Monthly Archives: May 2013

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When do I stop aspiring to be a leader, and just be one?

That question crossed my mind yesterday after a meeting at an eastern suburbs school, which is situated right next door to the Eastern Regional office where I was booked to attend an Aspiring Leaders Program today. I was chatting to the principal as I was departing, and she was listed to be a guest speaker at today's event, I remarked that I would be one of the participants listening to her speak. She looked at me, and said something along the lines of, "Haven't you been to this sort of thing before in the past? I remember seeing you at one of these type of events back in 2010."

It really made me think - I know that I am a leader at my school, and was one in the one before - but here I was still seeing myself as an aspiring leader, not just as a leader <full stop>. Maybe because I'm not the leader (i.e. a principal) that makes me assume that I still have to get more grounding, more knowledge, more experience, more everything (!!!) before I can offload the aspiring tag.

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April got away from me. It was the first month since starting this blog that I failed to post anything at all.

Maybe I am suffering some form of social media fatigue. I'm still reading and scouring the web as much as ever but I'm picking and pecking through my Google Reader feeds rather than reading feverishly, and my Twitter presence has dwindled down to virtually nothing. Ironically, I'm still picking up new followers but I'm not sure what I'm offering them. I reckon Dean Groom hit the nail on the head the other day when he wrote:

The dark-side is that social media (for educators) didn’t turn out to be the kind of ‘succeed’ culture expected, but a feed culture, where people either churn out the same old gruel or stare into their smart phone expecting for the unexpected to be fed to them.

I don't need someone pointing me to someone else's stuff and telling me that this is a must-read or an essential. If I have good enough search skills, I can mine the web for my own nuggets of inspiration and my peculiar flights of fancy.

But I do wish that I could recharge my enthusiasm for writing here. After all, this is my space - and thankfully, Edublogs has evolved into a comfortable low cost option for people like myself who don't want to do their own domain / own hosting scenario. More budget ranging than free ranging, however.

Tumblr interests me but what captures my attention isn't niche enough or focussed to make it worthwhile. Most Tumblrs I see are basic digital scrapbooking - which means the unique ones stand out even more. But it seems that the neglect of RSS, the great open concept of pushing information around, is really having an impact. Google Reader winds up soon and I still have to work out  a decent replacement, but one of the best features it used to have was the ability to create an RSS feed of my favourite posts, which I redirected into a widget on the sidebar of this blog. That disappeared, and so did the ability for anyone to see over my virtual shoulder, noting what I thought was worthy of extending out into the network. Corporate siloes are dominating the digital landscape and people seem to be perfectly willing to accept the limitations and standardisations of those places.

Nostalgia hardly seems appropriate for the great Web 2.0 premise of anyone and everyone being an author, a critic or social agitator. But somewhere I'm trying to work out where the joy of playing in this arena has gone for me.

Fire up the XBox - maybe I can still squeeze in a game tonight.