact you took leave of those closest to you, to assist others in strengthening their own professional and personal networks. You may not have been the first to state that "The network is more powerful than the node." but you were the first in a long while to engage this learner in high level thinking about the collaborative use of the read-write web!