Tuesday, March 31st, 2009...3:01 pm
brainstorming about community
Jump to Comments
During the day-long retreat for Born to Read trainers on March 4, we began a discussion of Gary Schmidt’s Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy with a brainstorm/word association exercise around the notion of community. I used the amazing tools at wordle.net to turn our resulting word list into a ‘cloud,’ with the most prominent words showing up in the largest print:
Are there words you would add? Please leave them in the comments section!
3 Comments
April 14th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
It’s interesting to see what words came up. I might add interaction.
April 14th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
I’d add safety, trust, commonalities, and challenge.
April 15th, 2009 at 9:06 am
Looking at the word picture I was struck by the way a words meaning can change over time. When I looked in my trusty @ 1976 American Heritage Dictionary Community is defined as follows. 1a. A group of people living in the same locality and under the same government. b. The locality in which they live. 2. A social group or class. 3. Similarity: a community of interests. 4. Society as a whole.
In today’s mobile society community is less about location than it is about similarities. The internet allows people to create their own communities via facebook, blogs and instant messaging to friends in far off places, which is nice. My concern is that we might be losing the physical sense of community, that we might not know our neighbors and this could lead to the isolation of those who don’t have access to technology.
Leave a Reply