flairandsquare.com

Creating and maintaining an online identity.

Blog themes are usually free and as such we can’t possibly expect others not to use the same ones. You have to pay for that!
But what if that person is someone you know? What if someone who has a fairly strong virtual identity and is in the same professional field, and is someone who visits your blog?
What if someone that you knew changed their blog theme to something almost identical to yours?

Would you be surprised when you visited their space? Would you be annoyed or flattered?

What if you had carried that theme through to other spaces?
Would you change your theme?

What is Social Networking? A social network site allows people who share interests to build a ‘trusted’ network/ online community and provides various ways for users to interact. Here are some of the more popular Social Networking spaces…

LearnScope Regional event focused on Youth and Social Networking in Education. Presentations came virtually via Adobe Connect and face to face. This resulted in some interesting discussion at lunch time about both the content and the delivery method.

What is RSS? How can it save you time? There has been a lot of interest in RSS lately. What is RSS, how can it help you and save you time? If the movie above wasn’t enough, then check out some of the links below…

Keeping up with “the Waters”…

Every time I check my netvibes (RSS Aggregator), I am astounded that there is one or two new posts from Sue Waters. I’ve mentioned Sue a few times throughout this blog and her content often inspires me to write a post in response. Like this post I wrote in response to Sue’s article about innovation being challenged by all the constraints currently on us, like blocked sites within DET.

Sue is a Aquaculture teacher at Challenger TAFE in Perth. She trials a lot of new technology with her classes, on her blog she provides useful examples, guidelines, tips and much more. If you are interested in m-Learning, PDA’s, mobile phones, spy glasses, etc, and you don’t already read or subscribe to Sues blog, you’re missing out on loads of good tips and advice.

Please Don’t stop the Innovation

The availability and access to these tools and this technology has resulted in so much innovation, collaboration, creativity and excitement from teachers, students, community and industry. While this has been very inspiring, there is obviously material out there, on these spaces, open to the world wide web, that legally shouldn’t be, may be against policy, unsafe, breach privacy and child protection legislation and therefore, those websites get blocked inside the DET world.
I do NOT however, think the solution is to block everything.
So what can we do?

Who’s responsibility is it to guide young people in these spaces? Their parents? Do they understand it themselves? How can we, as teachers, coaches and mentors, guide them in these spaces, prepare them for use of this technology in the workplace if we can’t access them?

There’s an obvious effort by educators to “engage youth, get on their wavelength” (article by Khyiah Angel from the NSW Teachers Federation), there are generation studies emerging at a rate of knots as the Baby Boomers and Generation Jones try to embrace technology, get their head around the effect that video games have had on Generations X & Y, and how this all might affect us in the workplace. How can we do this if we can’t access the technology that our children “live” in and work with?