Finally, and not least "helped" by blog-city closing down, I'm not going to be posting here anymore. Hopefully I can get all my posts imported over to my website, where I can re-import all the things I took down from my Durham website and never actually put into my own webspace... It'll be a work in progress for quite a while yet, but hopefully things will gradually be good and together. Feels a bit like the house (getting messier before can get tidier) and even, in fact, ditto with life generally!

I dread to think how much time I've put into Second Life over the last four (yes, four) years. Lots of it in the beginning was hanging out with friends on beaches, and exploring. It didn't cost me much. Learning how to build took a while, and I still can't script, so I'm still quite slow at creating things a professional might do better in a fraction of the time. Although a professional would charge for it, and I do it for free. In fact I don't even do it anywhere near on work time, and I do it with my own money, which I always think isn't very much - it probably still isn't very much even if I added it up, but I don't want to, just incase I'm wrong. 

I'm having some major frustrations currently/over the last few months and it is quite tempting these days to just walk away. I'm still here because the frustration of throwing away the work I've done is (currently, but I don't know for how much longer) greater than that I keep coming back to. You're not throwing it away, I might hear you object, but in fact, I probably am. I have tried very hard over the last few months to encourage all the projects that are in planning or development to make use of me while I was there - there's neither the interest or the time on my team to provide the support that I can. I appreciate this has been a worry to some of them and a reason to not push on with plans that may then be difficult to be supported, but I would have been happy to get them to a point that needed little support. And I appreciate that there are many other demands on academics' time - I know this, I've been there - and I most certainly appreciate that the University is just not kitted out for it, despite having someone on my team tasked to get technical buy-in from IT (thought it had been agreed, then when I  and two other academics tried to actually log in and use for a class, it was borked - not an encouragement for teachers, I generally find) - so to use in class time it costs to hire one of the digital suites that can cope with the graphics. Even our training room which keeps being put off being upgraded is unusable. So there are many - still, even after all the snapshots JK has done - technical and time issues preventing obvious engagement with SL. But this is so SO frustrating because I still STILL believe that there is vast potential. 

I've not had the time to publish lots of things, and there are many things beginning to be published on work undertaken in SL, so perhaps I'm going to be undermined by the evidence (though from what I've read so far, I think not) and there are many many detractors who would like this to be so. Then you get people like Gavin bowing out, and you wonder who might be next. And I wonder, I really wonder, if I should abandon any effort I might have still wanted to put in to trying to support staff with projects in plan/development get them ready and rolled out.

Because for all the work that I've put in, I've still seen very little come out. And it pains me to admit that, because there are people outside our institution that are impressed by what we've done. And, to be true, I go other places and I think, yes, I'm impressed by what we've managed to achieve too, but increasingly I think there is more creativity out there and that the environment is entering a new phase of design - I'm not totally a fan of entire scenarios made out of sculpties simply because my experience with crap kit make me know they'll be inaccessible to many - and we want to be able to keep up. So some of my projects are ok, some are ok currently and fine as fit for purpose goes, and some are getting shabby, because they were begun a while ago.

I'd like to think I've been pretty supportive of staff wanting to do virtual world work. I'd like to think I've been prepared to do my utmost in helping them deliver it. I've certainly done my utmost in helping them to design something that will be worth their and their students' efforts. Maybe this is why I've failed. Reading Stones into Schools and how the sad ending underlined the CAI's determination that there has to be ownership of the schools has made me think I've offered too much help. But then I think without central help there'd be little chance of people being able to deliver or build their own scenarios. I still think that there is a place for students to use SL for building, and there's a space for using SL for distance provision of teaching (which still has real potential in our institution), but my passion is to see it used for what I think it does best - give the students an environment that they can engage in realistic experience which cannot be rehearsed on campus. This has the potential to provide opportunities to practise 'being professionals' and in our culture of employabiliity pressure this is a great and cost-effective potential we should be grasping. 

Maybe - well I know so - I have too many ideas. Too many dreams. Many dreams that I don't have the scripting skills to deliver, and I would so dearly have loved funded projects over the last couple of years to have had as deliverables actual real reusable learning objects in the forms of items or scripts that can be easily re-formed for use in other scenarios. To me, that's what the learning technology sector used to be about, and one of the things (lessening of collaboration and increase of competitivity) that I'll not be missing when I leave it. At presentations last year I spent a lot of time trying to encourage people to see what we could share to save inventing so many damn wheels and re-energising the place with new  amazing experiences for students because the staff and the support staff could get further faster. This hasn't really happened. In my presentation at Coventry (slides repeated below), I listed a few things that it would be helpful for us to have as building blocks for building scenarios and interactivities. I stand by them. As I stand by the earlier post which prompted some of the presentation and the later post which reiterates most of what is still in my head prompting this one.

One of the things that I've really wanted to be able to leave behind me are a set - even if it's a small set - of things that might be useful to other people, whether that be IKEA colour changeable sofas or office chairs or laptops or some scripts. Or the avatar sets that are available free to anyone (not so necessary now LL have provided the whole new set of basic avs). I've been for a long while desperate to learn how to do the basic sets of scripting in the Uni Kansas operating room scenario written up in the Educause article, because I think this encapsulates some essentially basic interactive blocks from which you could build up effective learning. A bit like PIVOTE, which I was really excited by, but couldn't navigate the web forms for and which didn't actually negate the having to actually build the stuff in SL to get the interactions. 

Since I finished work I've been up till all hours trying to get my head around some of these bits of scripts, specifically so they could be used in the particular examples of engagements that are wanted by some of my staff. And to a point I've succeeded. I've got a simple (they're all very simple) time release running which enables for example a busy maternity ward to get new patient info throughout a simulated day/night shift, or for an NGO disaster operations room to get regular/irregular (text/audio/visual) updates from staff on the ground which can direct the students' development of strategising, planning and managing. I've got a set of little boxes talking to each other so I can invisible some of them and make them 'appear' elsewhere (this would be so much more efficient if they were rezzed as opposed to invisible phantom become visible physical, but I still can't do that) and I can use linked messages to change images on various objects dependent on choice/time. That's not very impressive really, but I couldn't do any of that two months ago, and all of it will make a difference to the interactivity and the dynmics of the projects we have that want to use SL.

Except. Except. Except that actually, as Stones into Schools made me think further into my presentation

to the slide on 'Control', I still end up with having the potential and not having stuff to act on. Most learning technology projects where they fail, fail because we're waiting for input from staff who just don't have the time/energy to produce it. I had a really good few development sessions with one school rep where we decided on the metaphor of a theatre to draw up the tasks for the project. And I think this is a useful way of planning.

It's about imagining that they the academic is the director of a new play, and I am the technical director/producer. They need to do multiple things in the right order and on time, revising where necessary, to allow me to do the bits I need to do for it all to come together for opening night. (Actually, it could be taken much further if I were going to be producing any more presentations, but as I'm probably not I guess it doesn't really matter). As technical director, I'm in no way capable of pulling off the production, but I do have a critical role to play. But I can't do it without them. The director needs to write the screen play, decide a cast list, sort out the look and the image that he/she is aiming for. Then we talk it through, rationalise the technical requirements for each scene and then while he/she is developing the screenplay/script, I can be organising the hardware, furniture, backdrops and working out how scene one is going to transition into scene two, etc. As possibly wouldn't happen in this scenario in the real world, I can also do a certain amount of scouting (if not actually casting) out the cast, taking photos of potential characters and taking the director to see them. So we end up with three lists, the script/content (academic responsibility); casting/characterisation/costume (academic decision responsibilty, my help out); technical/production director (my share, bringing it all together). However, it's not my name on the board outside, it's theirs. It's not me up in lights. And to get up in lights, you can't devolve to the producer, even if they're a capable producer, because much of the input simply has to be yours. Just like the Wirghiz had to finish their school themselves because the US helicopters (ach, you don't want me to give away the end).

Anyway - most of the projects that have been built on Teeslife have too much my stamp and not enough by the academics. And that is not making them succeed. Maybe I've been wrong in offering them a lot of guidance in trying to ensure that pedagogical reasoning underpins the developments, in order to make them really work, not just be flashes in the pan. Maybe my lack of coding skills has meant that they haven't seen results fast enough to be able to envisage taking the developments and their students further. Maybe that's been interference they didn't really want, and should have had more complete control themselves. And yet I don't see students actively engaging inworld when I log in when I have been around to help, and I know deep down that there'd be less if I wasn't there. Which there likely will be next academic year as our team numbers are halved and there's noone daft enough to take on my 1am building.

So where next? I really really really hope that some of the few projects that want to be available in the autumn succeed. I'm here to help before I leave, but then again staff are on holiday and it is already August. So I'm not sure. But if anyone else doesn't already have more complex scripts for doing some basic interactive things like I've just finally managed to produce, and wants them, let me know. I'd like to think I've done something useful in the last three years.  I haven't quite left yet, and I still plan to write up some broader ideas that I want to put out there that people could collaborate on if they were willing, but most days I'm increasingly thinking that the dreams that still deserve to be delivered may just end up going in a box marked ideas the world just wasn't quite yet ready for. Or rather, my world, as there are lots of projects coming to pilot fruition in SL in UK HE, so it shows that there is the scope and the potential, regardless of the skeptic viewpoint. But it also means that even when the potential has the potential to really address some of the major strategic objectives universities today are facing, that it's still an investment and you have to invest in it. And that needn't be massively financially - but it needs more intellectual and time input than it currently is getting. And that needs the mental shift from tinkering about with a bit of a game, to a serious use of virtual worlds for professional need. And I've a paper in my head about that. At least I'll be leaving that if and when I go.

*no, I'm not actually doing, not quite yet, anyhow, but I am considering it.

Had a lovely time this afternoon with Owen, who should know better than come to visit and not expect to go away burdened by the ideas that I never carried out as an academic adding to his own passionate ambition. We were talking iPads and other gadgets, and what potential there is today as there was for me when I was a postgraduate and technology just arrived in our hands so we could develop the first hypertexts and imagine the first Turning the Pages -type multimedia before that was possible.

Now we can imagine giving undergraduate students high quality zoomable images and a pile of reading in a stupidly small, light, handy gadget. The mind simply boggles at what may come in future development - I tried not to say you should fall off the fence like I did, I think there's scope to stay on the academic side of the fence, or at least with your feet down the academic side, mostly because the technology is easier to use today or because there are talented tech-savvy people who dream dreams too as well as can help bring those dreams about. At reasons for using technology, for the right reasons (rather than to try and make us rush through life enabling doing fifteen things at once, or not), to bring people together, not just today from around the world, but from today and from yesterday, sharing the insights and dreams from long ago with us today.

I'm watching this space. One day Owen might achieve so very much more than I did as a medievalist, even if he is multitasking manfully at the minute to get there. I'm watching this space too, for people to bring those ideas to life in 3D:

Well, deeds are being done, goodbyes are being said, and gradually the givens in my life are being overturned. Last Friday was my last day in the office at work, although I have a few things to finish writing up from home, so for the weekend (finished now, more or less) I've had bags and boxes of my career surrounding me on the living room floor. I've kept more than I probably should, and I may rationalise further, if not now, in two years time. But I did get rid of an awful lot. I was hugely touched by the beautiful crucifix bought me by my team on leaving, and knew it would be hideously difficult to get away from my close colleagues and friends without falling apart. We almost managed. I didn't howl until I got home, to read a stream of messages on twitter saying how they'd miss me. And many saying how fabulous I was going to do something I really wanted to do. A few people have said this to my face, and it always makes it tricky to answer. Because I'm packing away or recycling my life in favour of training full-time for ordained public ministry in the Church of England.

From September, at Westcott House, Cambridge. This has been a long journey to this point, longer, in fact, than the remaining [temporal] distance to travel in the two year course. And yet, there are many moments when I wonder what on earth I am doing, giving up a fairly safe job doing something I am passionate about. And yet. I am going to a [hopefully] fairly safe job [we'll come back to that shortly] doing something I am passionate about. Is it something I want to do? I don't think so. I don't know. I do want to do it, I'm here, but it simply isn't as simple as it being something you want to do. Vocation, and its discernment is not really about wanting to do it. Often it's almost more about not wanting to do it, but however far away you hide, it's a pretty insistent call/nudge/whisper/niggle/theme. In the end, it's not about a job (neither is what I've been doing in education for the last decade and more 'just' a job either) but vocation really is about learning what you are being called into, called to be, and eventually embracing it.

As children we [hopefully still] learn the Lord's Prayer. ...Thy Will be done... For those who are delighted I am doing what I want, I can concur, but it's because over the time I have struggled with being not something enough - pious, religious, involved, experienced - I have learnt that there is a quiet insistency which does not let go, that whatever I am I am called to be, and to bring something that I have to the benefit of others. Now I might have thought I've been doing that already, but it's time to move on, to take on that mission, to accept the envelope and open it for instructions (as if God does that...). At my leaving do that I didn't want so I didn't cry, Di said we've had our turn to learn from and share with her, it's time for someone else to benefit from that - only the vague image of Mary Poppins that scooted through my brain stopped me from crumbling completely at that.

There are some days when I know that skills and expertise that I have gained are coming with me, and will be of real use to the people I will work with as colleagues and as parishioners over the next phase of my life. There are many days when I wonder where the skills will come from to do all the other stuff. All the real point of being in ordained ministry as opposed to the bells and whistles I bring with me. I do of course know exactly where these will come from, and I trust absolutely that I will gain what I need, but it's still a bit scary.

Having made many promises that I won't just disappear (though silently terrified that's exactly what I shall do under mounds of Cambridge undergraduate essays) and that I shall maintain [at least] a watching brief on my old life in order for those skills I bring not to go mouldy, I received the welcome pack from Westcott. Which started out by saying

"...a lot of letting go. You will now be going through your own letting go process, and the important thing for each of us to do in any major transition is to try to work out what we have to leave behind and what we should take with us."

The letting go is being quite traumatic for me. It's also being quiet traumatic for the cats who are most perplexed at the amount of boxes and movement and stuff in the house along with my peculiar hours recently that they've taken to huddling all outside and sitting on the kitchen roof most of the day, coming in only when starving and then running away again. Not stupid, cats.

I'm disturbed by the thought of letting go of bits of my old life that I think will be useful to the Church, but I suppose those are the things that I will keep filed somewhere. And I don't want to let go of some of the fine friends I have made over the last ten years, because many of them have been good to me and are wonderful people aside from being collaborators, and I shall probably need to reach out to them to keep me going through the mountains of undergraduate essays (on the plus side, one day I might have a ridiculously large vicarage you can all come and stay in - you could even supplement my parish economy by holding courses in it ;-) ).

So what am I giving up, and how do I edge as smoothly as possible toward the new life? A new life which is whilst a new life completely, (in theory) not so much a new life but a rich and immensely privileged opportunity to focus on the life that is already within.

Mantra for the coming few weeks came from my team. Who I will miss and who I will hope and pray prosper and grow into their respective potentials.

 

The #BbWorld afterparty. You know I can't actually remember the last time I went to a nightclub but I do hope it wasn't Klute for my 30th. A decade without some serious boogying cannot be right!

Big corporations. One of them people shy away from to avoid putting all eggs in one [expensive] basket, the other [free] we flock to put all our stuff in. Or do we? Today someone asked me if Flickr was still/now the de facto image software, and it made me smile, since at half two this morning, I'd actually been contemplating why I'm not rushing over to put my photographs on picasa since I seem to be acquiring a number of the google accounts. (Because I've learnt how to synch my outlook calendar from work to my google calendar so it can update my [not i]phone, it made me wonder about whether I should take a look at googel reader instead of going back to bloglines - I intend to recoup some time to read blogs again after this month, so I wanted to start capturing the ones I need to read and re-evaluate some of the techie ones that I may not have to). For the record, I wasn't too impressed by Reader, which is probably partly why I'm not jumping ship from Flickr, even though the thing is free and I know a lot of people who use picasa. But I don't think it's entirely because it's free that I should want it, jsut to save some if the pounds that will be very precious when I stop earning next term. There's also some vague underlying sense of lock-in somehow that I can't quite put my finger on and is niggling at me. OK, I've some 2000 odd photos on Flickr that go back quite a long way, so I'd have to get them out for one, but there is something slightly odd in my head. Makes me wonder whether it's the commercial cost or the lock-in that's the issue when people don't like Bb - they often state both.I'm still trying to work out exactly where my digital life is going from August, in an outwardly facing way, but I clearly still have a lot of decisions to make on where it's going on an inward and aggregating way too...

Throughout this week's #BbWorld conference (and devcon) there has been an almost constant flow of info as a back channel via twitter. Last year there was quite a bit, but this year there was much more. I suspect there'd have been even more if the wireless had been more stable. To be honest, the opening keynote crashed on me and I switched from Blackboard1 network (I figured everyone would start with Blackboard) to Blackboard and had a totally stable access for the rest of the week, so I obviously got lucky. Without my laptop I used the very handy fact that I can tweet via sms for free. But the backchannel was this year I think an established part of the conference, and a more or less effective method of being here for all those who couldn't be here with us (Bb really really do need to get a grip on recording the sessions, even though the virtual track was definitely a good idea, there seem to have been less sessions recorded this year than last, which just continues to strike me as dumb when there are all those video streaming partners downstairs - get 'em to earn their exhibition stand!). 

 The back channel does a number of things for me:

• is an easy way to take short notes instead of writing them up and not really doing anything with them (in the tweetup this was articulated by more than one person under guise of making people think about things concisely to put in 140 xrs, of making it easier for non-native speakers to get to the nub of the info)
  
  
• to share and spread info (virally, well that is the whole point, isn't it?!) and collect resources, along with being able to ask questions and clarify ("Learn more from backchannel than actual sessions. attending virtual track, but have 5 pages of new resources #bbworld #bbtweetup10" http://bit.ly/ba9KwL - also my confusion about the "That's not a bug, it's a client"dog in the Blackboard video). This allows the whole verysmalldegreeofseparation thing to pass info around the world exceedingly effectively, targetting appropriate info by retweeting to people across campuses, across disciplines and across roles
  
  
• it often helps me to think laterally. Less positively put, it also helps engage me if I'm in a session that isn't doing anything for me, although the point when I was pained and reading tweets that said I'd just been mentioned in a mobile learning session that was interactively engaging the audience in tweeting means I know I was missing out, whereas in the old days I wouldn't have known this. Two things follow here; one that as I always say to my sessions you spend a lot of money coming here, if you realise I'm not for you, do change session, feel free- the fact that the twitter stream allows you to potentially jump ship (even from a really interesting session) to one which turns out to sound more relevant to a particular topic hot on your campus then I think that helps to get the most value out of the conference for people = A Good Thing. Secondly, sometimes, or often, the real value in sessions for me is that just a brief phrase or mention sets me off thinking laterally in a slightly creative, cottonwool way about things that I simply don't have the mental or temporal space to do in the office. I know there was a funny article recently about people who can (or think they can) multitask actually not being so effective, I've realised that to an extent I can actually process two info feeds and then concentrate when necessary but think on tangents while doing so. Tweets from a separate session or sessions feed into that process, and often the prompted but freely generated ideas I bring back are exactly that - not always things I actually heard people tell me. Thus I could enirely truthfully say that (hypothetically) none of the presentations were any good but I could still take a lot away. Emphasis on hypothetically, because there's always something that's useful out of the half dozen or so that you can hear ifyou cram everything in.  As a slight aside, the growth of the conference family has to some extent watered down some of the value in skipping sessions to talk to particular people, becuase you don't always know who 'people' are, but I guess this will rebuild over the next couple of years, and it was good to reconnect with people that we met last year at their first Bb conf since coming over from WebCT.
  
  
• it gives a real insight when reading tweets from within the same session (even if sometimes there's overkill on 'soundbites' from keynotes) as to how the same thing can be heard and interpreted very differently, not only from hearer to hearer, but also from presenter to hearer. I always love to see when people have blogged presentations that I have given and I read them and think, yes, that's what I thought I said too. Of course it's also interesting to hear what they thought you said because that often inspires you to do some of that thinking too. But the recognition of these different input feeds I believe leads to a richer processing of the information and also I guess the assimilation of it too. It is also a seminal lesson about how what you thought you got over to students when teaching actually arrived at their ears/eyes, and so to be aware of that in your teaching.
  
  
• it does provide links/a sense of attendance to the people who are not at the conference and wish to be. Or indeed those who were not and did not wish to be (let's not start the free beer/puppy thing again) but I think this can only benefit the company, the delegates, the non-delegates and ultimately the staff and student end users. 
  
  
• it offers a chance to build relationships among the community of practice. There are people who I met f2f at this year's BbWorld that have followed /engaged with me on Twitter for some time. There are people who have tweeted [really useful things] from the conference who turned up at the tweetup (I have another post in me about how/whether BOF sessions work, parking it for now) who I have followed the conference with and still couldn't put a twitter name to them even though I've seen them around the room. And there are some who, as I said at the beginning of the tweetup are not 'wasting time' meeting up but are doing the business out in other BOFs and twittering from them further shared resource (aside: unless Santo works this out, I'd have a hunch that the BOF were the sessions least tweeted from, in the event, even, I'd hazard, less than the party!). Nevertheless, bringing at least some of the community of practice f2f helps to create and develop that social capital which most of us would agree underpins strong networks. I've come to care deeply about people I've met f2f simply at conferences, but have continued to nurture as relationships virtually inbetween. I believe this offers a valuable chance to consolidate some of those (especially the 'in-laws' bit) relationships of the the Blackboard family as it grows.
  
  
• some of the twitterers are downright funny, which keeps me going after only 4 hours sleep :-)

So, what to take away from this conference and the tweetup? A couple of obvious things around wifi and power (the latter is so harf when big conference halls are divided, although I did see handy but dangerous power flaps in the middle of the floors in the corridors!) but the bloggers box at keynotes is gratefully received. A couple more around being able to identify sessions - I guess next year I won't be on the programme committee (although I'm more than happy to be, nay delighted to keep abreast of what's on the agenda!) but I should have pre-thought and lobbied harder in prog comm meetings for an additional identifier for sessions. This was a unanimous desire from the twits - and could just as helpfully be followed by the virtual/distance/non-attending consumers by displaying also on the conference website programme at a glance. Each paper has an identifying number as a submission, so let's not worry about what it is (though we can suggest potential options around a pattern which establishes a day/date/strand/paper; whilst recognising that these things are decided or can be changed as the actual logistics progress in the physical organisation, whereas the id given by the submission system could do just fine) but let's get it on the web, in the printed programme and maybe encourage speakers to be aware of it themselves and include it on slides/handouts and when the sessions go into connections. This will save characters and allow for the generic recognition of 'duplicate' tweets or finding them from having looked at the programme online.

The boards with the stream displayed on were seriously cool. Personally (apart from the moment that I realised I should have been more er, diplomatic, about the session I was in....!) I think this was a great start, and should be built on. Bigger and more prominent - not least so you can follow different sessions when you're sitting one out in the hall. I could find and link when I'm more awake some blogs etc about how difficult/what an art it is to monitor and respond to a twitter feed live on your desktop/screen when you're presenting unless you're a panel, so I wouldn't rush to demand this in any way, but it moves us a step into the future, especially when one session particularly looked at using twitter feed / text responses  connecting directly and dynamically onto a powerpoint presentation (I use SAP tools for this, and the tweetup discussed what other tools/apps people found useful).

 Along with identification of papers, it might be nice to see identification of presenters too. In April last year I gave a keynote at a conference on Learning in Second Life and the abstract booklet had our avatar names printed in the programme, as did our name badges dually identify us. This was very helpful, and although not necessarily so necessary for tweeters, might be a nice idea.

We'd like to engage in a conversation about how to make the sense that exists via the backchannel during the conference expand. In the same way as we would encourage tutors to pre-empt a learning event, deliver/monitor a learning event and then tie up/post forwards to the next topic, at the tweetup there was a palpable sense that we could be doing more to engage a conversation in advance of the conference (I have a few things to offer for ponderance which I'll dig out soon) - something more instant than Connections was possibly the feel; also to continue past the conference, which we do already do I think remembering back to last year where people who blogged notes (even if they weren't twitterers) were being picked up and passed on - huge resource for people attending or non-attending. I remember it didn't die down for a couple of weeks last year (tho people disappearing off on vacation at this time of year may affect the activity). We talked briefly about aggregators - pros and cons of different ways to collect and store - and filter I guess too - the tweets from sessions/the conference. Actually, come to think of it, it would be a great portal module to encourage people to make visible which would bring the conference direct to instructional designers, developers or even faculty's desktops. (Oh, look,  I do believe I showed an example of such a thing in my presentation!

There are discussions to be had and experience to be shared about what tools or apps help aggregate - twubs/lists/RSS collectors; similarly on identity management/personal v professional v instructor accounts. There's also probably an interesting set of views to collate on Bb staff's blogging which has bloomed - how do Bb market/decide/support the various feeds or potential - from @Blackboardhelp to @michaelchasen etc. Where these conversations might or should happen is almost as big a question in itself - within twitter, or make us come out of it into something else would be appropriate or unnatural?!

Finally (as I'm really tired now, but wanted at least to get this one out of my brain before it fades) to summarise a couple of the other discussions from the tweetup at least - we don't appear to be the only institution which has been looking recently at social media guidelines, and often it seems that people don't wish to raise the question of should there be some, incase they are either gagged or made to write one. A couple of resources were instantly shared here, a compilation and a university of missouri example.There was also discussion/concern about whether we ask students to consume or produce, and what safeguards/advice we [should] offer them if the latter.

Which leads into my last last point, which is we think that there is a fascinating ongoing conversation to be had about when communication becomes learning becomes enriched communication becomes enriched learning when using social media. As I've monopolised my free hotel wifi for too long now, I'm going to leave elaborating on that to another time, and hopefully also a broader team of conversationalists - from within and without the closest circle of Bb twits. 

Comments welcome, as are ideas for continuing to build that social capital and the valuable relationships. Thanks all for your virtual and real company, your insights and your humour!

Harrowing images from Afghanistan on video by Greg Mortenson of kids trying to learn/be taught either outdoors or in containers.

The sheer consumerism of what surrounds us here is in stark contrast. Seeing the video of the kind of places my tutees have been fighting and peacekeeping in gives an added edge for me, and I guess for many around me here in the Osceola Ballroom who will now troops on deployment.

Afghans want schools for the children. Schools that won't be bombed by anyone. Heartrending stories of individual families, little boys being lost to landmines for trying to get an education. I shouldn't have had mascara on today.

Only 5% of children in the US have spent more than 10 hours talking to our elders about heritage, culture, history, and the lessons they have learned. GM tries to get children to talk to elders - I agree, grandparent relationships are so important.

Many footballs made by children in Afghanistan. Modern day slavery still exists. Am glad I have 3 cups of tea in my conference bag. Am looking forward to reading it.

Elders just want to be included. This is the whole point of engaging in the communities. Not least that there are 3 times as many coalition troops as there are taliban. There is no military 'solution'. African proverbs of educating boy=indivdual, girl=community.

Female literacy of <5% NOT GOOD ENOUGH. they're running the villages without the men there. Children there trying to write in mud with sticks, or on slates with white mud.

Greg reaches out to lots stars to try and get money. Even 100$ goes a long way. Especially when a teacher costs 1$ a day

3 cups tea lessons: listen, respect (humility), build relationships. and people wonder how my change in career is different?!  Poverty cannot be solved from a thinktank in DC, have to touch it. indeed. It's too easy to be a long way away from it. Pennies for Peace project : pennies still count. a 100$ cheque goes a long way when a teacher costs 1$ a day. empowering children to empower other children is the most amazing future-building for the next generations.

education and literacy HAS to be our top priority globally especially girls. simple really #BbWorld Greg telling us how to empower the world. overpopulation can also be changed by female literacy. birth rate drops with educated women, and the rate of non-live births is almost wiped out.

Some sound bites from my later tweets:

"cannot win hearts and minds, only engage them" glad to hear the military believe this, wonder how the war strategy reflects it 

women want two things: for their babies not to die and the children to be educated #BbWorld how are we going to take this forwards Bbers?

"through education there is hope and life for all of us"

"I was taught how to fight, how to hate" more playgrounds, even for starving, grieving children

connect with our elders and with our children - together we can make the world a better place #BbWorld we have just been given a challenge!

More sensible notes from Eric here and a strong post also from Jeff Swain. And a couple of tenuously-related articles (on vets and women ) from the MOD about British Army officers which show some of the hearts and minds stuff they are doing is as important as the fighting . 

I'm currently in Florida, getting ready to attend #BbWorld10 and present for the last time before I leave. Because it's cheaper and easier to get a nice direct Virgin flight I'm here feeling more awake than I usually am when I've had to change loads of times and take ages. It's exceptionally hot - why does Blackboard book conferences at this time of year (presumably the cost of the convention centers goes down as the outside temperature goes up). But as it's summer and a holiday destination and I have a couple of days spare, I've brought my mum on her first trip to the US. She's going to have a fabber time than me. Because I'd booked Premium Economy (she's scared of flying) and they'd overbooked and had to downgrade me we were fed champagne on the flight which pleased her so she was already enjoying herself before we arrived! Now while I'm at #BbWorld10 full on, she's going to go on a Thomas Cook trip down to the Florida Keys and Miami and swim with dolphins. (All the years Dad didn't get fancy holidays cos she was too scared is kind of a shame, but I bet he'd be proud of her now). I'd warned her of some of the things that she'd find were 'foreign' even though the language is only a bit foreign. But some things I hadn't quite figured on pointing out as they're not things I notice. It's been interesting to watch her discovering things that I have got[ten] used to.

However, one thing I can not nor wish to get used to. The food in the hotel buffet here is fantastic. As is the service. But the hierarchy of things is visible, in a way that I have to remember how important I felt it was too to see Barack Obama winning power. In the restaurant, people are led to tables. There's a kind of dividing central area from which the serving staff sally forth with drinks. The restaurant is managed by a venerable african american lady of a certain age, with a sharp eye over her empire. The tables are monitored by a range of hispanic staff, who will talk english mostly to clients but spanish across the room to each other, seem uncertain as to if it's ok to respond in spanish to a client if they speak spanish to them (most probably surprised to hear it from a brit, as most of the brits are the usual very sunburnt variety). The table clearers are african americans. This wouldn't unduly worry me if it weren't for the way the room is seated. I've now watched closely at meals and I cannot see any sense of seating by room numbers, by choice of tables, by group size (this is vaguely possible) or by splitting more grownup families from the ones with smaller kids (also tentatively possible). What I can see, is that if you're white, you're seated in the first body of the restuarant, if you're african american, you're seated behind the central divider, facing the courtyard.  Even if there's a good reason for this, I find it really painful and somehow wrong....

When I was a little girl, I went to football every weekend during the season. When I was very very little, my Dad still played, but after breaking his leg and entering a pub argument that he could manage a team better, he started his own team, made up mostly of his friends, Holme Valley Academicals (still going strong - well, relatively, in local football). And after that our saturdays followed a fairly standard pattern. Swimming lessons or music centre followed by rushed lunch, followed by traipsing off to football, which didn't always take place at a pitch with a playground and thus could be boring, not to mention cold, often prematurely ended by racing off to the HRI with someone injured, then back to the pub/liberal club with pie and peas (big bonus, because otherwise it was  stew when we got home in front of Dr Who). As effectively a club mascot and absorbing it by osmosis as Dad also refereed and after retiring from managing worked for many years for the FA as regional fixture secretary, football is in my blood. In my soul.

Here in the northeast, football lives on in the soul of the people. It's a religion all of its own. (And not just in the northeast.) People who don't understand football don't understand why in much of the east end of Newcastle where the team began, people still put feeding the bairns top of the list of spending their often scarce money, swiftly followed by buying their season tickets, then followed by feeding and clothing themselves (the latter usually in club kit). Football has changed since I was a little girl, and not necessarily for the better. I used to go sit in the directors box to watch Huddersfield Town and though they weren't in division one, even the division one sides were much less prawn sandwiches. You worked hard for not huge amount of money - as Bobby Robson used to say he was incredibly blessed to be able to be paid at all for doing something that he loved, and you recognised you were lucky. The Holme Valley backs on to the yorkshire pits - the miners' strike was all too real for us. There was a luxury to play football, but the kind which worked hard and respected others. Not the kind of luxury that used to see Kieron Dyer crash another flash car across a roundabout on the way out of training every other week. I used to watch those reports, think of the tutees in my group the same age and wonder what they'd do if you gave them £100K a week and press adoration. Where do you learn a sense of perspective when you're treated as a demi-God and have more money than you possibly know what to do with? Look what happened to Gazza.

If you're really lucky, and work really hard, and are really talented, you can get to the top of your game by your early 20s. If you're good enough, you can be promoted as far as England. And then you get the absolute pride of playing with three lions on your chest. For your country - the country where ex miners feed the bairns and then go without to scrape together the money to come and watch you week in week out doing what you do well to earn that cap. Wouldn't that just make you almost burst with emotion? With pride, with motivation? With a sense of duty, of responsibility, of awe?

Apparently not. After a pretty dismal display - blame whatever you want - the altitude, the lack of a winter break, the system, the ball, the pitch, the supporters booing, the injuries, the not-knowing-the-team-till-two-hrs-before-KO, the pressure of being dropped like the keeper if you make a mistake, being tired, or even being primadonnas or incapable of playing as a team, or not having their families or having their families, or not having a drink the night before a match or having a drink the night before a match....or even the last government closing down football pitches (the ones without the playgrounds), or the previous government cutting out team sports in the school curricula... Whatever, it was shabby. If not shocking.

Yes yes, we know it was shocking. We shall all slink home in our M&S football. It wasn't just football, it was .... football. We shall be photographed looking appropriately sheepish arriving home. And then we shall not be prepared to meet the fans who travelled and waited to welcome us, we shall slink out the back door. We shall have as little respect for them as Wayne Rooney did for the fans who showed their displeasure after the second match. They payz their money, they'z allowed to give feedback - don't you know feedback is always sought, Wayne? Evaluation and reflective practice is where it's at in my profession. Shame it isn't in yours. Within 24 hours of the arrival home, most of them were straight off on their jollies, showing  little interest in their fellow professionals continuing in the world cup or even seemingly in who might be likely to win. The papers are full of pics of them frolicking at their Barbados villas etc. Hmm. Not to mention the beautifully shared (via a shared with friends gadget - who needs enemies, huh? boy, that friend must have agreed with me) picture from the deep navel gazing and introspection over the defeat.

Let's take a quick step back and compare that with the essence of football, shall we? Imagine a flick book - back and forth for a second or two until you feel sick, eh?

  

Can it get worse?  Can I feel sorrier for these mostly personable young men drowning their sorrows? But yes. Apparently I can. Because driving home last night I heard an interview on the radio with a fan. One of those people who instead of being given the M&S suit and enough money to afford a sea front villa in Barbados, bought the suit and has saved up since the last world cup to travel to South Africa to watch the Three Lions. Did he get to watch live? Not all of them, no, he watched most on a screen. He saw England once, Germany twice. So, we're out, they're living it up in some luxury hotel/villa, where are the fans? Living it up in South Africa still, since they saved up for four years to get here? Sort of. And sort of not. You see, some of them, the other kind of Lions, have being doing something other than drinking beer in between matches. Some of them have not only been volunteering inbetween matches but they're still there. And when they do leave and come home, there'll have been a real impact, a legacy left behind them which will most probably last longer and be more useful to the communities they have served than the stadia once the vuvzelas have fallen silent and there are no more construction or concession jobs at them. 

I am totally in awe and humbled by the efforts of Lions Raw. Thankyou for showing that there can be pride, humility, respect, motivation, inspiration and effort in the name of football that makes its community value and spirit worth its gold. May the work that you have done in S Africa be long fruitful. If I were running the FA, I'd have had those young men in their team stash putting down their cigars and spending the remaining ten days of the competition helping you out. 

Update: apparently I'm not the only one to be impressed:

9.46am: By the way did anyone see the bit on the BBC last night about some England fans who had stayed on to build an orphanage in South Africa? I found my grizzled mask of sneery career cynicism melting into hot wet tears of confused and helpless admiration. There men are saints. albeit, apparently saints without jobs or families to return to. That idiot-bus has finally done something worthwhile.

BBC Look North - Lionsraw Special Report - Part 1 from Dave Dixon on Vimeo.

There's a poster up in the bus station I pass on the way home which says you can borrow a gadget which monitors your energy consumption from the library. Well, I can't, as I'm not in Mbro libraries, but I might check if you can get them from our library too. I've chuntered before about our usage of resources and my own part in that. I hate to really think how much energy we use by being ubiquitously connected (and believe me, after 2 weeks without internet at home, I can't help but confess I hate not being ubiquitously connected). And I also know that my coffee when I make it at home is better for the environment than when I buy it at work (not to mention most of the stone I've put on over the last two years is from coffee, so I intend to lose that when I'm a skint student walking everywhere and not going past coffee places on my way to work). These two are my real vices in life.

I dislike that I don't have a garden and there isn't a composting cooperative near me for my green recycling, as I try quite hard to reduce packaging, and barely have a carrier's worth of 'rubbish' per fortnight- if I could green recycle I'd not have that per month. I hate throwing things out at all, Freecycle is a great option, but even if something doesn't work any more I don't like to tip it, I'm terribly conscious of it being just rubbish when I do. I'm happy to have to be careful about disposing things I own. It also reminds me how much 'stuff' we have, and how it surely must be overweighing our poor little planet. Which is why, although I think it's really cool how 3D printers work , but it worries me that we don't think about what happens when we've finished with them. You can't really undo plastic, though I'm beginning to see creative uses for recycled plastics, even up to suggestions of artificial holiday islands. We do need to make more effort to freecycle things and share with eachother rather than own things. And to use things more wisely and creatively seek solutions to energy issues, even on small scales.

An article on the BBC the other day draws one or two comments about social demographics, and harks back to the early seventies, an echo of which can also be heard in a Guardian piece which took me back to memories of my great gran's house in liverpool with its outside toilet and gas lamps. It seems almost inconceivable to today's younger generation that the house my parents moved to just before I started school was a new one, because it was cheaper to do that than to get a grant for having a bathroom at the old house, a house where I slept in a basket by the fire when the strikes meant there was no power 12 hours at a time. Nostalgic, perhaps, but worth being reminded to think about how far we've come in those decades, what we've gained (including metaphorically and materially) and what we have lost. And whether there's always time for a rethink on that, on what we need, what we really need, and how to manage what we've got, for ourselves and for a fairer sharing amongst others.

I'm not a mac person. I would have loved an iMac, just for the groovy colours, but somehow I don't quite get mac operating stuff and am confused by no right clicks. And I'm not impressed that iPhones only shipped here into a monopoly, and though now are available on vodafone too, I did have a bit of a look and bought my smartphone because I couldn't quite work out what I'd want an iPhone for. Whilst the sleep app is very cool, the permanently having to recharge the battery makes a mockery of the concept of 'mobile', although of course the iPhone isn't marketed as a mobile phone but a lifestyle choice. Or perhaps it's ok because it's American, where they're not about 'mobile' phones anyway, and noone ever said a cellphone promised to manage a whole day without being wired up to recharge. (True, it's an open door for creativity in things like embedding into your running shoes the potential for you to generate your own electricity - surely a gadget worth developing for sub-saharan Africa not just sex in the citiers?)

But the iPad? I've now met one twice in the UK, and this week while I've been in Amsterdam with the Dutch Blackboard User Group, they were everywhere. Am I impressed? Well, I can't see the point unless it's got handy wifi access, and lots of storage space, and potential to connect storage devices etc. If I'm honest I don't really understand the variations (doesn't wifi mean wifi, does 3G mean you can connect with wifi and via a phone net connection as well?) I'm really not sure about the whole debate about whether apple is trying to get rid of flash - a lot of what we do is flash-based these days - it was one of the discussions we had in Amsterdam about what the future of content is, as I'm not sure that having got to a point where easy upload and display web content has to return to pdf format to be i-able.

However, I actually think that I'd be tempted by an iPad twice over. Firstly (and this might be an expensive reason, but it would be worth it for me, and that's the only point of doing it I can believe in, rather than it being a new cool must-have gadget) as an e-book reader, as I've just realised that there's a heap of journal articles that I can download as pdf from the university library (free, for the next few weeks!) and whilst I can read them on my phone, that's a lot of scrolling for large documents, and I can read them on my netbook, if I'm taking my netbook somewhere, if I actually would just like to take a pile of docs, then an iPad would weigh a heap less than the equivalent in paper. I've handled a couple of the other e-readers and not been tempted by them bearing in mind they don't do anything else as well. Even though I might not be buying it to do anything else, the fact that it can makes a difference.

Secondly, i think there is finally a potential to move to more electronic assessment with the iPad. I had a go with typing on one and found it easier than I expected. And quiet. So any objection to computers in exams has just begun to go away. They do not make a noise to disturb the student at the next desk. Their battery life enables there to be no safety issues with trailing wires. Their lack of connectivity means you can issue an iPad with nothing but what you want them to have on it, and students can type as they are used to doing instead of producing appalling handwriting that someone then has to read. And you as a marker get typescript to read to mark. If you have enough iPads for two consecutive sessions, then you could download one load of docs to send to markers while the other set were in the next exam. Ongoing storage is also transformed. Am I missing something obvious here?! As an about to be student again facing 3 hour handwritten exams, I (and any poor person having to read the result) might definitely prefer an iPaper :-)

I still don't really understand the choices, and what it can or can't do, and have made note that all the 'accessories' that aren't exactly 'accessory' but required all cost more in the store, but still, I'm tempted. Being able to carry documents around to read electronically attracts me greatly. Already did with ereaders, but none of them made me want to buy them for what they actually did/price. The iPad might just win me over.

Some time ago I wrote about a dream I had, of being able to run a cafe with accommodation, that I might have called Home. I might have called Home & Garden if I could have got my hands on an allotment as well and let people grow stuff for themselves and the cafe, but I might have got into rights issues with the magazine. Just now I saw this article on the BBC, and the picture caught my eye. That might be what my dream Home looked like. The post I wrote on Home dates from around the time I was slowly waking up to wanting to go into ministry, although I hadn't realised it then, but probably plays a part somewhere deep down in wanting an urban title. Maybe Hope is a good alternative name.

I can't remember if I blogged this last summer - I probably linked to it from a work blog, but having just been looking for some TED talks on marketing, I found it again and listened again. I'm beginning to enact an exit strategy at work (a post all its own coming soon) and thinking about what I throw out recycle and what I keep. I know fine well the team will chuck a lot of what I leave, so I'm trying to do it for them - and some of it can definitely go. I mean, I found it interesting to look at an attendance list from a week of training in July 2003 (loads of people, dammit, why don't they still come in those numbers??) but that was slipped in amongst training materials that we've since developed. So a lot for the recycle, but I've (or they could just be humouring me) made a sort of deal with them - I'm giving them a quick overview of what I'm leaving for them and why, so that they have a sense of what it is, and given them a very brief qualification of why/when they might need it. Whilst I fully don't expect them to read it, should they be in a position where something nags their brain, they might remember I'd said for just this emergency occasion and fish it out. Last week (gonna end up writing that other post here if I'm not careful) I found quite hard but then I was reading Judith Molka Danielson's book on learning in Virtual Worlds and  she reminded me about explicit and tacit knowledge, and how the one can be codified (ie written down or sorted through and given away) and handed on and the other (gut instinct, acquired experiential wisdom) cannot. This helped me begin to accept that much of what I have that I was wanting to download, ain't gonna happen. That it's tacit knowledge. It can be tied up with a little bow in my head cos it ain't going nowhere. Which is kind of sad, but slightly somehow easier to deal with now I've made the mental distinction.

What's this got to do with Seth Godin? Not so much, I guess, except because I'm going, I've been thinking about everything I've achieved, or feel I've not achieved, and the stuff I feel I've failed at. I've not managed to really change the culture here. It shouldn't have taken so long, and I feel I've not managed to take this institution where I promised them I would, but I didn't bank on it being so hard. And that's self-criticism not simply criticism of the institution, but some things are not set up here for the culture change to really embed. I wish the team that remains behind and whoever replaces me more success than I've had. I've certainly challenged, and I've certainly committed, but maybe I wish I'd heard Seth back in 2005 and tried some different things to create the culture...

I'm leaving my post in August to reach out for pastures new. I've been licensing Blackboard for 10 years, and using it (or CourseInfo) longer. That means I've been a Blackboarder longer than most of the current staff! I thought it would be nice to go out with 10 top tips from those ten years, so that's what the abstract for my presentation says.

Now I've started to think about my presentation though, I'm not sure it will be just a 10 top tips. It could be a bit of a retrospective - a tip for each year. It won't be, but could be. And this bothers me a bit. It bothers me because I could, for example, reprise my San Diego presentation of 2006 (which was very popular, so almost worth repeating/updating!) but there'd very possibly be little to update. It's four years ago, and I could give exactly the same presentation and only the jokes would be less relevant. The ABC of Blackboard Support suggestions itself would not have changed. 

This may be a good thing, I hear you wonder. Well indeed. It may - if you mean that I haven't changed my mind, didn't give you bad advice back then, that I have a lasting contribution to the field. But. But...

It leaves a nagging frustration beacuse I haven't followed my own advice. Or I have, or I've tried, but I haven't achieved it. This is not really the place to beat myself up about the (I do that enough already) and it's definitely not a place to be a 10 things which you might as well not waste your time on, because I firmly believe that user conferences are - or should be - about focussing on sharing the positive, constructive stuff, with steam-letting done informally, not from the lectern.

It's not just a Blackboard issue, I feel the same frustration more generally about elearning, its potential and actual achievements. Last year I attended the annual conference for ALT and was similarly underwhelmed. The Blackboard catalyst award scheme make me ask myself what is catalytic? The exemplary course competition makes me ask what is exemplary? We often talk about our support being raising the baseline and thereby the student experience, rather than pushing the boundaries of innovation beyond what the students (and certainly the faculty) demand or are comfortable with. It's about establishing and embedding good practice as widely as possible.

The thing that frustrates me is that I haven't seemed to have followed my own advice, even though I have quite a big team. And that I'm not really sure why that is is. There's a really great presentation on why this is/could be (preceded by careful & interesting research) with the time or resource to engage in it, but I'm not going to be giving that either. Don't get me wrong - we've delivered a huge amount. It's just not as much as I'd like to have thought was possible.

So what will I be talking about in my 10 Years of Top Tips? Perhaps a bit of everything. Delivering a decade's dreams: some lessons learnt, some usable models, some favourite presentations from BbWorlds, some unfinished business and some enhancement requests. Valid for all users - Bb, WebCT, Angel and also the Bb staff to whom I'm coming to say thankyou and goodnight!

In my pram, being walked through town when I was nobbut a little thing, I was on TV. As a passer by - an extra from the locals going about their business, which the BBC often handily borrowed the inhabitants of Holmfirth to be, as they filmed, year after year after year, Last of the Summer Wine. A vintage now corked (as could be said of most of its original actors), and which will have its final dregs drunk this summer. One last harvest. I haven't really watched it at all since Compo died, and mostly watched before that to see places or people I knew appearing, but it has represented a fixture in the Sunday viewing schedule for the whole of my life, and as with  other things like Are you being served, represented the gentleness of comedy which I have found really funny. Peter Sallis must have mixed feelings about it finishing, but with him at 89 and Roy Clarke at 80, their ever-presence could perhaps be thought to be on borrowed time. I probably will watch some of the last episodes, with Songs of Praise coming from Holmfirth (or not, because as Mum was telling me last week, the churches have been fighting over whose choir is best and therefore wins the right to be focussed, and Holmfirth lost out to another of the team churches!) and will think fondly back to the really nice people that the programme included, many of whom I came across when I used to play/sing a music spot in the White Horse pub which they not only drank in in the series but stayed in as a hotel while filming.

My mum volunteers for a less energetic group of Holmfirth's elderly generation. Their funding has been slashed and will soon have to close. It's more about armchair yoga and easy crafts as well as a monthly meal, which for some is the only time they get out of their houses, than screeching down the moors in bathtubs, but would be a desperate loss to the community. A loss, one suspects Bill Owen would have spoken up for if he were still here. 'Incomer' that he was, he chose to be buried in Holmfirth. It's a special place. Mostly full of tourist shops these days and not the butchers and bakers that there used to be, for the locals, will be interesting to see how after -presumably- a rise in business this summer, what will happen in the future.

It's an interesting dichotomy I think, in the concept of seeker-friendly church, what is seeker-friendly and should we be doing it. Over the last year or so, it's a discussion I've been on the edge of, while marshalling some thoughts. At my placement church last (before last) autumn, there was a monthly afternoon meeting (hardly call it a service) of post-baptism families. This worked for them, and the vicar was keen that if that was all they could manage as 'church', they were still most welcome. The tea ladies pointed out while I was helping washup and therefore one of them rather than being on the side of the vicar, that this was all very well, but they never even donated towards the tea, as normally we would after morning services, never mind made any offering in their service, nor thought about the fact that not only were the staff of the ministry team and those serving tea, looking after children etc and the caretaker there all day to be there for them, but that the heating had been left on and the lights don't pay for their own electricity you know...

On the other hand, when seeker services have been discussed in college, there's a palpable sense among some that sometimes seeker-friendly can mean dumbed down, and surely isn't part of the point of meeting the transcendant glory of God supposed to be awesome rather than just comfortable and accessible? How do you manage to make anyone who dares to cross the threshold at ease with a service booklet that isn't obvious to a newbie and still ring out that joy and love and power even when the organist is murdering some tune that mayor may not be related to the number identified on the board? Cathedrals are growing in visitor numbers, because of their freedom to be, to hide, or their sense of the colossal, the numinous, the prayerfulness despite the photo-inhibiting-stewards?

And then, there is something else. There is still the question of what is the Church? Who is it for? Or, what is the church, and who is it for? If we are to shift thought from being an inward looking church to which we hope to draw people, as in into the building and our way of doing things, to the sunday morning (or more) worship meetings being the place which those 'inside' meet and refresh in order to go out and be church elsewhere, should we be more interested in what happens outside, and if we are seeker-friendly in our being of church outside than in our being church in church? Should we build those bonds so that any crossing of thresholds is not done by strangers, because it is us crossing the threshold to meet them, and should they, when they, choose to join us in church, it is not as nervous strangers but as ready friends? This does not mean that we can maintain our own comfortable habits of long standing, which might not be comfortable to newcomers, but opens a thought process about who and what and where. And when and why. And probably how too, just for the full set.

Then again, there's also the consideration for those who used to come. Why have they stopped? What would it take to bring them back? Better (ie drinkable) coffee and shoot the organist? In an address in College Chapel earlier this term in a series on music and liturgy, Canon Rosalind Brown spoke about hymns and what they mean to us. She threw in as a sort of side comment, although it did make me realise that I hadn't really ever thought about why it bothered me, a note about not liking many worship songs because they were indivdual (once referred to in a glorious and hilarious moment as 'Jesus I want your babies' songs to the bishop), and that hymns are the church's corporate worship. This is one of the themes mentioned in an excellent blog post I read the other day about getting blokes back into church. In the midst of progress about women in the episcopate, I have no wish whatsoever to encourage much thought of re-masculising the church, but I thought it a really powerful article. With a dear friend in the US being a similarly Acts 29 kind of guy, I hesitate to underline that I don't think that their sense of women not being in leadership, even in the family, takes away from the urban pastor's points, which are all totally valid. They'd be no doubt vociferously agreed with by Rich, a passionate believer in men's ministry, and who I'm sure could post equally eloquently about it,  and which I'd be interested in reading.  

The coming of age of fresh expressions is really interesting to me, how some of the expressions are (or aren't) mainstreamed, whatever mainstreamed might mean. I loved the concept of a skateboard in the nave in this Times article (read it while it's free!!) though it isn't necessarily what the urban pastor had in mind in his mention of sport, although when we recall that almost all the premier league football clubs grew from a faith background, maybe there's an olympic challenge for churches round the nation to take up?! Is the XY group mentioned at the end of the article a fresh expression, or simply the men's ministry which can be fostered out of the urban pastor's church? When shall we blur the distinction of fresh expression and refreshed expression?

Surely what really matters is that people are comfortable. Not too comfortable, because then it's easy to sit in our cosy familial coffee after sunday services without being challenged to take up the cross and get out over that threshold to be church in the world. But with enough availability and appeal to be comfortable that people want to be a part of church, a part of that mission of love to the world that should shine through beyond the bad coffee. The Church Mouse's review of recent research (also on men, although I'm not thinking solely about men, neither is Maggi Dawn in her response) poses a really serious question about the church's future if Christians ourselves do not feel comfortable in church (presumably this assumes to mean our physical existing church buildings, but I suppose is open to definition, as with any research!). This may be a good thing for fresh expressions of church. It may be an explanation for successful fresh expressions of church, but is it a long term answer or a long term question for us to wrestle with - how do we equip all churches to be church not just for those inside, but for those outside, or those loitering at the gate?

I have - as many people know - a nasty habit, despite knowing, understanding and even advocating social bookmarking, not least because I regularly use 4 different computers, of keeping tabs open in my browser that I want to do something with. I'm not always sure what I want to do with them, and I am kind of trying to get back my blogging from my tweeting (despite having indulged in a discussion about this, I'm not sure still that tweeting killed my blogging, more like it's kept me on social media life support!). Some of them I get from twitter, so don't re-tweet, and many are more than 140 xrs worth of content. Some are just funny or noticable or at least not really standalone, so if I just bookmark them and forget about them, is a bit pointless. So there they sit, for weeks or months until the next browser crash, whereupon I trawl zealously back through my entire history, trying to remember what was open....

Anyway...

Am having a tidy up. And I would place all these things together in one post, only that would just be lazy. I suppose I could sneakily add different dates to them, but the point is really just to set them somewhere rather than in transit in a tab. And for me to come back to. What I really need to do (along with doing something about the website that never got built after I left Durham, er, 5 years ago next week)is sort outlocating all my feeds etc and tagging them and my posts properly.

Now see, I've burbled for long enough for a post anyway and haven't even said anything yet. I might have to edit out 'part the first' from the title of this post and make it look like I meant to be a bit blonde for a minute

This was a link on twitter that made me smile and I've had open for a little while. Beyond the sheer cleverness of the advertisers/marketing advisers, and the pure funny, there are some great examples here of both tricking the brain (like I like to think Second Life design can be so good at) and of not tricking but simply re-engaging the brain with images. The power of images is huge. Even though there speaks a visual learner, some of them are still very good. With it being the drawing to a close of another academic year, and the lull (obviously, a finalist would be hard put to use the term) between reference-writing periods while the exams take place, one in particular caught my eye. With the general fear about jobs and potential double-dip recession, along with rising unemployment and media coverage about graduates not being able to find jobs, these appealed. A number of my finalists are taking time off to travel, to go back to charities they worked with on a gap year, climbing kilimanjaro to raise money for charity, or taking time out to decide what they want to do next because the postgraduate Hatfield history sausage factory of corporate wotsiting or law conversion doesn't suit them. They are all concerned about how much they owe, and yet are being brave enough to be brave. Which, in the long run, I think is not only brave, but smart. I choose the one that's most relevant to me (and clearly, the least real, bearing in mind there is never decent-stuff-that-might-conceivably-be-called-coffee comes out of a machine) but the other two on their original page are equally entertaining...

On Friday evening I sat through five and a half fascinating hours of a contemporary re-setting of Durham's medieval mystery plays. Despite the cold - v e r y   c o l d - it was a great experience. Sadly, because of the cold, and perhaps also the length, not everyone stayed to the bitter end, but there were still a goodly few hundred of us at the close.

I was exceptionally grateful for the study day at the Cathedral the previous Saturday, which added much to my enjoyment. As pointed out by one reviewer, the Dean and Chapter were not involved in the writing of the plays, and at one or two points, my theology was, er, creatively stretched, but on the whole, the combination was really quite powerful. In the medieval days, the plays were undertaken by the guilds, not the religious, and this was very nicely visible in the first play, at the Gala. I don't watch Britain's Got Talent, but I am partial to the excruciatingly awful first rounds of X Factor, so I recognise the format (and let's face it, no different on Strictly really) and the Gala Theatre setting worked. Clearly Durham is short of major venues to take the audience, so what happened probably worked. The primary school play-ness of the Cathedral-hosted play could, for me, have been somewhere else - eg a school, if one were available, accessible and big enough - I suspect none meet these basic criteria. The issue of staging so eloquently dealt with by John McKinnell last weekend underlined the sensibleness of having all the Sands plays in the one structure and lighting system (whilst being remarkably - and successfully - light on actual stage furniture, although I was almost wishing that we could have gone back up the Bailey to see the Crucifixion in the Cathedral or the Cloister or on Palace Green, and the Harrowing of Hell somewhere up there too. I don't think this would have been impossible, especially if the Fall of Creation had been staged somewhere other than the Cathedral.

I had my camera with me, but didn't take photos until the end. Partly because of the light staging, there was nothing really to take (bar the Theatre and the Cathedral where you're not allowed to anyway). Partly because I actually got quite carried away by all but a couple of the plays, and was concentrating on them. And partly because even though I love my camera and I'm trying to learn how to use it better, I figured to get the right setting to get the big stage and the whatever I was looking at would distract too far. Also partly because we were sitting directly behind a camera man, who was going to be in the photos. He was, when I eventually took some in the Crucifixion, but then I was too cold and too engrossed to move to try and avoid him. The advertising shots in some ways bore no resemblance to the plays, which I was a bit confused by for a while, although I do like them now I realise they are a separate thing - individual images which throw a contemporary light on the subject of the plays, not the plays themselves. In this, especially now I've seen the plays, I think they're great. And of course they do bear resemblance to the plays, because they're stark images which live in our modern brain and connect those histories, plug them right into today.  

There were people filming the whole thing, so presumably there'll be some sort of DVD coming out of the full set (presumably a very large income from parents of performers buying it, so definitely will help to claw back some of the investment!) and I guess more info will appear in the press. I haven't bought a broadsheet this weekend, but it would be nice to think that it had made some recognition wider than the local BBC and the Durham Times.

The idea of the mystery plays is that the 'illeterate majority' can learn Bible stories. Let's gloss over any comment about the population of the NE, and concentrate on the fact that, with a couple of dodgy exceptions, they really were a great learning experience for the actors/children taking part. Many of the plays had some or more than some children, and what a way to learn RE!  When we look at a lot of medieval representation of Bible stories and early history, they are often portrayed in contemporary costume, location and with contemporary scenes/articles. In this Durham Mysteries 2010 were right on message. And some of the messages were really very powerful. In particular, the way God's Day Off dealt with the concept of free will was really interesting - and a beautifully done God by my friend Simon, who I didn't realise was in it until the lights went up. There were one or two continuity errors - anyone paying attention in the Gala knew that Lucifer had been de-winged, so I bet some eagle-eyed kids spotted that wings had returned in later plays. No continuity error feel to the very different portrayals of God, though, and my favourite (sorry Simon) was the female creative spirit gone a bit askew in Noah and the Fludd. She was an absolute hoot. Cain and Abel I thought could have been edgier with the growing prevalence of gang and knife crime. Abraham and Isaac I struggled with firstly because I was trying to work out how the programme's "words by children, acted by adults" corresponded to the teenagers dancing round on chairs. Eventually I did hear children's voices in it, clearly in answer to who is your father and what does your father do, what does your father mean to you. Then I wished I'd heard more from the beginning. Then I was equally confused by the child who offered to take Isaac's place on the sacrifical altar - I'd thought that one was the lamb until it screamed for help on the altar and God told Abraham to fetch a lamb. I never did quite work out if this was a Carlos Fuentes-esque 2nd person of Isaac or quite what. That one was probably the least highlight for me, along with the Nativity, which I perhaps felt focussed on preying on Joseph's anxiety to the parentage of the awaited infant rather than on Joseph and Mary facing the nativity together. From the publicity image, one could have imagined very relevant other directions this play could have taken. The highlights for me, aside from the God of Noah, were the Raising of Lazarus and the Crucifixion. Lazarus was nicely located off the stage and in the audience, and though it didn't take long to twig, the sight of the policeman clearing the front of the audience for the ambulance to reverse in to, blue lights going, suspended reality for a few seconds at least. Also the planting of people in the audience was very well done - they'd been there a while, the lads who jumped up from next to us to rush to the growing throng collecting for Jesus. Lazarus' writhing around in the ambulance was a bit, well, theatrical, but it was a good episode. As was the Crucifixion, the end of the story told by the young soldier. The lighting here was superb, and at this point I gave in and hauled my camera out, cameramanintheway or not.

All in all, a great series of productions. A guaranteed audience due to all the various school involvements, but hopefully very successful. I fear the rain last night may have dampened the audience, if not their spirits, and I hope very much that the plays are not only repeated, but gain recognition in the national sphere for their attempt to bring that mass teaching via contemporary and in contemporary culture through the dramatic interpretation of Bible stories to a modern audience. An audience who may have sat anywhere on a continuum of proud parent to critical theologian but who could not fail to see both the story/ies being meeted out to those who may not otherwise engage with it/them and the relevance or reflections in today's society. Big thumbs up from me.

I know this is twee, but it's so sweet! The only time my cat copies me is when he sits by my computer chair and reaches up and puts his claws in the side of it, so I lean down and try and swipe his paws and he throws a left uppercut back again. And he hates the stupid voice of the terrorist in this clip, as, I confess, do I, and he's offended on behalf of the kitten that he's called a monkey, but still, it's cute...

Well, I've exercised the democratic right that women fought and died for, and which to many around the world is still denied. But I fear I have never voted with such lack of decision before, and now am still agonising whether it was the right thing to do. In the end, I think I have voted for personal integrity, but not necessarily that of my local candidates. I am now going to attempt to stop paying attention to last chance swaying tactics through today or I may feel sick that I have voted wrong. I have vaguely thought on the way to vote about the time I remember when there were four parties, and whether Liberal or Social Democrat would be my home if they were still separate, and how merging hasn't really done them any good. Will it this time? Will they get enough support to force a change in voting so we can vote more 'fairly' in representational terms? What impact will that have? I came back to see this tweeted in the Guardian:

For as long as I can remember, people have dismissed a vote for the Lib Dems as a "wasted vote". In this election there is no such thing as a wasted vote. Every single ballot paper will count towards the percentage figure for a party's share of the popular vote, and the spotlight is on that as never before. If, for example, the Lib Dems get more of the popular vote than Labour, but far fewer seats, the unrepresentativeness of the electoral system will be dramatically exposed. Even if this allows a Conservative minority government to slide into power, its own deficit of democratic legitimacy will be plain. (My emphasis)

The fatal flaw in this should be obvious. The twitterverse and probably everyone else was horrified yesterday by the Indy article on what the Conservatives have brought to Hammersmith. I have to vote, even if I really don't know who to choose, locally or nationally. But I don't choose Cameron as a man, so that pretty much rules out me voting Conservative, even if it shouldn't. Sadly Obama didn't turn up as a last minute miracle entry on my ballot paper* nor could I have voted for the independent candidate who I'd never heard of (how does he think he's going to cover his costs?) but as Dave Walker so helpfully reminds us, apart from it being our duty in a democracy to vote, there's no scope to criticise after if you don't. You made your bed... Well,now I've helped tuck in the sheets of tomorrow's bed, and I have no idea whether it will have made one I want to lie in or not; a wasted vote or a vote that helped or prevented change at a local or national level.

On Sunday, while I was still trying to decide (not that I have, even now I've voted) I heard two things. One, on a morning news show before church was Liam Byrne, standing for Labour in Birmingham. I didn't hear the question that he was answering, but he was talking eloquently, passionately, caringly, personally about what he wanted to work towards for the people he wanted to serve. The Tory woman next to him then ignored the questioner and tore into Liam, trying to undermine him (him, not his policies, on the back of national policies) and the liberal chap looked helplessly at the questioner and fluffed a not-respons. This reminded me how much as I'd like it not to be about personalities (as in celebrity personality) but at least when they first get into this about people who care about trying to help others and stand up for those around them. 

Secondly, I was listening to Stephen Cherry's sermon. I knew a bit of what the topic was going to be after listening to him talk at the Chaplaincy lecture given by Chris Mullins on Friday night. Stephen was talking about the closeness of 'vote' and 'votive', and how as a candle is a prayer, trying to align oneself with the will of God and for the good of the Kingdom, our vote for the good of the Kingdom on earth. Stephen also drew our minds to the Eucharist - it is our duty and our joy, and also that it is not unlike the marriage service, to be entered into reverently, respectfully and after serious thought. But he also sketched out the dilemma in summary: do you vote 'traditionally', 'rationally' or 'emotionally'?

"When we vote we are expressing our will and trying to align the future of our country with the will and wisdom of God.

This might not be the way in which you ordinarily tend to think about voting. If you are the thinking type you will probably see the decision to vote as a complex intellectual exercise involving evaluation of the merits of the clusters of policies that the parties present; if you are a traditional and loyal person you will see voting as the duty to support ‘your party' - the one with which over the years you have established a strong bond, possibly a membership; if you are a  person moved by strong feelings and impulses you will be monitoring those feelings as you watch the performance and absorb the promises of the leaders of the parties, all of whom are seeking to move you to vote for them. The reality is that we are, all of us, all three of these people - traditional, rational and emotional - and that it is the interplay of all these kinds of considerations which makes voting seem such a perplexing business. No wonder so many people decline to vote, or long for a single issue party or candidate to resolve the complexity and anguish of it all. No wonder so many people desire the end of party politics. No wonder so many people seek to discredit the whole difficult business by drawing attention to the moral failings of politicians and the actual failings of well intended policies."

Whatever the outcome tomorrow morning, I sincerely hope and pray that whoever 'wins' recognises that they have most likely barely 'won' and that respect, humility and grace. And that whatever the outcome, those we elect deliver on those promises to serve at the very least to the best they are able, reflecting the will and the need of those who voted for them, but also of those who did not.

* the man in the polling station has a list which corresponds to my voting number and the code on the ballot paper. He assures me that the votes go to somewhere while the list goes in a sealed envelope to someone else. But what happens to them? Does anyone know? How long is it kept? When is it destroyed? When are the ballot papers destroyed? Even if he tells me that the two can't be put back together without the rule of a high court judge (and this is good if, say, one of the neighbours had tried to vote as me, the one ballot paper could be extracted without everyone having to re-vote), still I find myself almost as disturbed by this as I am by the lack of requirement to take photo ID to get your ballot paper in the first place. Can I have an FOI on this?!

 

A great song, and a great take on the video for it. Sung by a great singer too. I've attended a few concerts by Craig Lyons and love his music, although I find it a little strange (impressive, but different)  that he streams a live video of himself playing in his garage/lounge behind his avatar. This makes the avatar a puppet more than a person in an odd kind of way for me, it's harder to think of the avatar as presence when the rl presence is so visible behind it. Contrast this with when a musician (such as Clarice Karu, another fave) just has their avatar on stage and I think there is a very different vibe. Anyway, that's an aside. He plays some great stuff, and Across the Universe is one of my faves. Craig is a green musician. I don't quite know how he makes a rl living, hopefully from playing too, but he is keen not to travel more than necessary. But the reality of technology these days means he doesn't have to, so you can get him playing live in your sitting room from his. But you can also collaborate around the world, and this video is a great example of that, as well as of staging, storyboarding, filming - all the things a rl video would need, but less costly to produce. A super cool example of what you can do with creativity to admire. Musical instruments can be found at Robbie Dingo's place Scafell or at Beerbaum and ifyou want to check out some real music inworld, go sign up at Danmark where my friend Pellegrina hosts some great concerts...

Tsk. While I was waiting for the text editor to load, I worked out why the image below looks skewed, which makes it a deal less controversial than I was about to say. I'm really struggling with who to vote for in next week's general election, and the easy tool I just saw - if you could trust that the statements were accurate summaries of policies - was a handy guide. I actually found it on a page of examples of e-learning content, which I've been focussing on at work (no kidding!) and clicked through. I've been really wanting something that made it easy to compare, so this is worth a go even to see if it makes you think. One or two of the statements I thought I recognised - I shall probably go back and see them with the results in to check. But first of all you're asked to prioritise a set of issues, and this is where I thought it was cheating me at the end. Then you read a series of statements on the issues and select which you think is most important to you. Then it tells you which you picked, and weights them according to the priorities you gave at the start. Easy peasy, just like all those magazine life quizzes. So, for random info, here's my results:

 

And here's how it made me think (incidentally, if you want to check the facts afterwards, there's a link on the last page to all three major manifesti, Labour, Liberal, Tory, and you could, potentially, vote simply on the niceness or otherwise of the covers (or, if you're Dr Gaffel, on the chosen fonts)).

My priorities - well you have 5 options to place them, and I guess I didn't make as much of an interesting final bar chart as I might have done if I had spread these out more (sorry, I may have just given the trick away, but you should still engage honestly). Because in the end I only used three of the criteria. I prioritised Health and Education.

My first reaction to the bar chart was hey, they are different sizes, but I think - having worked out why - that that's quite a cool way of weighting them. So I could quickly see that of my priorities, one was LibDem, one was none of the above. So if I just chose on real priority area, should I choose LibDem? (this is probably what interests me about this flash tool, because actually it unpicked for me on screen some of my real issues). What about the other things - can I vote on one single issue when each party has something I'm not too keen on? Not to mention (as I already didthe other day) that I can't vote for an issue or a party without voting for an individual in my local area who I may not want to.

So then I looked at whose was the element I liked across the areas. Maybe this surprised me, maybe not. Maybe I'll scoot through the manifesti, maybe not. But since you can't see from the graph, I preferred the options for

Labour: Tax, Defence, Immigration
Tory: Spending, Political Reform
LibDem: Europe, Health, Benefits & Pensions
Other: Crime & Policing, Education (colouring it green, because I sure ain't classing I don't really like any of the three on crime and policing any more than each other as I want something dodgily narrowminded!)

No, I will say - I was surprised. So now do I - well - at least read the manifesti properly - look at these again and say, well, after my first priorities of Education and Health, which of the others did I then prioritise, and what balance have they? Do I look at the combinations and value them as a combination (ooh I feel like a judge on Great British Menu - although, perhaps that is all too apt in the circumstances - having been given the menu and found my favourite and least favourite courses are by the same chef...). Which would still come back LibDem, by the look of the prioritising/weighting I did before I knew what it did. The answer is, of course, I've no idea. Still.

This morning on my way to work, I was already pondering this whole schmoodle and wondering whether I could base my vote on the leafletting. Yesterday I came home to another LibDem leaflet. If we voted on quantity, LibDem are almost edging Labour, but Labour go for the bigger document. These two have listened/should have listened to my previous years' comments about size, recycledness and % slagging off the other-ness, but still neither win me over. For info, despite having a frightening number of UKIP, UKIP-looking Independents and at least one BNP candidate, I've only had one leaflet from the BNP. That was the day before yesterday and whilst someone has heard my previous rants and - badly - managed to get a recycled logo on the front of the glossy non-recycled leaflet, closer inspection of said non-recyclable document reveals that it actually says Recycle, not recycled. And I cannot but wince at the substantial coverage of the leaflet with backing photos of our troops. Even with my tutees currently all back safely from the front line, it causes me anguish to see them used in such material. So that leaves us with - oh, well, although we don't usually even have a Conservative candidate, they seem to know it's going to waste their cash here,  one lonely leaflet from the Tory chap, a young man, brought up in Durham but I'm not thinking in a village like mine. Said it was sustainably forested, and was pretty modest in size and coverage. Can't immediately see it in my recycling pile to remember what his name was or what it said. Says more than enough I guess. 

So, who gets my vote on the leafletting election? Probably still the Greens, who printed their manifesto.....in a page in the Big Issue.

I get Faculty Focus landing in my inbox, and of the one that just arrived, I really liked this reminder. It's a bit too long to add as a signature on my work email. Shame....

 3. Reflect upon the meaning of the verb “to educate,” which comes from the Latin educere, “to draw forth.”
We cannot “draw forth” a student’s interest, awareness, and ability if we never leave our egocentric elevation on center stage. Drawing forth suggests a reaching in and a pulling out, a teacher-initiated effort to meet the student where he or she is and move forward together. It implies an other-orientation, a willingness to set our own comfort aside and risk entering the student’s cerebral territory—however unsettling that prospect may be.