I’m sad that I couldn’t find more time for #clmooc. But I think it might be fun that if I only get two posts in, that it be one at the beginning – my Untro – and one here at the end on public spaces.

I was not sure what was going on when I noticed many of my friends were changing their icons to little rangers on twitter. What the heck is the deal? That was when I realized that this final #clmooc prompt had to do with public spaces.

I caught some of the calls to pin maps with people’s favorite public spaces, photos, blog posts, and a twitter chat the other day which I actually got to take part in… but to tell the truth I did not get a chance to really dive into the conversation. Still, I’m inspired by this prompt… so without much background here is my reflection.

One of my first thoughts was about the open web as a public space and how that plays into digital citizenry. What the responsibilities are of the citizenry in public spaces of all kinds but then how that plays out on the web. How communities like #clmooc (and #moocmooc and #rhizo15) serve as good examples of digital citizenship by encouraging people to not just be on the web but to think, create, question, converse… build affiliations, acquaintances, friendships,… by using tools of the web to reach out to one another and be creative in positive ways that encourage a better public space for everyone. It seems that is an important part of a public space – realizing that it is public and that it is shared and that to share we need to work together to make a better space.

But then I had wondered if I had used the wrong metaphor in calling the open web “in the wild” for the #tomereaders book group that I facilitated on the open web. I did so because there were some people that did not want to participate in the open web and wanted a closed LMS instead – which I coined “in the lodge”.  I used these metaphors somewhat based on the fear that was expressed from the people that did not want to use the open environment and I’m not sure it was the right fit. This got me thinking about wild places and what it really means to be a wild place.

A wild place is different than a public place. It seems to me a public place is a place for people. In contrast a wild place is a place where nature comes first – not nature as in flowers, rocks, and animals but nature as in that sense or source of energy of the way things would be without a lot of man-made rules, structure, or laws where the flowers, rocks, and animals are there because of a shift in what is valued. In one sense a wild place is dangerous because it has not been massaged by the rules of humans and the wild things could have their way with you if you were out in the wrong place at the wrong time. But in a bigger sense the wild is vulnerable because we all know how humans can bend the wild to their own needs with pavement, machinery, and bureaucracy.

This led me to think of the recent protests in Portland OR where the protesters were trying to stop Shell from transporting equipment they needed to drill oil in the Arctic. The protesters were dangling themselves from a bridge putting their bodies in the way of the barge so that it could not pass. To some they are troublemakers and standing in the way of legal drilling that was given the go ahead by the government. But to others they are standing up for that value of the wild spaces that are vulnerable to the impact of humans.

#ShellNo protestors have stopped an Arctic drilling ship from leaving Portland >> http://t.co/VTbQRqH4ve pic.twitter.com/2yuPRMc2te

— Discovery (@Discovery) July 30, 2015

And then looping back to the digital citizen in how all of this is documented and tweeted and blogged about; debated and conversed about on the open web leading to redefinitions about what it means to be public, what it means to be wild, what it means to be a citizen and be responsible to each other and to the public and wild spaces.

I’m not sure where this all goes and what this all means but I’m grateful for public spaces to have the conversation and think about the different spaces in our world.