We are all Rock Stars! #edtech

As I find myself getting closer to a ‘big’ birthday (thankfully not this year) I have realised that I am reminiscing just as much as I am reflecting (good for CMALT!), and not just about work. This post helped me with a thought process I’d been struggling to complete for a while:

The most emotional time of our lives (so far?) are when we are growing into adults, the late teens, and the music we listen to then will always be associated with the emotions we had and continue to have. This stands to reason as

“our relationships with music really gets going when we enter puberty, and becomes most intense from then through to early adulthood. This is no coincidence. It is music that plays when we fall in love, when our hearts break, when we discover sex and learn the meaning of true friendship.”

In my late teens I, like so many others, thought/dreamed of being a musical genius of the likes of Freddie Mercury, Robert Plant, or Eddie Van Halen (there, you know my musical tastes now). It didn’t matter that I had no musical ability at all, but it did matter that I couldn’t work out if I was going to sing/shout (Dave Grohl, Freddie Mercury, David Coverdale, James Hetfield et al), thump some drums (Roger Taylor, Mick Fleetwood, Lars Ulrich, Dave Grohl again, etc) or strum the gee-tar (Joe Satriani, Slash, Eric Clapton, Brian May, Michael Schenker, etc). These were my heroes, not because they were famous or rich, but because they used a talent to bring me happiness, put a smile on my face during all the usual teenage troubles.

What I know now is that I am passed the (st)age of rock stardom, and many other kinds of stardom for that matter. BUT, and this is important, the age of self-publishing has given each of us the ability to put ourselves out there on the Internet, and bare our passion or interest for all to see, much the same as the song/lyric writers did in the songs I head-banged to as a spotty teenager.

The bands I grew up to were doing much the same I am doing now – they wrote their songs because they wanted to, just like many of us are writing our blogs because we want to. The likes of Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Queen, and Whitesnake are Rock Stars to me, just like people like Steve Wheeler (@timbuckteeth), Stephen Heppell (@stephenheppell), and Sir Ken Robinson (@sirkenrobinson) are held in such high esteem to many of us involved in learning today.

If you didn’t see this post last year, then please check out the video “Obvious to you, amazing to others“. When I read the article on music I immediately thought of this video – the people I looked up to musically, and still do, are doing the same as I’m doing here, we are all writing about experiences, passions, interests, life. Whether you have a recording contract and a number one hit single or write a blog about your passion (coffee, learning, technology, poetry, swimming, etc) doesn’t matter – to someone you are their Rock Star, just like you have people you look to and think of as your Rock Stars.

Rock On!

Image source: Mark Wainwright