I remember what the future was like...

Is was the 90's and I was just hearing about this whole Internet thingy. I worked on an industrial estate at the end of the Fenchurch Street (train) line in Essex. We still had a computer that took 5¼" floppy disks and the new Windows machine was solely for the Director.

My knowledge of "the net" came from William Gibson, .NET Magazine and a book called Virtual Reality by Howard Rheingold. Mr. Rheingold's book become something I read, and shared with friends.  This was what was going to happen!  It was filled with descriptions of old arcade games that emulated motorcycle rides through to teledildonics.

After getting a PC and connecting to "the net" (which really was more frustration than excitement at the start) things didn't quite pan out the way I foresaw them.

I looked for that book recently, just to re-visit some of the ideas, but found it was one I left behind when we moved to the US. But as chance would have it I ended up connecting with Mr. Rheingold (virtually) the very next day. As I fired up Miro, there he was A featured channel - vlogging about the social media classroom.

I recommend subscribing through Miro or the RSS feed to see why he's starting this classroom and the tools he's included in it.

Technorati tags: howard rheingold, social media, web2.0, vlog

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