Terry Heick writes about “When Student Writers Learn That They Must Make Their Audience Care”, meaning when the audience cares specifically about the writing not the writer, as might be the student’s prior experience with an audience of attentive parents or teachers. This idea is carried through to the concept of creative non-fiction where the goal of the writer-reader relationship which is to communicate. One of the most inspiration examples of this is a project introduced in Dean Shareski’s video Sharing: The Moral Imperative where George Couros a principal at an elementary school describes The Identity Fair he developed. In a format similar to a science fair, each student created a project to explain themselves to the school. This is much like creating an online profile of yourself, which could have a wider audience but lacks the face-to-face component. A video and video conferencing could further personalize the profile.

“Going from an audience of zero to an audience of 10 is so big that it’s actually huger than going from 10 people to a million.”

This statement made by Clive Thompson in his blog, How successful networks nurture good ideas, introduces a concept that I see as having a profound effect on individual expression.  He describes a case where an English teacher was stunned by the care and attention to detail her students took in preparing essays for posting on Wikipedia, which the students explained was because their audience members, Wikipedia community, were harder graders than she was. This brings me to my audience in OLTD and I wonder if other members of the cohort felt like I did when I realized that many of our assignments would be posted for all of us to view (and sometimes to others). This certainly pressed me to do my best on all assignments and never falling into complacency by thinking “just getting it done for a pass is good enough this time”. The idea of posting for a broader “audience that cares” and criticises is even scarier but also pushes one to either strive for excellence or to be intimidated to the point of inaction. I hope it is the former for me.  
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Thompson began by his blog posting with a story about the innovative potential of sharing that begins with Ory Okolloh a young Kenyan-born law student studying in the US who took up blogging about Kenyan in 2003 as a way of expressing her obsession with it and sharing ideas with others.  Political upheaval in Kenya and a media blackout lead to her blog to become a clearinghouse for information on the crisis in the country. Okolloh’s blog inspired others in Kenya and the US to develop a map-based tool for reporting the violence in Kenya via text, email, or the web, and they called it Ushahidi, the Swahili word for “testimony”. And in a funny epilogue, this is the website that our instructor of OLTD 505 Alec Couros shared with me for my learning project on community mapping.