Life Long Learning

For the eTwinning exchanges the British Council offers some eTwinning project assistance and I have developed material for them on behalf of TheConsutlants-E

A few months ago I setup this podOmatic tutorial for teachers using podomatic itself as an alternative to the print copy

Here’s the link http://tutorial.podomatic.com/

There are some podcasts from teachers using podcasts in their exchange projects http://www.britishcouncil.org/etwinning-podcasts.htm

Good stuff!

technorati tags:podomatic, podcast, eTwinning

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· What opportunities do you see podcasting being able to offer you in your educational setting?

Generally speaking they offer language learners the chance to practice two essential skills: speaking and listening. The content is flexible as they can create it or they can choose from a wider choice of ready available podcasts to listen to.

I feel there is a multi-strand here and we need to remember the context and learning level, outcomes, styles and resources we have available.

Podcasting can offer:

a) Authentic Listening: learners listen to real-life audio content (created by others) Great new opportunities for listening – very much like a more flexible and menu-selected range of audio files tailored to our learners’ needs

b) Real Audience: learners record their own voices and content. The listeners soon become speakers and can post audio comments in reply to what they hear. New ways of recording voices ( a great improvement on the tape recorder) which allows learners added speaking practice and the possibility of sharing their voice new audience and new levels of interaction with that audience new horizons to suit some learning styles better than text communication

c) Audio-on-the-go: lecturer podcasts to catch up on seminar or lesson you missed, tutorial for so many subjects, homework assignments, more listening practice, mp3 files on lessons or relevant topics to integrate or review material covered in class.

Learners can use their PC to listen to it or download and store this audio content to their portable music players in their own time, as many times as they want. Repetition easy and integral.

As I said in the round table discussion tonight on Podcasting & Language Learning hosted by Scott Lockman and in the YG discussion I have used podcasting with learners mainly as a listening resource. The main reason for this is they are academic university students and we do not have recording facilities. Podcasting also requires a lot of time – practising and repeating “parts”, uploading, editing etc which many short exam courses do not allow.

These new resources are much more than just more listening. They are excellent for exposing to a huge range of accents, speaking styles in a click. They are fun like http://thedailyenglishshow.blogspot.com/ and quick to follow. For young learners there are issues with level and appropriacy (see Graham and Joe for more info!)

With one class I even found they were interested in listening to the same podcast in several languages. A lot of government information is now accessible as a podcast. For academic students, who have a command of many languages and are training to be interpreters, translators or whatever this is fantastic. Take the one I did on the environment for example from the EU Climate change site http://ec.europa.eu/environment/climat/campaign/ My students found it great to be able to listen to the other languages they are studying after listening to the English one (at the Oriental University of Naples the students I teach will have English is their second language, an Asian language will be their third and maybe fourth and fifth will be Latvian and Portuguese or some other European mix )

I have also trained teachers to set up podcasts. On a recent face to face project training we developed an idea for a project that will be carried out in the UK with mobile podcasting. The idea is called “Talk a Walk” and it is to record their learners’ trip to London in a new perspective, through sound.

These are some of the ideas we brainstormed: London with difficulty/ London in different shoes/ London through other senses. I think it was pretty neat to allow these students to choose the theme, to work in separate groups and then to help them develop it. This is not always possible, we were lucky that this EU funded projects covers the cost of going to the UK. Lucky for some J I just do the training ;-( So the “through senses podcasts” will be on describing art: wall graffiti to Tate Gallery, or describing the food they see and try. The oral record will be done as a substitute to our travel log scrap books! If the school could get the money for videocasting tools that would be ideal but sometimes just voice with no images makes the dialogues or spoken comments richer and for teachers new to ICT it can be easier – although vlogging is getting very simple.

· How effectively do you think you can engage students with something like a podcast?

· What (if any) problems can you foresee that may result in your podcast project not becoming a success? What can you do to avoid them?

Listen here for my answers (podcasting from Odeo to familiarise myself with it after a long time

http://odeo.com/show/8536743/1060891/download/EVO2007Week4ReflectionsOnPodcasting.mp3

Or try this

powered by ODEO

metalab040207

Originally uploaded by Valentina 24.

We had a great time experimenting with uploading slides and dragging and dropping (while holding CTR key down!) to the Interactive Whiteboards kinldy assigned to us by Fire Centaur in English Village in Second Life.
educating the educators
I thought I’d try uploading this from Flikr to see if all these ways of uploading work smoothly.

On 02/02/07 (midnight my time) we were privileged to be able to hear Alex Hayes  involved in LearnScope projects across NSW talk and showcase social software usage in these projects. “Webpublishing is a clear and defined objective.”

Bee, Berta, Patricia, Gerogina, Anne, Laine and a few other OWP names were there.

It was very interesting first to use this new real-time software that I have seen demos of and analysezd features of but never actually used synchronously in order to compare it with live chat rooms I’m familair with (LearningTimes, Blackboard, Vyew). Until the 01 Feb 2007 it was known as Breeze but since 01/02/07 (i.e 24hours before our session!) it became known as Adobe Acrobat Connect

It’s a rich platform for synchronous sessions.

• Good professional layout with nice easy push buttons to ask for microphone and split windows.
• Alex referred to is as very “democratic” because participants could also resize presenter’s windows. I think I would disagree with this definition. It’s not that democratic because it’s a paid for service!! It’s very professional.
  
• We were participating as presenters and had been given access to the chat room via a shared link (no password) but one can set this up so that participants need a password and cannot share the applications (PPT slides or browser unless granted permission by moderator)
  
• We were all “presenters” as it were and that yes, was very democratic of Alex. Thanks! With a larger, less experienced, group it could have lead to collapsing windows.

It’s nice to have shared browsing and although I thoroughly enjoyed the talk and this learning opportunity I found that the shared browsing didn’t work so well on this occasion and caused problems:

1. some degree of detachment
2. text too small,
   
3. passage from web page to web page too fast to actually appreciate more than the basic layout and a few pics or headings. (Maybe I’m used to active web browsing, meandering round a wikispace to observe all the hard work and collaborative efforts that have gone on behind the scenes in my own way, in my own time, in an hour it is not possible to cover all that. )

Alex did a great job but I’m wondering about this quantity and exposing remote participants in this way.

I feel that a presenter, in this situation, is best

• outlining projects in a different way (not only verbally) and
  
• providing URL for later individual enjoyment and greater engagement.
  
• talking thorugh key points on a whiteboard or slide or
  
• ensuring that the webpage opens full screen (which then loses the sidebar chat – a disadvantage)
  

I think Laine, may agree with me here as she said in the text chat she felt confuse. The audio on Alex’s microphone was not of constant high quality adding to the distancing of the experiencing and the need for better visuals.

However, don’t get me wrong the session was extremely successful and enjoyable in extending networks and really interesting from the point of view of seeing how funding and technology can assist some brilliant projects and connect people. A real example of knowledge sharing.

It was also a special moment to actually hear a moblogger (mobile blogger) speak “live”!

Alex said he started out with photo blogging and then moved to expressing himself in text. A lot of his work is done on the go. This is a form of technology and use of technology that is very avant-guard here in Italy. He showed us how the use of Flikr captured their learning journey http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/nswlearnscope06

Some important issues were also mentioned about protecting and preserving indigenous languages through mp3 recordings and podcasting. The public photo or storage of voice recordings has met with many problems in mobile blogging projects. It is crucial that people’s traditions are respected and if the capturing of an image of oneself or the archiving of a voice of someone who has passed away is considered by that community as unacceptable then that must obviously be respected. There is, of course also, a generation aspect to this – younger learners being more interested in becoming involved and exploring new traditions, more open to change? But the older members of the community need to be part of the decision making process for any project like this to work and Alex explained how they worked in a “watermark” system for granting permission for photos to be used. This protection is in the hands of the community and it great to analyse all this from the point of view of open and participatory (of our past few weeks) I need to find out more about what Alex said on Creative Common’s.

We also got the chance (very helpful) to see how Alex has set up and uses Bloglines for aggregating the thousands of feeds all his projects are using . He shared his bloglines public space http://www.bloglines.com/public/alexanderhayes

Superb example of folder management and an excellent way to consolidate and see in action more examples of what we have been examining over the past two weeks.

Problems with Bloglines, mentioned by Alex :

• That the interface does not allow you to view all the updates on one window.
  
• You can see changes marked by individual feeds – to view you need to click that feed.

He mentioned that Planet TALO does this so I’m off to investigate. Another feed scraper (I liked this term!) was a community based portal called www.zimbio.com. Another one for the comparative analysis tasks that I have set myself!

Another interesting thing was the way they had used a Google calendar in their wiki to make even scheduling visits more collaborative – less of a top down approach

Also nice to see great “HowTo“ links and their idea of sending a Web Office Tool Kit to everyone involved in projects seemed great.

Well the key words : teams, collaborating, networks and also unpredictability. One mobile bloggers choice for their “personal identity” activities showed that

Connections and conversations http://www.nswlearnscope.com/

Loads of scope for learning… Thanks ALex, Bee, Patricia and Georgian for arranging this session

I thought I’d experiment with inserting a YouTube video into my blog and I’ve chosen this one on Second Life called One Climate Island a virtual world in Second Life dedicated to practical solutions to climate change. It’s linked to the wiki and blog space at

On the Digital Gaming EVO session I am also enrolled on we are talking about online gaming and how this can increase learner interest and motivation?

One participant, Joel, metioned that his daughter plays a game that ends in “dead babies” and this reminded me of something I heard on the BBC Digital Planet Technology podcast in Dec 2006 (they seem to have removed it now so am I allowed to share the mp3 here -see podcast below ) It was about Persuasive Gaming and I was wondering if anyone has experience of these for language learning. The ones they described where about Darfur is Dying available free and how the game is based on trying to get water for your family and Peace Maker simulating the role of Palestinian and Israeli Presidents to find new solutions. (BBC article http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5153694.stm )
Interesting?

Although the argument is these games don’t change the world and they can also trivialize a serious problem, can’t they? But the question is are they maybe a little more ethical and help get away from promoting dead babies, what do you think? I thought Joel’s comment on getting learners to write about how they feel is really good system for opening debate – The debate can be serious and maybe the way to visualize even serious problems sometimes for young learners is to make them accessible to teens in “their” language, to tap into their way of thinking and then encourage discussion on world famine, or Israeli-Palestinian issues and even on how the game has simplified the problem.

Let’s take the Darfur one as an example:

Is it better for learners to be involved simply in creating conflictual environments (World of Warcrafts does have these elements, doesn’t it? ) or trying to resolve conflicts in an oversimplified environment? A difficult question to ask but often the key to making people wake up to the reality is to find a channel that they can tune into, surely?

If playing a game also allows room for discussion on how learners feel and exposes to some of the questions say for example:

• How did the conflict start?
• What is the government doing?
• What has happened to the civilians?
• How many have died?
• What happened to the peace deal?
• Is anyone trying to stop the fighting?
• What can be done?

and room to explore the answers then I would argue that an oversimplification is helpful.

Given that not all young people know what is happening in Darfur then I would argue it’s better to help them find out. We can start with a game, if that is appropriate, and then follow on with a more serious debate on the issues of “getting water for your family”. Comparing contexts, raising awareness, discussing issues and opinions can help open doors. Not all learners will immediately respond to a New York Times article or an abridged UN report or section on Famine in our coursebooks so if technology can lead us to understand that Darfur is Genocide we can stop and help us take action to stop it then yes, let’s remember Darfur is Dying – find out more and maybe also read and create blog spaces where we can express views and explore new ones? 

Sir Ken Robinson’s talk is not only hilarious but touches on many crucial points about education!

Quote of the day “If you are not prepared to be wrong, then you’ll never come up with anything original!”

3 D intelligence:

• diverse
• dynamic
• distinct

You can listen to the podcast here http://ted.streamguys.net/ted_robinson_k_2006.mp3
to hear more on the need to completely rethink education so that we can nurture and develop the creative capacities of those we are educating rather than educate them “out of creativity”.

How does this all tie in with this week’s blogging discussion?

Well in more twasy than one. Blogging can lead to new forms of creativity, a quick glance at some of our own learner’s blogs or the some of the projects on the Dekita exchange are enough to see great levels of creativity. Sir Robinson’s talk focuses on the unpredictability of the world in 2065 , or even in 5 years time and the extra capacities that our kids have. One really important part of writing in public spaces is also related to de-stigmatizing mistakes, with blogging we need to ensure learners aren’t frightened to be wrong so they can create and express themselves freely. Blogging can spark off something unpredictable and can trigger new original ideas. Education is about making learners comfortable and addressing a range of styles – we need to remember that while blogging might work for some it won’t for all. The sound, visual and (mouse/keypboard movement) that technology allows address some styles better than others….

Illya said that Patricia had suggested she post some of the questions from her blog to the YG so everyone could join in the discussion.

Her questions are:

1. How much of the wheel will need re-inventing? Is teaching for the 21^st
   century different than teaching before? Will we need to teach different skills?
   Will the others prevail?
2. How will we overcome the great fear we encounter when we try to get others to
   see that the world and the way our kids get information is changing? (is it
   really changing?)
3. Any more questions out there? Are there any answers?

Illya says “ I perhaps focus on teaching because learning is so vague – we really don’t know how and why certain things are learned and others are not. Maybe learning will also change.”

I have to admit that I was intrigued first by the questions (but didn’t have time to answer immediately) and secondly and more importantly I was intrigued to see these questions posted on our YG discussion list (prompted by moderator). This was a clear move away from the open aggregated space we have spent a few weeks setting up and back to the
closed forum type style of a yahoo group.(the somewhat different style of this
EVO session apparent to us all)

But before I had time to write to find out why or if there was indeed a reason, Bee stepped in with “Patricia and Illya, Thanks for putting up the questions. I think they are an excellent topic for discussion. However, there are also a number of readings to do and questions we have asked you to consider and reflect on for this week before you move into podcasting next week.”

I completely agree that this and all EVO sessions have to be carefully moderated and it’s up to Bee, Patricia, Graham, Nick etc to steer the dialogue and ensure participants aren’t overwhelmed. I take this opportunity to raise my hat to you all. I know (first hand) what sort of demands it takes and you are not only extremely committed and helpful but
such rich and wonderful people.

I was just a little puzzled by this “stalling” of the flow of ideas. OK it’s week 3 and slow time, open space and food for thought.

I must admit that I am behind with reading too, too busy comparing public OPMLing features and obviously like everyone tied up with f2f work – university end of semester
exams, so maybe all will be revealed soon when I finish my “homework” but in the meantime can I ask:

• Can we reply to Illya?
• Should we record our ideas in audio format?
• Or add just add text comments to Illya’s
  blog if we feel that’s appropriate?
• or Send a message to here
• or just simply wait …..
• will everyone be able to male the synchronous session?
  

On the subject of OPEN and CLOSED from last week and moving on to teaching styles this week I thought this illustrated a point and carries on from my own notes over the past few days?

• How does the flow of information change?
• Just how much of a group is created between commenters and how much overlap is
  there of generating similar info?

I can see in these few weeks there are central strands and a lot of experiential staged
learning. But if we are coming or were sort of prompted to come together to discuss main issues on the YG instead of (or as well as) on our blogs was this to draw more participants in?

• Would Illya’s questions sparked discussions elsewhere?
  
• Would that have been more dispersive but less intrusive?
  

We are all teachers and quite involved (time permitting) but with learners this is a real big issue.

• Were we cleverly slowed by Bee in order for discussion to be deeper and
  more participative later?
  
• Will this alienate some learning styles but guarantee
  that “lurkers” and “late comers” have a chance to come forward?

My personal feeling is that the range of tools for this EVO session are well thought out. Moderation communication on chat schedules, welcome messages is well served by YG, for a bank of easily accessible and updatable resources the wiki is great and for the creation of individual but connected and developing ideas and discussions our aggregated
blogs are wonderful.

So I would suggest I feel we should psot our responses direct to our own blogs or as comments to others’, to say in this case Illya’s great set of questions direct to her blog (as some have already) and those who are not ready to take part catch up later when they are. Is that what we are “supposed” to be doing? This is what I would encourage with learners so that those personal spaces can grow with a little moderator watering but without drying out the flow of ideas because there are other tasks to be achieved, or have I missed a point here?

Valentina

technorati tags:Teaching, Blogs, Learning, styles

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Well we’ve been doing more than pulling our hair out this week, what with tasks and benchmarks and all our own work schedule deadlines etc!! The really pulling has been in subscribing to each other’s blogs and seeing how easy it is to retrieve all the great blog entries in 2 easy clicks (that’s what we always seem to be striving to achieve) and RSS is definitely our ReScue SystemWell they say that RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or some say it stands for Rich Site Summary. I have decided to rename RSS as ReScue System – without those little orange buttons that provide us with the feeds we need and which we can use to aggregate blogs and news and much more too, for our learners we would definitely be bald by now or have simply drowned along time ago in the sea of information overload.Last week’s suggested reading highlights many some good points

http://www.techlearning.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=163100414
Quentin D’Zouza has some great resources for those who still haven’t got their heads round this one.

So why is Push and Pull so important?
When blogging aggregating feeds are a way:

• to be active and pull information towards us
• to narrow and filter the information learners access on the web
• to easily view the blogs (in their learner’s communities or chosen for the project in hand)
• to save time and reduce information overload and overwhelming nature of the rich resource the web is
• to instantly see what new content has been added (this could be video/PPT/audio etc)
• to create a circle of commenters and thought sharers by collatind feedlist into one folder
• for the moderator to track what’s going on

Part 2 – What are the differences between the three technologies we are observing with regard to the PUBLIC/PRIVATE

In a way they can all be public and private but they go about this is quite different ways which I have found interesting to discover.

Bloglines
We learnt from our YG discussion what Bee’s pull system. She uses “Bloglines folders you want to make public or private. People will see your username in the URL (just like for your mail
and all the other social tools like Wordpress, Flickr and the 43 trio)- it’s your presence online.”

If you want to share your feeds, you have to make your Bloglines public by clicking on the Options link (column left), Blog Settings (page on the right) fill in the username (now…here I have not used my username to login but my nickname – so you may want to use another name) and choose the option: Show my Blogroll >Yes, publish my blogroll and Save Changes.

The address you should get is: *http://www.bloglines.com/public/yourusername

In the left navigation column, at the bottom, you will see you can export your bookmarks (opml file) or import others. This is particularly useful when you have a good number of them and you do not want to make your stds lose time copying them one by one. I usually have them send me the address of their newly created blogs, add them one by one to my Bloglines (there is always one who has to do it) and then give the opml file for them to insert in their blogs so they can have the whole class in their blogroll if they wish.

Just the blogs I want to read like you will find here:
http://www.bloglines.com/public/bee

You can not only share your links but also keep private the folders you do not want to disclose. I have for instance kept them all private and am only sharing the EFL/ESL, Dekita and Open Webpublishing Blogs for this workshop.”

I used the OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) file that Bee shared to import all the complete list of feeds into my own Bloglines Public Space. OPML allows you to import all of the aggregated feeds in one go.

This is interesting as it illustrates the open/closed features.
I used the OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) file that Bee shared to import the complete list of feeds into my own Bloglines Public Space – no problem – 2 clicks and it’s there http://www.bloglines.com/public/vale24

I also wanted to investigate whether I could share just one folder not all the ones that are in my public space. And yes Bloglines allows you to do this:
insert the following Javascript code into your blog template

If you use PHP or another method to include raw HTML into your blog, use the following URL instead, which returns the blogroll as HTML for just one folder?
http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?html=1&id=vale24&folder=My OWP feedlist

With bloglines you can
• Single-click to select.
• Click again to rename.
• Double-click to edit details.
• Ctrl-click to select multiple.
• Shift-click to select range.
• To reorder, drag and drop into place.

But I wanted to take this experiment in contrasting and comparing the import/export of OPML files one click further so I imported them into Netvibes

Netvibes, as we have seen can also be very useful (once you have learnt how to get rid of a lot of the free boxes and tabs). Graham says “My idea of how you could use it with students was to set up a class gmail address and use that for access. Then you can use it in the same way that you might use a Bloglines account with students, only instead of students having an individual account, they share one. Anything they add to the account (feeds, etc) can be seen by everyone else. I have to say that I’ve never tried this, so I’m not sure how well it would work, but I have tried accessing the same Netvibes account simultaneously from several computers to see if that works. It does.”

So yes it’s public in the sense that you can share the user name and password of the netvibes account and direct learners there to view or add their feeds. That’s got a nice feel to it because you can also set up a “To do list” (useful for keeping students on task at a distance!) and add anything you want really to that home/start page e.g. a Flickr section/ Delicious Bookmarks (with chosen tags) and loads more to customize the page.

But can you also share the aggregated list of feeds with Netvibes?
Yes, by creating a public tab:

• First, import the OPML to your own Netvibes account (import all of the aggregated feeds in one go)
• Then create a new tab, right click the feeds to add them to that page (i.e the new tab page) and there you have a page with multiple windows. For each blog feed choose colour, rename, number of entries per box etc,.
• Then using the tiny (bit tricky that part) pull down menu in the tab itself click “Publish this tab” From this menu you can also fancy things like personalize the tab name, choose an icon and so on.
• Once you’ve clicked publish some code will be generated which I’m experimenting with here
It says:
Your tab is ready to be shared
To share your tab with your friends, send them the following link:

http://www.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?url=http://eco.netvibes.com/opml/80e8054128d1967efb0314a56a39b583/owp2007.opml&type=opml

or
You can also allow visitors of you website to add your tab to their Netvibes page. Use the following code:

Once your tab is validated, it will be available to all Netvibes users !
I didn’t understand what that last sentence meant so I searched to find out. The tab has to be verified I guess and then it’s visible in your “my modules” page. The other public modules “are applications and services built by the community of netvibes developers. You can browse our catalogue or click on tabs.” This all seems a little awkward! And more importantly does it work?

Can you see something like this

Flock as I have mentioned before offers great drag and drop and edit name features which making subscribing to a feed very very very simple but it also has a superb system for both importing and exporting OPML format– really in only one click.

• To export news feeds in the OPML format.
• Click the “Add News Feeds” button in the My News sidebar and
• select “Export News Feeds…”

But does it allow you to share an aggregated folder of feeds in public?
I can’t find that option yet. And from the forum can see others demainding this feature be introduced!

You can share favourites in public- supports two favorites sharing services: del.icio.us and Shadows but I haven’t been able to find a way of sharing the feedlist the way you can in bloglines or netvibes  No doubt this will be in next version!

Ok, better PULL my socks up and stop pushing those tasks to the back of the list and stop pushing all these PULL buttons

I have been invited to join this meme game! Mixed feelings here (thanks but no
thanks?). I normally hate these keep-the-ball-rolling –send-to-5-people
invitations but if this the spirit of the blogosphere and with such an
interesting name and OWP I can but try! Now for the tough bit, finding
something interesting to reveal.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about the meme game going round is asks each blogger who accepts the invitation to reveal five things most people don’t know about them and then invite five other bloggers to join the meme game.

Not easy and the “most people don’t know about them” bit is the hardest – which
people are or aren’t in this group? Anyway here are my five things (not very important
cultural information and certainly not necessarily transferable as memes might
be )

Memes:

One of the reasons I’m intrigued by this Meme game is I am actually fascinated by
memes. I am still reading some of the leading authors on the subject (Susan
Blackmore’s Meme Machine

Coming from a family of scientists (mother Elisabeth Cove and uncle David Cove, geneticist ) for  most my childhood years I had avoided physics lessons but adult maturity and close science-mad friends have meant that I realize I need more knowledge and
wow memes are amazing!

Adventures

I’ve always admired my older sisters. From an early age Deborah the eldest was an
inspiration. I was six when she left home and travelled round South America for 2 years, tracing her movements as the posts arrived. Lucky for those kids who can now see instant Flickr pics but can the satisfaction of opening a long awaited for feather light airmail letter ever be matched or felt by this instant messaging society? Those were precious moments.

Second sister, Dominique a speleologist, geologist and photographer http://www.shutterpoint.com/Photos-BrowseAlbum.cfm?album_id=8&user_id=DDODGEWAN
has beat us all with her adventures! From days in caves and under water discoveries to her now more “tame” life on the Malaysian island of Sarawak. She is the
proud designer, developer (mouse) and co-builder (hands) of a long house in the
Mulu jungle where her husband’s family originate. Wild!

Tracy-Renata, just two years my senior is a true diplomat! She ventured into the Foreign and Home Office with her proficient command of most European languages (including Russian) and her scary memory, spent some time in Vienna battling for arms
reduction and respect of international agreements and is now back in Westminster in charge of Cultural budget

Roots

Are roots important? What happens when you are uprooted? These are questions that
have been on my mind for most of my life. Not sure I have an fixed answers but I feel that growing new roots is important, being able to plant your tree of life again, in a new place and remain stable and connected as a person requires skill. These thoughts have often lead to discussions on identity and my admitting that I don’t feel a strong British identity, but couldn’t define myself as Chinese (born in Hong Kong), Belgian (9 years living in Belgium), a Londoner (grandparents and graduation) or Italian (20 years living here) so is it ok to be international? Maybe cyberspace helps us grow a new style of roots and can overcome some of the barriers that identities seem to be causing in our crazy world? Let’s hope so.

Wisdom

My daughter is called Sophie, partly out of Italian tradition to name daughters
after their grandparents (Sofia) but mainly because of my love for philosophy. I don’t have half the time I want or need to enjoy the readings and meanderings of philosophers past and present but watching Sophie grow and question the world brings wisdom to one’s
day. She loves playing with words and a few years ago came up with “purupucchiolo” which we are trying to add to the dictionary. A purupucchiolo is the end part of the seam of your sock toe!

YouTube Mum

My mother, Elisabeth, is going to be 80 in a few months but she’s the most active and dynamic person I know! A few years ago, she installed a modem on her own, got her email
client running and started to go “digital”! She hasn’t joined YouTube yet but I see there are some elderly YouTubers so maybe I should suggest it! She bounces ideas back and forth via email and is following the blogosphere closely from her screen. When she settles into here new flat next month I hope she will get round to writing her blook (blog that could become a book?) based on all here great virtual exchanges with friends and family scattered around the globe!

Here are the bloggers who I’ve invited to join this cultural propagation and diffusion….

Susan Burg http://susaneb.wordpress.com/ (she’s
the only other OWP participant based in Italy!)

Karen Haines in New Zealand
http://krnhaines.wordpress.com/ (love
the Learning Curve name)

Anne Fox http://foxdenuk.wordpress.com/ who I’ve
met in the webheads hut in SL

Erin in El Salvador
http://elowry.wordpress.com/ (grateful for the widget entry!)

Niels Damgaard http://damgaard.wordpress.com/ (looks like this blog need some
action so hopefuly this will help find out more about Mysterious Niels!)

technorati tags:meme

Blogged with Flock but I had to edit it in edublogs because all the formatting was wrong? %-)