The Fun Pass

In a little departure from the more mundane, day to day on the job stuff, in today’s chapter, I’d like to talk about the Small World that is the Internet. When first I ventured on line, via a 1st gen eMac, fully maxed at 1MB RAM, on dial-up, I looked for a place to hang out. Teachers are kind of odd that way, and sure enough I found a bunch hanging out in a chatroom attached to a site called Teachers.Net. Back in the day, that’s where all the cool teachers hung out. Sharing lessons. Arguing politics. Chatting about any and all sorts. One time I got to chatting to a lady about visiting Canada.  She lives in San Diego, and wanted some advice on what to do in the capitol city, which happens to be a mere 30 miles from where I live, and so I arranged to meet her and her family during their vacation.  This was not really an unusual occurrence– there were T-Net meet-ups all the time (Gatherings, I believe was the preferred term).  One T-Netter in particular holds the record for having met/visited over 60 teachers from the site, and she lives in Australia. Over the years, the site kind of lost it’s appeal for me, and then FaceBook and Twitter were invented, but many of the TNet connections are also my FaceBook friends, including Laurie from San Diego.

Recently, G asked me for some advice on talking to a Uni class about Educational Technology. One of the things I told him to mention was viral videos and memes.  Well, he didn’t take my advice on that part, because he didn’t really think it’s relevant.  Perhaps not…. but it’s a phenomenon not to be overlooked. And this brings me back to Laurie. One day she read a post on my FaceBook page called Caine’s Arcade, a cute and quirky short film about a boy who built cardboard arcade games at his dad’s East LA automotive parts store. I got the link from Clint, but the ways in which our paths have crossed over the years needs its own blog post.  So, Laurie is watching this sweet little film (which only went on to win awards at Cannes) and realizes that Caine’s Dad’s shop isn’t to far from her, and she drives over to check it out. Then, she thinks to herself: “Wait, I am awesome, and I make awesome spirit buttons and badges, I’ll make a few for Caine, because he seems awesome too”. The next thing I know, she and one of her equally awesome sons is heading over to Caine’s for this HUGE event, where they are going to sell masses of buttons to raise money to donate to Caine’s scholarship fund (set up to help other kids be awesome and creative like him), and if THAT wasn’t enough…. Well…. there are no words for the final piece of this story.  You have to watch the short film to get the full impact…but look what arrived in the mail for me today:

Always, always buy the Fun Pass

 

Memes and viral videos an irrelevant time waster of the Internet? Or something with the power to change lives and connect real people in real ways…..