the spirit of christa mcauliffe...

don't know if you remember her, but at one point someone got the idea that what we really needed to do was to put a teacher in space, someone who could tell the rest of us what it was really like, to get out there, and look back, and see the earth.

after a nationwide search, they chose christa, and it was tragic, because they screwed up somewhere along the line, and she died in space along with the other astronauts, in a terrible explosion that left a huge smoky question mark in the sky that was on television for days. but, and i'm not sure when it happened, sometime in that period of time, when they sent so many people to space they could afford to send a non-scientist, i was listening to those scratchy voices coming through the soundwaves, and one of the astronauts had just turned around, looked back, and thought earth was a pretty awesome thing back there, spinning around. and he said so in a way that reached me.

so tonight i went to an online conference, the webheads online convergence, and was going from room to room in cyberspace, where you click on little electronic icon doors and magically appear in some other room which announces your entry to whomever might be virtually present. in one room i found a woman, but she wasn't saying or doing anything, so i left. But in another room they were looking for her and saying she couldn't get in. unfortunately i couldn't remember the way i'd gotten there...

at one presentation everyone was putting things on a mutual whiteboard....colored letters, pictures, words, all at once...meanwhile chat was going on AND people were talking with that same scratchy radio wave voice. and i was thinking, as i scrawled out land-a-linkin on the whiteboard...what a small world.....

so i turn around, and here i am, in a small town, a small room, by a computer that appears to download the whole 'elluminate' program every time i enter one of these virtual rooms...but i feel that sense of connectedness, community. it's awesome...