What to write?

It has been a sad few weeks since my last post. The situation with Al Upton and his mini-legends drags on and because we are in holidays, little has been resolved. In a skype conversation with Al and Sue Waters and Anne Murchison, he was understandably dispirited. It is such a blow to someone who is a devoted professional, such a slight to his good judgement of what is safe and appropriate for his students- in consultation with parents that it is.What concerns me greatly is that Al should not be the pinup boy for this cause. There are so many of us attempting to wrestle with the new technology, with a new way of seeing ourselves as educators that Al should not be bearing the brunt of all this considerable backlash in the light of the hysteria generated by the media about fears of 'The Internet'.I know if it were me facing such a questioning of my judgement, I would have given up and run-I am not of the same strong stuff as Al, but it is an issue that has to be dealt with and government departments and schools and parents cannot hide their heads in the sand and hope it will go away. It won't.
The picture I have added to this post is my attempt to finally respond to the Passion Quilt meme started by Miguel Guhlin.
What is my passion in teaching? To help students to find their own voice in writing and to glow with pride and happiness when they write.The lights are on in so many classes, students are starting to be heard, but it is decisions like that of the Sth Australian dept of Education that make it seem a very distant possibility to have classes where students can raise their voices beyond the small pond of the class and doing busy work for the teacher, to actually engage in writing for real authentic tasks to a wide audience.
It is interesting that when I started to write this post, I felt I had little of value to say. I have been reading some of the blogs mentioned in Clay Burell's post about favorite blogs and felt I had so much to learn and nothing to add to the discussions which are flowing past me on twitter all the time. Maybe I have little of great academic worth to contribute, but I feel better for exploring what has made me feel so down all week.

Twittering on -the tipping point is reached!

Holidays have been rolling along here and for the first time in nearly twenty years we haven't had a holiday away; but instead of it being dull and boring, I have had a fabulous time! While not posting has been on my mind, I have almost been attached by an invisible cord to my computer and that cord has been Twitter. If you have been living under a rock you may not know about twitter, but for me a tipping point has been reached and long passed as I have gone from being a somewhat sceptical observer to a committed addict.

I use snitter which allows me to continually get updates as I read blogs,fill up my del.icio.us pages with great information and generally zip around the blogosphere.My network has nearly reached a hundred followers and I am convinced for me it is the most powerful app around.The reason I haven't done any posts despite having more 'time' is that I am too busy doing things to stop and reflect on my doings! As I pondered my lack of posts I decided to write about the huge explosion of things that I have suddenly become involved in over the last six week and the power of jumping in to a social network which is so welcoming.As I composed my draft- ie tried to remember the things which had been so earth shifting in my new committment to the power of web 2.0 -I was not at all surprised to see others write on a similar theme. Chris Betch, Murcha and Jo McLeay have all posted recently on how significant Twitter has become in their network and I agree with their thoughts.

I have also worked out how to actually connect to World Bridges presentations and have been participating live in chat rooms and even contributed online in a skype call to one presentation which was a first for me. The effect of this participation is powerful and how to make sure my students have the chance to engage as personally as this not just on Myspace, will be something to work on this year.

Following my meeting with Jo Mcleay I have also signed up to class 2.4 of the webcast academy and even have been given an intern badge!!Hopefully I will be able to get up a 6am for the classes on monday mornings - committment eh?
The time difference problem has not been such a problem while on holiday and I have been much more able to participate in webcasts and chats because i have been home. How I will go once back at work will be a challenge as I have relished the immediacy of the live broadcasts. Hopefully once I have done the training Jo and I and others will be able to do something to help with the problems of time difference.

As part of my new twitterness habit, I have also been using skype more effectively. Previously it was for talking to my daughter when she was on exchange in France for a year and the webcam plus the audio helped me survive the year. In the last few weeks however, I have been involved in conference calls and chats with the real people whose writing I have enjoyed so much. The first way to 'flatten out' this world is by simply talking and when teachers can start these conversations, we are on a good road.
A really concrete example of this has also been the FLNW08 - a virtual un-conference which was an example of how technology could be used across countries to present. We were watching -we being a very large chat room as a result of Kim Corfino and others sending out tweets- the ustream of the meeting in Thailand and also the slideshare presentation was posted, as were the photos in flickr that were being discussed. All this plus a very active and entertaining chat room covering several continents made it a fabulous experience and NZChrissy has blogged about it in detail and included some screen capture as well.
My last but not least or only point is how last Sunday I was playing around with Picasa to explore it for photo editing. I just mentioned it in twitter for fun and then Sue Waters and Chris Betch took over having a long conversation of tweets discussing the pros and cons of picasa and flickr as photo editing tools. This went thick and fast for quite a while with others adding in and finally I said that a blog post might be the best way to preserve their combined knowledge... and so they did!! They used Google docs and from both sides of this continent they wrote a blog post about the suject and then individually posted it- preserving the moment in the blogosphere.What an awesome example of knowledge sharing, and of the immediacy of the tools available to us to share and comment!
So apart from doing lots of bottling of the fruits of summer and having time to enjoy my garden, my holidays have been about Twitter and networks and a path forward - I am hoping to go to NECC in Texas in June. I have definitely dived in and am swimming as fast as I can.My 'tweeties' are are a great bunch and we are all swimming together. They say that the first part of dealing with an addiction is admitting to it. Now what is step two?