Dave Winer - a blogger for 30 years!

One thing that constantly humbles me is that no matter how much I put in the Tutor/Mentor library, it is only a small fraction of what is happening in the world.

Here's an example. A couple of days ago I saw a post on Twitter from Harold Jarche, about Dave Winer, who started blogging 30 years ago.

I've followed Harold and other pioneers of Internet networking and learning for many years and include links to his website in my library.  However, I don't recall every seeing a post by Dave Winer.   I started following him, like I do so many others. 

Today I saw this post by Dave, pointing to an article on the Daring Fireball blog (another that I did not know about, which has archives dating back to 2002). 

The article ends with this praise:

"He has such a distinctive writing voice that is impossible to imagine in any medium other than the web. But I think that’s because he helped define what writing not just on the web, but for the web, even meant."

Here's a post on Twitter by Harold Jarche, who has been writing about "Personal Knowledge Mastery" for the 20 years I've followed him.  Many of my own articles about learning parallel some of Harold's ideas.

Since I'm doing shout-outs to some of the pioneers who I've learned from over the past 30 years, Howard Rheingold, should also be recognized.  Here's a post that Howard shared on Mastodon.Cloud, about creating online community nearly 30 years ago. 

He points to this page.

In another post Howard points to an archive of Whole Earth publications (open here) , started in the 1990s. 

If you visit this section of the Tutor/Mentor library you'll find links to blogs written by Harold and Howard, and many others who I've added over the past 20 years.  I added a link to Dave Winer's blog today.  This is one of four sets of blog links in this part of the library.  

That's a lot of information and ideas!

I've used this graphic for many years to illustrate the constant learning required of a volunteer, staff member and/or leader in an organized non-school tutor/mentor program.   These are habits we want to build in the kids we tutor and mentor, and to our own kids!

You can see it in this article titled "Building Personal Learning Habits - Solving Complex Problems".

If you read the article you'll see that it points to the work of Harold Jarche and shows how I've tried to create a learning culture in the tutor/mentor programs I led, starting back in 1973 when I first became a volunteer and started to seek out ideas.  

 I started this blog in 2005, so am a youngster, compared to Dave Winer. I think my writing style is choppy, learned through writing retail advertising for 17 years.  I also could have benefitted from some of the auto correct features now available.  I cringe when looking at some of the typos in past letters and visual essays.  

But, I keep writing because there are still thousands of kids living in areas of persistent poverty in Chicago and other cities, rural areas and reservations around the country.  In each place, if someone is building a library like mine, they create a wealth of information people could use to build and sustain efforts that do more to reach kids and help them through school and into adult lives free of poverty's grip.

I've been digitizing my files and am almost complete. Now I've a lot of organizing to do.  However, unless I find someone(s) to take ownership of my work and use it as a teaching tool, thought starter, and reminder of the persistence that is needed, it will be lost forever in just a few years.

Here's a presentation I was able to create, drawing from my archives. It shows my outreach to universities in Chicago, the US and abroad over the past 30 years.  It includes links to many original documents showing work student interns did to help me build Cabrini Connections, the Tutor/Mentor Connection, and Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC.

It's an example of the type of presentation student researchers could be creating to show others what information is available in my library.

I saw another post by Dave Winer today saying "It’s time for people who make their online home on Twitter to find a new home in the social media world. This place is a haven for fascism. We really don’t belong here anymore."

That's sad, because without Twitter we might never have connected.  I've started accounts on other platforms (see links here) but it took me 15 years to build my small network on Twitter.  I don't have that much time to rebuild on another platform, but I'll try. 

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