Welcome to My PLE!

FRONTLINE: digital nation: watch the full program I wanted to wait a bit because it seemed like it'd be more interesting to listen to all of you. There used to be a name for what I was doing, "lurking" -- it dates back to a very different time in the net's history, when usenet and mailing lists were the main forms of communication. It was hard to talk about lurkers then, for the obvious reason that no one knew much about them; it hasn't gotten much easier since. The idea of lurkers has all but vanished now, buried by a succession of ways to try and slice and dice them: "eyeballs," pageviews, users, subscribers, friends, followers, etc, etc. That pessimistic view is closely related to perspective(s) of people who are trying to make money off of lurkers, because "monetizing" (a really ugly word) them and their actions sooner or later requires connecting whatever they're clicking on or reading or whatever to some kind of action -- preferably, some sort of expenditure. That's good and bad. But it definitely has downsides, too. Cheers, Ted

Transcendent Nebula Where I'm From, a poem by George Ella Lyon, writer and teacher In response to the fear- and hate-mongering alive in our country today, I have joined Julie Landsman?a writer, teacher, and activist based in Minneapolis?to create the I Am From Project. Through our website (iamfromproject.com) and Facebook page, we?re collecting art from around the country prompted by that theme. You can listen to our interview on the National Writing Project radio here: We want to gather the diversity of our voices, and we plan to archive the results online and to present them, in some form, in D.C. The Kentucky Arts Council has wrapped up my Where I'm From? “Where I'm From” grew out of my response to a poem from Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet (Orchard Books, 1989; Theater Communications Group, 1991) by my friend, Tennessee writer Jo Carson. In the summer of 1993, I decided to see what would happen if I made my own where-I'm-from lists, which I did, in a black and white speckled composition book.