I find social media to be so incredibly powerful. A couple examples from earlier this week.
- One of my students couldn’t find any creative commons licensed pictures of safety pin jewelry for a presentation she was making. She did find some on a blog that were all rights reserved. I noticed that the blog owner had a twitter account and so my student and I sent them a quick message on Twitter asking for permission to use the photos. I got a reply about a half hour later. Cool. (unfortunately we still have some work to do tracking down permissions, but I was still impressed at how quickly social media let me and my student connect and get questions answered quickly).
- A chance glance at my twitter feed turned up a tweet suggesting that Mitch Resnick was presenting on the new web based SCRATCH interface. I am very interested in this new iteration of SCRATCH and am intrigued by its potential as a collaboration platform, but I have not been able to figure out when it will be released. So I replied to the tweet asking if he had mentioned a roll out date and was told it would get asked during the Q+A. How cool. I was able to indirectly ask my question to Mitch Resnick himself.
When I have days like this where I feel the world is at my fingertips to think that everyone needs to know how to connect in this way. I am still trying to figure out if there is any truth in that statement.