A mentor and new media luminary takes a blogging hiatus

By Wesley Fryer On August 25, 2009 · · Add Comment

Thanks to a tweet from Will Richardson, I learned today that higher education blogging luminary Larry Lessig is officially ending his blogging activities on his personal blog, Lessig.org/blog. Dr. Lessig helped found Creative Commons and was one of the first higher education professors I encountered (probably through his then-published column in Wired magazine) and inspired me to take up blogging personally in 2003. Larry has been and continues to be an inspiration to me because of his writing (his book “The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World” is one of my favorites) as well as his presentation style. In many cases now, sharing keynotes and other conference presentations, I aspire to model his “Lessig style” using full-screen CC images (usually found with either Compfight or FlickrStorm) and single words or short phrases shown rapidly when I use text. His September 2006 presentation “The Read/Write Society” at the Wizards of OS4 conference continues to be one of my favorite presentations of all time. His personal website, Lessig.org, is one I consider a model for information sharing, personal marketing as an educational resource, and layered complexity. There is LOTS of information there, but it is presented in a clean, simple format which is easy to navigate and utilize.

I’m pleased to learn Dr. Lessig is maintaining a Blip.tv channel as well as his podcast, as he takes up a new role as the director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. We need more fluent, articulate users of social media like Dr. Lessig in higher education.

You can’t put a price on inspiration.