Teaching Generation Z

Blogging at me.edu.au looks like this to me …

Blogging here is more like this …

Image credits: Beehive by TLVshac & a room of one’s own by jspad

Will the work you do today
Stand the test of time

“Test of Time”, Spy Vs. Spy, 1988.

D’Arcy Norman went very close to pulling the plug and “nuking” his blog. Why?

He explains in an out-of-context quote:

…my blog is strictly just a bunch of words. Just a bunch of talk.

Now the focus of his post was tossing around the “edupunk” theme that seems to be fairly visible in my aggregator but this particular quote combined with his actual willingness to make his blog disappear from the face of the internet really made me think. All of us, typing in our thoughts, ideas and experiences - just a bunch of words?

Are words different to action?

Can words be a result of action?

Sure, some blogs can be a pile of pontification and empty trails heading nowhere. But D’Arcy’s blog is not the sort I would place into that category. His blog and many more that I read are full of action - documentation of action, plans for action, ideas to spark others to action - they are “about standing up and doing things”.

The things that are done are archived for those of us unable to see and experience the first hand action. We can take those words and use them to guide our own actions, to provide us with experiences and case studies and to help form professional and personal relationships with others in totally different spheres of learning. D’Arcy (and many others) help me with all of the above and more often than not put a smile on my face when I need it most. Where else would I have encountered the term “borked” if not for D’Arcy and his “outboard brain”.

Blogging can be a form of “time-capsuling” your work. I want my blog to be more than just words.

Image attribution: ‘i don’t know anything right now‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/79477064@N00/88887418
by: Diane

For anyone who may be interested, I held a Parent Evening at my school to explain our Upper Primary student blogging program and to share some information in general about using social media in primary school classrooms. The evening attracted a small number of dedicated parents and was very successful. I also had the support of about nine staff members. I didn’t record the presentation as it was more of a free flowing exchange of information - there were references to specific kids and other aspects of the school not suitable for a generalised audience. However, some educators on my network were asking if I would share my slidedeck - so here it is for what it’s worth out of context. I’ve altered some of my own photographs of students to mask identity and done some other scribbling on some of the slides to be pro-actively protective. I’ll share the link to my Google doc notes to help add the content of my talk to the slides. I’m more than happy to field any questions in my comments.

| View | Upload your own

My theme for my ten minute audio at last Friday’s Learning In The 21st Century roundtable discussion was about protecting teacher innovation and how student learning can extend beyond the classroom. I managed to get myself to educationau headquarters on Fullarton Road shortly after 2 pm and got to be involved in the last two hours of discussion which was centered around the development of a starting framework of what Teaching And Learning Online means in an Australian context. I tried to catch up and plug in on what had transpired in the previous five hours while the other participants were tiring after an intense day. My impressions of our facilitator Joan Russell, an eminent South Australian in the field of Science, were first rate. She set the tone for working through the issues in a timely and open manner keeping all participants on track whilst respecting their various points of view. I wish that I could have been there for the whole day but Mike Seyfang recorded all of the relevant presentations and conversations in due course I will be able to listen to all of the audio and be well briefed.

It is great to see that Al Upton has restarted blogging with his class under a framework of guidelines developed in consultation with his principal. If you visit his blog, you will notice that the Notice For Closure page has been archived under a tab and you will know be able to re-directed to his new miniLegends blog. Al has kickstarted so much of this conversation that we had to have here in Australia and it is only through boundary pushing innovators like him can we discover what is truly best for those learners under our care.

That’s why innovation is something precious to be guarded within our schools. Without the innovative educators, we would be always camped at the safe no-risk end of learning - innovators are the ones who open up new possibilities and create new entry points for others to follow through. But the concept of “duty of care” is a real one that K-12 educators must deal with. Whenever you invite someone to interact with your learners the potential and expected benefits must carefully weighed against the potential risks. While a lot of American research is cited that dispels a lot of the myths surrounding use of the internet, there is precious little that carries similar weight in an Australian context. So do Aussie educators assume that the North American findings are directly transferable or do we proceed with caution and push for more research to be carried out with our own population?

“Duty of care” assumes that the students under my care will be cared for and not exposed to any risks that a parent or caregiver would consider unreasonable. In the case of using the web, that parental point of view could swing from parents who use heavy filtering, perhaps have deliberately chosen to not to get web access at home to the parents for whom the web is a big mystery and they don’t give much thought to where in cyberspace their children might be because their awareness levels are just so far behind.They just don’t know.

Peter Simmonds, our DECS Learning Technologies Projects manager was an all day attendee on that Friday and he used the Outdoor Education analogy to good effect. To paraphrase his words, outdoor education could potentially be a very risky undertaking (think rock climbing and kayaking as two examples) but the educators involved have developed such well developed protocols and guidelines that the risks have been diminished to their very slightest and are now considered to be safe activities for students to be involved in. Teaching and learning online activities also would benefit from the development of protocols and guidelines that would turn the use of blogs and other online tools into a safe, highly valuable and essential learning practice. Doing so without this happening is like trusting your ropes will hold you down the rockface because of your experience rather than taking the time to check and ensure that the activity will not end in disaster due to human oversight or negligence.

The framework under development and started on May 2 by the gathered group of volunteers is a positive step in the right direction for Australian education.

Kudos to educationau for offering to host the May 2nd event titled “Learning In The 21st Century” as a positive spin off from the issues coming to a head with Al Upton’s class blog closure. Now the event is not about Al’s situation but is more a roundtable discussion as a starting point for moving forward. Acknowledgement must go to Alex Hayes who came up with the initial concept of an event and drove the TALO involvement but will be nursing his swollen knee as the discussion unfolds. Janet Hawtin has also been amazing, connecting all the dots and encouraging key people to have their say. Over a GMail chat the other night I negotiated an afternoon only visit to the event and a recorded contibution for the morning due to my classroom teaching commitments. As I type the just over 10 minutes of audio is uploading to my podomatic account and hopefully I’ll link to it just before I head to bed.

Audio presentation for May 2 - click to download.

Sites mentioned or relevant to my presentation.

Connecting the Digital Dots: Literacy of the 21st Century

Spin The Global wiki project

I know I’m writing on this topic a good week or two after an interesting discussion on the TALO forum on the topic of Learning In The 21st Century, but I’ve been thinking about some of the ideas on student identity that were explored on that thread. This all ties back to the Al Upton issue and is certainly something that I can’t seem to be able to move away from. (That could explain my blogging slowing to a crawl in the past fortnight.) Janet Hawtin has done a truckload of exploratory writing/thinking and was asking the following to occur:

Passing the baton back to the gang there are many folks on list who are more experienced in the specifics of these issues in a school context….

…fwiw I am not in any position as a non-educator participant in an open community to critique who is credible in a discussion about safety in schools…

So, I thought that I would have a go (edited to stick my chosen topic of student online identity):

I’m going to do what Janet suggests and that is speak from the perspective of working with kids and what the issues at hand might mean for them and me. I work with primary school kids - mainly 10 and 11 year olds. I really like this age group because they are still open to new ideas (they haven’t closed their minds down into that’s cool, that’s not, learning sucks, teachers suck, we’re really good type of thinking … yet) but they are independent enough not to have their hands held all of the time. They are the right age to be guided to use the web responsibly, ethically and safely in my opinion. Many have not made their own “digital footprint” and many know a fair bit about a few limited things - MSN chat, and video games to name a few.
I’ve started off cautiously introducing them to social web tools using avatars and nicknames for two reasons - one, I know the media hype and scare stories and I didn’t want to have alarmed parents denying their child’s participation, so slowly does it and I also reckon it’s everyone’s right to have control over and determine their digital identity. What we created when we started a wiki project with Doug Noon’s Grade Six kids in Alaska were sort of disposable identities. We worked on this wiki throughout the second half of this year - a great opportunity for their research to be for a purpose, they were accessing primary sources of information via the wiki and then creating something that could be shared with others. All of that happened.
This year, I started the kids with their own blogs. I was (am) hoping that this was a chance for regular writing, creation of a repository of their learning, building up of a class community of learners via reading and commenting.  Again, I was cautious so that the rug couldn’t be quickly pulled from under our feet - avatars, no real faces, nicknames or first names only, close monitoring of content, moderation of comments, clear guidelines about what constituted private information…
…I’m scared - scared not what might happen to the students because I am confident that my caution will nip anything remotely inappropriate in the bud - but that one complaint from a paranoid source could shut down this opportunity for my students. We’ve learnt heaps along the way in only six weeks - mistakes have been great learning opportunities but we’ve kept them in-classroom and no-one has suffered embarrassment or felt slighted or unsafe. I’m concerned because I have to think of all of the contingencies and possibilities in advance, knowing that my department’s policies have not kept up to date…

James Neill responded later with this reply:

interesting, graham, so you’ve basically gone the sock puppet route with
kids

another experiment would be to only allow direct true, honest, and
transparent self-expressions - otherwise take it home / do it outside of
school - ideals about honesty, etc. often appear in school mission
statements - but perhaps school and education department mission
statements should be modified to reflect actual practice

Now James works in higher education, so I wasn’t sure if he was having a go at me with the “sock puppet” reference. It was the first time that I had ever heard the phrase and a bit of Wikipedia research found that it wasn’t a flattering term. Anyway, in true Wegner diplomatic style, I decided to explore his point of view in another post:

Hi James … I’m not sure what to make of the “sock puppet” comment - something tells me that I should be offended or at least reacting to it as some form of jibe. Is it just another name for an avatar/nickname based identity? Is the concept of a “disposable identity” for students under the age of 18 such a bad thing? Maybe I wasn’t clear about my choices here - and it could well be that my thinking is full of holes - I may be on a lower intellectual level anyway. To me, while the concept of real images and use of real names might be desirable, it isn’t crucial to how I wanted to start my students in using read/write tools for learning for the first time. Part of my thinking is that once you are 18, as an adult in an educational setting, you can choose how to portray yourself in your online identity - disclose as little or as much about yourself as you feel comfortable with. But my students are still minors under the law, I am their “legal guardian” during school hours and for any school based projects that I set up. Any choices I make and set up for them could affect their future digital history if linked closely to their actual non-online identity. A “disposable identity” that has enough in it for the classroom community (and by default their families) to know who is who allows them to sever ties with that classroom project if they want. After all, this is new territory for me and them. There are unanswered questions in my mind about how any blogs of theirs should be used anyway after they finish in my classroom and move on… I’ll concede that the “sock puppet” treatment is conservative but I think it is very early days to be using these tools in the primary school setting. And at least in primary school, there is one teacher mentoring this whole process - in high school when things get fragmented, who’s doing the guiding and teaching then? I want other teachers to come on board and they need to feel sure that they are doing the right thing in their appointed role - adults themselves use “fictional identities” until they feel confident in the online world.
I’ll emphasise again that for the vast majority of my kids (10/11 year olds) this is their first foray into online read/write interaction. My parents expect that I will be keeping them safe but they also know that this may be the only time their child might be doing individual online authoring in their school life - so their support is not something to be treated lightly. If their comfort level is at ease because we’ve equitably agreed that we’ll go down the avatar/nickname path - having different options would only muddy the waters and make it very hard to manage. (Especially as I have the rest of the curriculum to deliver.) Again, make things too complex or hard to manage and other teachers following behind will baulk.
I think that while it’s nice to think in terms of ideals, the practicality of delivering those ideals in a classroom of minors is too much to ask. And even with the compromises I make on those ideals, the kids are lot more savvy and in control of their online skills than without any read/write exposure at all. This is an important part of my job (and one that is sadly neglected by the vast majority of K-12 teachers in my opinion) but it is not my entire job, and it is a useful and much needed tool for my students’ learning but it is not the sum of their learning either.
I apologise for being unable to make my points more succinctly - it means I won’t be adding any of my thoughts on your other posts and points right at this point in time.

James then chimed in with his clarifying thoughts. Now I could see where he was coming from - and he now understood mine:

i suggested the term ’sock puppets’ might be relevant earlier on as another word/phrase for describing one approach to handling the issues raised by the minis not being allowed to blog anyone - they could go the route you have chosen. i also suggested we might reclaim the negative connotation of the word, just as ‘true’ hackers have tried to
reclaim the good meaning of hacking.

i am curious whether you have actually been given any guidelines within which to operate - or have you intuitively picked your way through the minefield of ‘what might happen if’ in order to get the project to fly?

i’ve got no problem with people using multiple and fictitious identities - when there’s an authentic purpose. but if the fundamental reason is to avoid political scandal, then it’s time for online educators to start the revolution.

from what i can smell from here, i suspect that the current conservativism in online education is undermining the quality of education for our future workforce

sincerely,
james

So, maybe the “sock puppet” moniker can be reclaimed for good but I think I prefer the term “disposable identity”. There is also some great discussion around this topic when Alex Couros and his EC&I class talked through some of the issues around the miniLegends closure with Sue Waters. There the participants talked around whether the use of pseudonyms reduced the authenticity of a blog or a blogger. However, when dealing with younger students, I still believe that a student blog using one of these (modified name, representative image) identities can still be authentic - for me, these choices place barriers to actual identification but leave enough for other readers to engage with. I was amused but dismayed that the suggestion that pseudonymity would be the creation of a fictional identity. I don’t think that should be the case. There is no doubt that if you read one of my student’s blogs that they are actually Year Six students, you could figure out their gender but you won’t get their actual name, you won’t get actual clear images of them, you won’t get any more than vague references to their family, they refer to other students by their avatar names but they are authentically blogging about their learning, their classroom experiences and their own ideas.

Their blogs are a construct of my design. Although they have been extremely enthusiastic, they haven’t just decided to blog of their own accord so I owe it to them to ensure that it is a safe environment. A “disposable identity” is something they can cut adrift at a later date, or claim for their own when they feel they are ready to manage their own online identity.

It’s not just about safety - it’s about personal control of that identity. And in the artificial world of the classroom, my role is to help add the responsibility component as my students make their connections beyond that classroom without compromising that control.

I saw and spoke with Al Upton last night at the Annual General Meeting for our state association CEGSA - ironically in the same room where two years earlier he was standing clutching his CEGSA Educator Of The Year award in recognition of the groundbreaking work he had been doing in his classroom. He had met with DECS and AEU representatives earlier in the day and was busily typing away at Update No. 3 for his closed miniLegends blog as the meeting unfolded. He was trying to get the wording right because as many online educators will attest, it is easy for readers to misinterpret words and make incorrect assumptions.

In an further ironic twist, we had an invited speaker on the topic of “Cyber Safety For Teachers” who unfortunately delivered one of the most negatively slanted talks on students and their use of the internet that I have ever heard. I won’t elaborate any more on the speaker’s identity or  perspective but to agree with the concept of banning mobile phones in schools and wondering out loud why any 12 year old would ever need one wasn’t really the right approach to take with a group of the most dedicated and forward looking educators in our state.

So, back to Update No. 3. Please go and read it carefully if you have been following Al and his class’s situation and if you want to help his case (and mine and any other teachers in South Australia or elsewhere in the world who believe that students having real access to tools like blogs is key to effective learning of online ethics, safety and responsibility), add your comment to the list so that continues to grow. The most powerful ammunition at this point in time is real educators talking about the power of students using these technologies in an open and carefully monitored in their classrooms, talking about the immense benefits that their students have gained, talking about how obstacles can be turned into powerful and lasting learning experiences and how allowing students participation in the networked capacity of these tools can help to prevent the disaster stories that were almost gleefully portrayed during the AGM feature talk.

Add your story …. please.

Doug Belshaw wrote an interesting post about the changes he’s seeing in the edublogosphere and laments the effect of many more, less revolutionary voices.

Whilst it’s great that there’s more educators than ever blogging, tweeting, etc. the focus has shifted. Those that were formerly in the classroom and relating the changing world and tools available to everyday educational experience are no longer in those positions; educators who have no desire to transform education are blogging. The edublogosphere has changed from being about ‘the conversation’ to being part of ‘the network’.

As often happens, the gold is in the comments where a few “old hands” (and a newer one as well) lend their perspective. Wesley Fryer agrees with Doug that “we all need to maintain a focus on school change” while Chris Craft voiced the opinion that ” the conversations we’ve been having for years now have served to enact zero change“. Doug Noon also made a very valid point for me when he wrote that while it was “interesting to attempt an analysis…. the read/write web phenomenon is very complex, and it’s bound to change, like everything else.”

I’ll certainly noticed the changes Doug Belshaw refers to but I’m not so quick to characterise it as being a negative or positive evolution. It’s true - there are many more edubloggers around and writing regularly compared to when I started my blog in mid 2005. I could fill my aggregator with double the number of feeds if I decided to read everyone I ”know” via the various Web 2 channels that I connect to. It’s also a much quicker journey in 2008 to become noticed and included in the ”conversation” as I’ve written about before.

This talk about effecting school change is very interesting as well and in some ways is tied very tightly to local and national contexts. The classroom that our new Student Wellbeing Coordinator described to me from her year of exchange teaching in Colorado, USA was totally foreign to my experiences in twenty plus years of teaching in South Australia. She laughingly referred to it as a “working holiday” but confessed boredom with the scripted curriculum and use of prescribed textbooks to deliver that curriculum. I also had an enlightening exchange with Clay Burell the other day on Twitter when he made a reference to student athlete letter jackets which I had thought was an American high school movie fiction. (Hidden curriculum. indeed!) So when Ewan McIntosh points out that what some education cultures see as revolutionary practice and something to aspire to can already be commonplace and well established in other systems, I tend to concur and wonder if we (the edublogosphere) are even talking about the same future change.

It’s also why the second part of Chris’ comment tends to explain the expansion of classroom based bloggers that Doug refers to:

The conversation changes us, not our circumstance.

It’s also neatly summarised by a catchphrase I’ve seen on Kevin Honeycutt’s twitter bio that says, “I’m out to change the world.. one classroom at a time!” A lot of teachers are flat out trying to effect change within their own faculty or learning team, let alone talking up major change of one of the cornerstones of modern society. Being part of the network is an important step forward for many affording them contact with others in similar situations, teaching the same subjects or year levels with the simple goal of becoming better at what they do with their learners. I think that’s a positive development - and helps break down that perception that reflective blogging is the exclusive domain of the edtech crowd.

So, no, not everyone is out to change the face of education. Some are even openly skeptical about this movement characterised as Classroom 2.0. They just appreciate the opportunity to look over someone else’s shoulder, work out effective use of digital tools to improve their teaching and to make links for collaborative projects. Some teachers feel like they are the only ones pushing the limits within their school environment, the only ones striving to continually improve the learning programs they offer to their students and finding via the internet that they are not alone and that someone else shares their perspective. Maybe they figure that changing the future of education is not their call - it takes time, energy and commitment that they may not have.

I used to think that blogging had the potential to have a huge influence on how education could unfold in this country, and by extension in other systems around the world. The recent events surrounding the closure of Al Upton’s class blog tell me that decision makers are not tuned into our particular conversation. But I think that Doug is still interested in that bigger conversation - the one that did dominate the edublogosphere a year or so back. Maybe it has evolved into new forums and that discussion will have more power over on a Ning like Classroom 2.0, although I see a lot of the classroom teacher connection stuff happening there too. But there’s a lot of conversation out there - one can choose to connect to the visionaries and push for meaningful change or extend one’s global staffroom to gain support, inspiration and resources in equal measure. I tend to dabble in all camps on this blog anyway - no issue’s too big for me to have an uninformed go at and I want to improve what I take into the classroom tomorrow as well.

It’s a big edublogosphere.

There’s room for all of us, to be as involved or as detached as we want.

Chris Lehmann has written some of the best posts for my money in 2008 and his timing always seems to be impeccable. His recent Letter To A New Teacher spoke to all teachers, new or experienced, regardless of sector or country and I found Chasing False Gods to be really good fodder for my own thoughts. As the whole Al Upton and his miniLegends issue dropped into the edublogger pool and the ripple waves started washing up onto various shores, Chris’s words have new meaning for me as I try to work out why blogging is worth pursuing in the classroom. Is it a faddish idea because it’s new technology and merely digitises what’s always been done in classrooms or does it offer students regardless of age something more? Chris points out:

We have to understand — we cannot compete with the ever-more-fast-paced and realistic entertainment world. What we can offer is meaning and purpose and authenticity.

Does blogging have purpose and authenticity? Or is it just a shiny new wrapper that just maybe has too many hard-to-manage variables for the average teacher? Where does it fit?

Something tells me that we should be encouraging teachers to be innovative, to push into unfamiliar territories but once again, Chris’s most recent words come swimming into my brain, looking to temper that innovation with our responsibility as educators:

As educators, we must be hyper-aware that we cannot be revolutionaries at the expense of our students.

And there are plenty of revolutionaries around. It is one of the things that Al himself must guard against - being the poster boy for any cause that sees itself at odds with the status quo of administration that doesn’t get it, railing against an impersonal system that just doesn’t care or in desperate need of an overhaul or dismantlement. He must beware of powerful personalities willing to hitch their cause to the miniLegends - and most are worthy but it’s so easy to get sucked into the frenzy, to forget that there is a curriculum to deliver, a classroom to run and there are the students who probably just want their blogs back and have had enough of their time in the spotlight.

But Chris does elaborate more about the role of the risk taker in the classroom:

We must take risks in education. We must challenge the tried-and-true way of educating students, but we must do it thoughtfully and carefully and transparently, because we don’t have the luxury of just “going out of business.” Every school that makes those choices poorly affects the lives of the students who honored that school with their choice to go there. This is — as much as any other reason — we must always, always, always humble ourselves before the enormity of the task in front of us.

I know that writing a blog has altered the way I learn. But capturing the elements that enable me to reflect and connect is not so easy with the students that I teach. It’s why I think that the work that Konrad Glogowski has done with his students to be incredibly important. It’s also why Al’s issues have resonance for me. It’s why my own department’s response and planned future responses are important to me - how authentic student blogging can be will be determined by how well they can connect to each other, to other students learning similar things and to adults who can guide and direct them in their learning. Otherwise, it will be just recounts and writing in short bursts in pretty themed environments - the digital equivalent of colouring in the page margins.

By running a class blogging program, am I really pushing the boundaries of what the classroom should be today? I think so but only if there are connections out of that classroom. It’s early days - and I’m pleased that a sense of community is starting to emerge with my students. There is encouragement, there is some risk taking going on in terms of reluctant writers creating their topics and posts, there is some exchange of ideas and the kids are looking already in under a month to go beyond the “Cool blog” comments and add some substance to their observations of their peers’ writing. The Blog Coaches was my next logical step - I need to partner that up with parent information and education as the greatest threat to this carefully monitored situation is media-fuelled apprehension. So I can see the blog as a learning tool that helps students to become digitally literate, improve their use of the written English language, explore topics from their SOSE (Studies Of Society & Environment) curriculum and reflect on their learning in any area of their set curriculum.

But how realistic is this all? How sustainable is a model that demands that the teacher implementing it be linked into a global network? That they understand the digital tool they expect the students to use intimately? I like what Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach has to say on this point:

As educators we need to get ready for a real shift in culture. The shifts that are coming will not allow “business as usual” rather it will be “business as unusual”. That is why it is critical for all of us to first own these emerging technologies and the pedagogy/culture that surrounds them, by using Web 2.0 tools to connect- in an effort to chase our own passions. Through the experience of building of your own PLN, not only will you model for your students how this should be done, but you might find some transformational moments along the way -that like mine with Jenny and Dan- will leave you a better person. And do NOT discount what those younger or older than you have to offer. Use expertise and passion- not age- as criteria for who you should learning from and for who should be part of your learning network.

The miniLegends are well on track in this regard. Al Upton is an exceptional teacher who believes in empowering his students. If Sheryl is right and she’s identifying what is needed to be a teacher today, I feel ready for the challenge and I reckon that the kids in my class are going to be well positioned.

For this year.

See, that’s where my selfish generousity kicks in. I can leverage my network and hook my students up with Alaskan kids on wikis or have well respected edubloggers waiting in the wings to become another one of their teachers. But what about the other teachers in the building? The ones without their own blogs? What about the teachers in my son’s school who have never ever read a blog? What about the students I teach as they leave me and hit high school where they get taken back to basics with their technology use and assumed levels of competency?

Has my genorousity been more about me and my passions than their needs for their actual future? As opposed to the one we all agree they should be getting? Don’t worry - I teach all of the stuff that Chris advocates we do not overlook. Balance is important.

We need innovators. As Leigh Blackall once said to me, (I’m paraphrasing here) that you need the boundary pushers as it then gives those following behind room to move. Occasionally, however, it doesn’t hurt to remember that the students of innovative teachers don’t get a say in coming along for the ride. But then there are implications and consequences for inaction and ignorance as well.

For readers following the situation of Al Upton and the miniLegends and their recent blog closure, it’s worth checking back at the blog now for Al’s Update No. 2. It outlines the sequence of events, where the miniLegends are up to now and promises another Update No. 3 in the near future.

Al writes:

… Yesterday I had planned to simply write “It’s all good. I’m waiting for something in writing.”
… Today I feel compelled to share what I can as a professional teacher and employee of DECS. My intent here is to clear up some issues, taking the ‘heat’ off the miniLegends, myself and DECS thus distancing my example situation from the necessary broader dialogue and action.

Considering the significant interest and support from various parts of the world, some bloggers have added a fair bit of conjecture into their posts and some misunderstandings of facts have occurred. The best place to be informed is at the source - but I do know that the situation is resolving itself but a lot of learning and moving forwards (at a number of levels) can and will take place as a result of this closure.