My distant close friends are my fellow explorers in these new spaces of humanity.

What does this say about our desire to connect, to search for meaning?

I am beginning to extend my circles of empathy, I am beginning to see that I am part of a much wider world.

That comes as a bit of shock. There are suggested readings, links, that comes as a bit of a shock. This is a course, I had forgotten what a course was. I make a mental note. Please try harder to remember that this is a Course.

A light lit up on the Spaceship's dashboard. It was Susan. Could she connect too? I have no means of picturing Susan's space at the moment she asked that. I scrolled through Susans desperately seeking Susan.

Meanwhile back at the picnic spot, Terry and Keith had turned up. It was six and seven o'clock in the morning for them and they had dropped everything to spend a little time at a picnic to chat with friends.

Marcin and I's relationship has no doubt been enriched by visiting each other's homes and countries this year, a dream for many people who have extended online personal networks and the ties which bind us I feel are profound - perhaps because of the distance.  There is a part of Poland in me now.

I was in the room with him from my learning space in Clermont Ferrand. I could hear the bad acoustics of the room in which he was/we were?. We were sharing the slides on the screen in Krakow inside the slide share of our hangout on air.

I continued the day with a picnic, a #clavpicnic at for me lunch-time. When I arrived at the picnic spot (a hangout) nobody had turned up.

It is a shape-shifting space.

This is clearly not Second Life or the World of Warcraft but a space much more liminal, much more fluid, much more powerful.

My only way of assimilating what was going on was to imagine a fictional environment in which these characters met, interacted, and played.

Yesterday, I started the day with a blog post entitled 'In the Tribble Valley' inspired by a series of tweets between people who I had never met