Living Authors Are All Around Us
As a student in a small elementary school in central Iowa, I met my first author—at a book signing at a local bookstore. While the actual book and story didn’t make a big impression on me—I have no recollection of the author’s name or the title of the book—the experience has stayed with me. The idea that this person wrote every word in what I considered a massive work (probably around 250 pages) was amazing to me. Coupling that with the fact that this particular piece of writing was available all over the country, I wondered how it was that a person of this stature could be sitting directly in front of me. I was baffled.
Since then, I have met a number of authors and still marvel at their works. At the 2007 NCTE Annual Convention, I met Frank McCourt and found both his speech and my brief conversation with him, as he shared with me another story of his teaching career, fascinating. I’m beyond the starstruck stage I felt in grade school, but I still come away from each of these meetings excited about Tag Heuer Replica the whole writing process. I feel a connection with these writers because of their ideas, their use of language, and their willingness to share stories. These real authors become real people. What’s more interesting is that I’ve found myself feeling the same connection with many of the bloggers who I follow online. In fact, because people who blog do it daily, their stories are ongoing—I feel as though I’ve been given a window into their lives and thoughts and, to a certain extent, I feel as though I know them even before a facetoface meeting.
Advancements in online tools have opened up the world for those who have something to share. Living authors are no longer found only in the bookstore. Today, online publishing has become significantly easier. With the development of services and automated platforms, virtually anyone can selfpublish without having to understand the internal workings of programming languages such as HTML and Java. This online software offers students and teachers the ability to have an online presence with only a computing device and access to the Internet. The power of this can be seen and felt in a virtual educational blogging community that is full of big thinkers who provide a wealth of information and resources to teachers.
These resources are not only available to teachers but also to the students who populate our classes. As I reflect on the students that I work with today, it strikes me that many of them could be considered “living authors.” Through the use of blogs and other publishing tools, teachers around the country can Breitling Replica Watches bring the larger world into the classroom. No longer are students just writing for their teachers; their ideas and stories are available to a much wider audience. Not only do many students write for the love of language, in some classrooms they are expected to approach their work as real authors, writing for audiences far beyond the classroom. Papers that were once reviewed by peers and graded by teachers are now published online and, in many cases, read by people from other schools, communities, and even countries. There is no doubt in my mind that they are real authors. The medium may not be traditional, but they are authors nonetheless.
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