Told to ponder the “power of the Web” as the topic for this post, my mind seemed to automatically shift into a metaphor. (. . . is the Web is a metaphor for something else, anyway? . . . ) What leapt up from my memory was an evening close to forty years ago when I sat out on the fire escape of my summer apartment and watched a spider weave its web (almost from the start.)
Radial thread by radial thread, the spider walked along what it had already laid out, the silk trailing form the its silk gland, building the Y-shaped netting. Then came the spiral threads . . . with the completed web being an artifact of the spider’s travels over the previous hour.
The power of a spider’s web is in the connection of individual, delicate threads into a cohesive whole that has a strength and resilience far greater than a single strand or junction would suggest.
Kind of like The Web.
We, as individuals, navigate our way through The Web, leaving behind us our own digital trails (artifacts) with their new connections to other webs creating and building still new webs.
Kind of like millions of spiders being able to connect their individual (static) webs into a dynamic mega-network that would fill much of our world. Nothing would be safe. Now that’s an image.
Any thinking spider would choose to engage because they would see that solitary unconnected spider would lose out.
Kind of like The Web.
Because of what these connections allow for . . . a level of ease of sharing, and a degree of connecting and collaborating that still can’t be dreamt of . . .
In my Science class, we were exploring particles and the concept of particles being in constant random motion. At room temperature, air particles can bump in to other air particles a billion times a second. I get the idea, but cannot really comprehend it.
Kind of like The Web.
The power of The Web is in the incomprehensible degree of connection we can make if we remember one thing. To paraphrase Andrew Torris, in a posting about leadership style in a posting on Sentiments On Common Sense, “Learning is about connecting at a human level to the people you are learning with.”
A few years ago, my Mom passed away. As part of the cleaning out of our family home, a number of family artifacts were put aside to sort through. This Spring, my sister sorted through my Mom’s “mushy black box” – a box on the mantelpiece where she has kept letters that had touched her heart – and sent each of us siblings our own set of the Straub/Hill family artifacts.
Reading through the original letters (or their photocopies) was a very powerful emotional experience for me. I know the same was true for my brother and sisters . . . . because of our shared life experiences and connections . . . otherwise it was just paper.
In this business of education, it does come down to creating meaningful learning artifacts (check out this thought provoking video from Lawsom Journalism about using student blogs as meaningful “Me, changing” digital portolios) that will allow us to connect (better) with each other.
As we leave our digital trails and weave our webs, one power of The Web is to invite others into our black box on the mantelpiece and share in the connection.
The power of possibility is indeed rich. My Mom knew. So did Spidey.
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