10 thoughts on “A Place To Call Your Own

  1. Darren Draper

    While blogging with me.edu.au might feel like a crowded, cloned experience, I wonder if you’re at least left devoid of the solitary feeling that might exist though the edublogs adventure.

    Beauty, freedom, and uniqueness potentially come with a high price-tag called isolation.

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  2. Graham Wegner

    Another perspective is that many people live side by side in identical apartments within metres of each other and never communicate or interact with each other, while in the countryside, you can live several kilometres away from your nearest neighbour and know them on a much more intimate level. My me.edu.au contacts list is a mix of mainly Aussie educators who I have connected with via my “kit home/shack” blog (using genuine James Farmer endorsed components) and colleagues who I have taught with, been on committees with, been to teachers college with. No prizes for guessing which group I have had the deepest, most important conversations about learning and education with.

    The isolated feeling was there pre-edublogs. Spending time in me.edu.au only reminds of that time again. There is potential for a vibrant community there but I’m impatient and selfish. I’m not holding my breath for it to evolve when “small pieces, loosely joined” connects me to and stretches my thinking now.

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  3. Nick Lothian

    Hi Graham,

    Thanks for your perspective. From my point of view, what we are trying to do with me.edu.au is to try and enable “small pieces, loosely joined” for the education sector. In particular, we have been quite aggressive in being as “open” as we can. We aim to integrate as many data sources as possible, to enable people who are very digitally literate to show others how to use sites and services.

    Anyway, I’d be quite interested in continuing the conversation, either here, via email, on me.edu.au or via twitter (nlothian)

    Nick

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  4. John Travers

    Great and evocative images Graham. I thought you were selling edublogs short until I read your text and saw that you have a nice romantic story about rural connectedness: the satellite dish must be behind the tree.
    I think it is sensibly ‘selfish’ for you to be very comfortable with you large network that you have in edublogs. I guess we are all interested in getting more teachers connected. A nice aspect of the me.edu.au experience is that the blog is part of a group of services and search allows people to connect to them all. So a mention of hopscotch in a blog can be found along with references to hopscotch in a community or a whiteboard.
    The hard part of blogging seems to be getting establihsed and maybe beginners will be comfortable in a space that brings chalkies together. But of course, thre are many paths to salvation.

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  5. Graham Wegner

    Wow, you educationau types move fast. I do realise that I can patch in links to my blog and compared to many who I’ve added to “My Colleagues” list I am a reasonably regular visitor to me.edu.au. I suppose I just don’t quite yet get how to connect to others within that interface – especially when compared to the ease of using Google Reader, twitter or just watching my del.icio.us network tag a fast moving stream of links. I want to share ideas, resources and experiences – I think that the big attraction of much social media is how easy it is to customise and personalise. I look at your new blog, John, and I see much less flexibility, dare I say it, less personality than your old blogspot or edublogs venues. Is it really a key ingredient to have a blog attached to me.edu.au?

    To use Kerrie’s phrase, “the new kid on the block” fascinates and frustrates me in equal proportions. Is the goal to get educators without much social media experience up and running or is it trying to attract those of us already out “free-ranging” on the web to one spot to be in one Aussie education community? I want this idea to be successful – if nothing else, it won’t go away overnight. (Not that James will pull the edublogs plug without warning!) But I guess I’m wondering why the goal is to replicate much of what is already available on the www. I find I’m learning less and less from my immediate colleagues in my hometown while the generosity of strangers who I will never meet just blows me away.

    It would be interesting to know how many of the me.edu.au members have enabled their blog, added RSS feeds or moved beyond adding a brief note on their whiteboard. I just hope it’s not a “Field Of Dreams” scenario – build it and they will come. Trust me, I would love to be involved in a bustling community within this toolset and I will keep my toes in the water. I think it says something about the digital literacy of much of our teaching force, unfortunately.

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  6. Nick Lothian

    Re moving fast – I suspect you’ll find we all saw your post via me.edu.au – that was certinaly the case for me.

    “Is the goal to get educators without much social media experience up and running or is it trying to attract those of us already out “free-ranging” on the web to one spot to be in one Aussie education community?”

    Yes to the first, a big no to the second (from me at least). The web is so much bigger an richer than one single site can ever hope to be – we’d be deluding ourselves if we thought me.edu.au could ever be a substitute for that richness. However we hope that me.edu.au will become a useful resource even for those who know there way around the web.

    As far as the me.edu.au blog replicating a feature that is already available – yes, that’s true, and no doubt we’ll add other things that are available elsewhere, too – but we always think very carefully about the reasons we are doing it. In the case of blogging, we found that people were trying to use their own whiteboard as a broadcast mechanism to tell people what they were doing, and so we wanted to try and make that easier and work better. Making it integrated makes it a lot easier for beginning users, too.

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  7. Chris

    Great choice of images Graham. I get that same feeling at places like me.edu.au… it feels contrived and limiting and forced. I joined me.edu.au when it started but I have to say I’ve rarely been back. Maybe that’s selling it short without giving it a chance, but even in the short time I played there it felt a bit like dancing with your sister…

    I think the problem is that there is no ownership there. It belongs to someone else who is wanting to create a community. A noble goal, but that’s not how communities grow.

    Thanks again for the images.

    Chris

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  8. alexanderhayes

    Hi Graham,

    The banality of moral barbituates seem to have got the better of you 🙂

    Best you build bridges in the open fields and let others tend to the stack of disclaimers amidst the carnage of aggressive openess.

    Reply

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