It’s this blog that I value the most as a connection point with others. It’s where I started dabbling in this networked way, where I connected to my first edublogger colleagues, people who I hadn’t met but whose words and ideas drew me in and got me writing and sharing my own little piece of the world. Through comments left by others and by responding to comments on others’ blogs, I widened my circle of connections and the network started branching out in unexpected, intriguing pathways.

New concepts like Leigh Blackall’s networked learning, Will Richardson’s connective writing and Konrad Glogowski’s classroom learning communities were all new perspectives that I would not have encountered in a non-digitally connected world. They taught me about the transferability and reinterpretation of new ideas, as much as someone more recently like Dan Meyer with his “Be Less Helpful” mantra.

It’s probably because I enjoy the process of writing that this particular outlet has such appeal. I’ve migrated and used other tools to connect – ning, Twitter, delicious, and even more recently Second Life but invariably, my network has been built on the back of edubloggers or secondary connections from those edubloggers. There are those people who started their connection in a similar fashion at a similar point in time – people like Jo McLeay, Darren Kuropatwa and James Matthew Nelson. Initially, I felt an obligation to add anyone who read my blog (identified via comments) to my blog reader and thanks to a feature in Bloglines that I used at the time, anyone who I could identify from the subscriptions list. But interestingly for a bloke who hasn’t all that much new to add to the conversation, the readership has grown beyond that need for reciprocal subscribing. I realised that I can’t read and converse with everyone who reads this blog, and that are many bloggers who I read who don’t know that I exist!

This realisation certainly helped me to manage my usage of a tool like Twitter where I can have a massive disproportion between followed and following. I must confess that I feel more comfortable in the asychronous world of the blog post where I can write something, set it free, see whether it strikes any chords out there than the weirdly hybrid synchronicity of the 140 character “Is anyone reading this? Whoops, now I’m having a conversation.” I share better from my ramblings here than by pumping out URL shortened tidbit links – that’s just not my skill set and there are plenty of others who do that much, much better.

The connection to others is very hard to explain. There are others out there scattered across the globe to whom I have felt a collegial connection; a new type of friendship that starts with a shared interest in web based and enable learning but manifest itself in a desire to find out a little more about the person behind the blog and have a much more personal conversation. It’s interesting – sometimes people connect to what I write and sometimes they connect just to me as the person they have gotten to know via this blog, twitter exchanges, invitations to participate in projects and Skype conversations (although these happen much less often than they used to). Alex, Doug, Chris, Ken and Darren are all more than just names in an aggregator or a contact list – I think of them as friends who would help me if I needed it.

I don’t venture that far from home either – a combination of family commitments and a job that doesn’t require much travel – but via these connections, the long term comment exchanges, the occasional Skype chats and the @messages on Twitter, I’ve managed to meet quite a few other educators both far and near. I can still recall having a meal with Michael Coghlan and Alan Levine with only half his voice left during his speaking tour down under and hosting Tom Barrett and his family for dinner at our place was simply a delight. None of this possible without online connection. I get hints from others like Clay, Dean and Chris that should I ever venture into their neighbourhood, the welcome mat is already waiting.

How do I do the connecting? The work day is invariably very busy and I have this two hour window from 8.30 – 10.30 pm each evening after the boys are in bed where I can open up the laptop and do a task switching blend of planning, reading, chatting and exploring. My iPhone has become the most constant connection now, as it is easy to just turn on and connect whenever a spare opportunity arises. I use a Pageflakes startpage to jump off into various places, I use GMail and Google Reader, Tweetdeck on the laptop, Twitterific on the iPhone and I keep a watchful eye on some of the Nings I have joined, my delicious network feed and the occasional Skype chat. I’m still getting past that “ghost town” feeling whenever I venture into Second Life and find it interesting that some of my real world insecurities in social situations have followed me in there. Writing like this in text form seems to be comparatively liberating.

The longer I have played in this digital world, the wider and more diverse my network has become. It probably has an overwhelmingly “education flavour” to it all but that’s OK with me because the spread of educational situations is so varied. I’m not quite the free ranger – in fact, I am still bemused that anyone finds what I have to say to be of importance – as if something works, I tend to stick with it.

So, D’Arcy, there you have it. My response to your prompt. Your blog was amongst the first added to my aggregator. Yours was one of the first where I saw fit to criticise a blog post. Your education world is vastly different me here in suburban Adelaide but there you have it, we’re connected. In the loose, multi-directional, serendipitous cluster of nodes that make up my Personal Learning Network, this is how I connect to people online.

Early on, I realised that using official debate structures were too large an initial leap, especially when the skills I really wanted to focus on were using powerful language to express a specific perspective, being aware of opposing viewpoints and being able to counter these in a persuasive way. The students needed to be able to get their ideas down in print first, to hold their ideas up to the light, re-word them and listen to how “powerful language” is used in the art of persuasion.

So, in the spirit of sharing, I developed a paper based written debate format that I’m hoping will scaffold the kids towards considering both sides of any issue. I used the free CMap Tools mind mapping program for this as I really like the font and the way it lays out a flow chart like style. It also exports to PDF so I can create something here on my MacBook and share it here or print from my school Windows laptop without any tricky formatting issues.

Here’s my PDF original on the topic “Mobile Phones Cannot Be Owned By Primary School Students.”

If you have CMap installed, here is the file you can open and edit for your own purposes. I’m not sure which is the best format for exporting that would facilitate others editing for their own classroom so any suggestions would be welcome.

Don’t worry, I’m sure it will pass.

So, instead of drafting insightful missives or spreading the comment love, I’ve been delving into online music. I’ve been listening and viewing clips from artists who I’ve had a passing interest in from years past but didn’t spend much time listening to at the time.

I like alternative music – artists who are not mainstream (but still popular enough to have a significant body of work) and my tastes are probably hard to categorise. So, I stumbled back into the music of Eels and followed a bunch of links across YouTube, Wikipedia, the official band site and ended up at the Eels MySpace site. So, for your enjoyment (and definitely mine) here is a really nice version of “In My Dreams” performed by the very talented frontman, Mark Oliver Everett.

EELS “In My Dreams” from The MySpace Transmissions

MySpace Transmissions | MySpace Video

1. In what ways are you gaining as a professional by the way you work with others at LNPS ?

2. What are the skills and qualities you have appreciated in those who have supported you? You may give examples if that helps.

The co-planning teams that we work in to design our inquiry units have really helped me to improve the quality of the lessons I present to my class, become much better at effective assessment and really honed my focus in sticking to curriculum and lesson design that refers back to the skills and understandings identified as part of the required outcomes. In my role, I get to work with nearly everyone in the school and every conversation sheds light on how others tackle similar objectives. Every time we add another piece to the professional puzzle at LNPS, it opens up an opportunity to work closely with experts in various aspects of learning. In the last few years, I’ve got to work with Toni Glasson, Kath Murdoch and Mark Treadwell. I’ve had the opportunity to workshop with Jay McTighe in Melbourne to really come to grips with UbD. Like many of the staff, I’ve been fortunate to be trained in PLOT as well.

I also gain when my fellow professionals are prepared to take on my own initiatives and ideas enabling new ways of working to become commonplace at our school. Where else could I plan collaboratively using a wiki and a chatroom, have social bookmarking site delicious as the “glue” to save and group digital resources and have others lobbying for access to normally blocked sites like Wikispaces, Ning and YouTube so they can be embraced as effective tools. But I think that what helps our school to work well is that we really do have a form of distributed leadership where everyone can bring different strengths and expertises to the table, take in turns to lead at the front and basically, share.

So, using the power of tagging, we decided the best and easiest option is to use a unique tag to tie all of the saved resources together regardless of who was doing the tagging and saving. This way, even the teachers who are not using delicious (even though we are getting closer to total staff participation) can just have a shortcut to http://delicious.com/tag/lnpsmaths on their EdPort homepage to benefit from the Mathematics focus group’s hard work.The only glitch we’ve discovered is that the same site can be saved by multiple users and it will show up each time as a separate entry on the list. Our stopgap solution is say the first person to find the site uses the unique tag, and others can save but avoid the lnpsmaths tag.

Now none of this is ground breaking or unique, but it showcases the simplicity of the way delicious works (I think it is quite a bit simpler than diigo and most staff are not power users of social bookmarking at this stage) in a very powerful way. Now, we have a hotlist of sites that is constantly growing, anyone can contribute and it gives using digital resources in the teaching of Mathematics a real vitamin hit.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/double-h90/3014614501/

As I unplugged, trundled and then re-assembled the desktops in their new homes (ably helped by an enthusiastic Year Fvie class), a few interesting things became apparent. Firstly when the classrooms were first wired with data points, it was obvious that no-one envisaged that computers would be anywhere but at the back of a classroom. The number of data points is also interesting to note where the educators responsible for planning and trying to predict future needs could not foresee a need for more than four data points in a junior primary classroom or six in an Year 3 – 7 room!

Now, my point is here not to criticise my predecessors for getting things wrong but to make the point that what we actually need in classrooms in the very near future is a very fast moving and elusive target. In the goal of future proofing a school’s technology needs, the constraints of budget and what is actually available at the time provide real barriers to what is possible. For example, currently we have wireless network points running on the “g” standard meaning that all of our laptops can log on, authenticate and access the network with ease. We could upgrade to “n” standard wireless at a much better data transfer speed if we wanted but as our technician pointed out, straightaway we would have to purchase “n” wireless access points at a much greater cost than the current generation ones we have and one fleet of laptops purchased in late 2007 would not be able to connect as “g” is their maximum connection, making them redundant on our network. Also attaching more laptops to the network means that we need to have the infrastructure to support this expansion.  But if we hold off for six to twelve months, prices drop dramatically as a relatively new technology becomes commonplace and more readily supported. And with budgets always tight for a humble public school, these sort of trade offs mean that sometimes we will take a wrong turn or be surprised when technology opens up new opportunities.

So, we are now in a transition period where we try and imagine what the new learning space will be like and try to eliminate the “this is how a normal library looks” type of thinking that could be very redundant and date very quickly. Things will be testy for a while as classes go cold turkey from their regularly scheduled computing room time (which was a useful time for classes to work on individual tasks) and work on ways to use these newly created pods of older computers within their classroom. I know that I will find the regular access to our old computing room to be problematic as the trolley of twenty laptops only go so far between four classes. Time for teachers to get creative – yet again.

So, this morning, we went out bowling and when we returned home, there was a box from Amazon on the front doorstep. It is no secret that I am a lover of comic strips – starting back as a kid who loved the classic Hanna-Barbera characters to the antics of the Dog in Footrot Flats, and now my latest obsession with Pearls Before Swine. After stumbling on this comic during an English focus on humour, I’ve even managed to get my fellow teachers hooked on this little strip that constantly bends the rules of this particular media type. We’ve even used some of the strips in the classroom – teaching social skills and the use and mis-use of words to convey messages!

I still think that it is amazing that I can discover something new and exciting (and very funny) using this connection of the World Wide Web, and then have my own copies of several Pearls treasuries delivered to my doorstep.

Of course, my youngest son doesn’t see this as a big deal at all. It was, however, a great chance to nab a handy sized box for his latest creation.

Of course, one of the greatest strengths of text as a form of communication is that it can be so easily re-interpreted.

In the first instance, this can be a frustrating from the writer’s perspective as I can see via the comments or from blog reaction that my intended message can be seen in a totally different light to my original intent. But, on the other hand, as a reader, the freedom to take someone else’s words and view them through my own lense is actually a huge positive. I can take these ideas, sometimes with very little context, and manipulate them to create my own message, my own innovative path forward and create something new beyond the original text laid down by the writer. I like to think of it like the difference between reading the book and seeing the movie. Reading “The Lord Of The Rings” allows the imagination to run wild – but once I saw Peter Jackson’s cinematic version, I can only picture orcs and hobbits in one way now.

He’s a Noob in Second Life. He’s been hanging around Jokaydia, ISTE Island and freebie shops scavenging around trying to work out how to teleport, fly and strike up conversations with impressively physiqued and impeccably attired avatars. Gray has even been to a few events now, settling into custom bean bags and listening intently to talented educators detailing their innovation (both virtual and real world exploits). He even went to his first Jokaydia Unconference on the weekend – not as much as he was hoping, as his real world alter ego had issues that interfered (families, sleep) with a fuller participation schedule. But he did get to meet (virtually) one of his blogging heroes, Konrad March (aka Konrad Glogowski).

He has a lot in common with his alter-ego – me. Like Gray, I’m an ordinary person who is constantly in awe of the talent that is so easy to connect with online. What Jo Kay has created in Second Life is totally amazing – and a massive leap of faith in the potential of this online education haven. Build it and they will come, indeed. I’m not quite sure yet what this space has to offer me and its relationship to my current work – but as I (whoops, sorry), Gray noted last night at the beach side after event celebration, sometimes the deepest learning occurs in the space where I am doing something new and challenging, but feeling out of my depth.

The talent I can connect to via these avenues – my Reader, twitter and now Second Life – is unbelievable. Sometimes, I think that my main talent is recognising others’ talent and being able to stream and subvert their innovation for my own purposes.