A discovery that I made this summer, through the help of my Tweep (Twitter friend) Max Cooke (@maxcooke) is the blog on the Canadian Education Association’s website. The Canadian Education Association blog has regular posts by people in all forms of education across Canada, including voices of teachers, students, administrators, ministry employees, parents and parent organizations.  It is complex and diverse.

Then after engaging in discussion with my classmates in the UofAM.Ed. TL-DL programme, about our experiments in blogging this semester, I found Stephen Hurley’s post (@stephen_hurley) about how the paradigm shift that Ken Robinson announced in 2008 is morphing into a narrative shift.

It’s fascinating stuff.  Hurley argues that we are connected to stories and the sharing of these stories is helping us to build a global context to further our narrative as humans.  Deep, right?  The author, their setting, and our response to it from our own unique perspectives is all moving towards a greater shift in understanding using narrative structure.  The same narrative structure that humans have always used: this experience moved me.

Only the difference is that everyone with internet access can record these narratives and share them on the internet, and everyone can read them.  A geography teacher in my school was talking about the riots in Libya, and gave her students permission to immediately find someone in Libya to find out their perspective.  They had a connection to that narrative within minutes.  So imagine now, who you would most like to connect to and what story you’d like to hear?  Remember when we used to talk about the Six Degrees of Separation and how we weren’t really that far apart from each other?

Well we’re a lot closer than that now.