Enjoying a Halt

In the quietness of the Benedictin Monastery of Santa Maria do Mar, we can find that “fine pitch” of silence that enables us to listen the otherwise easily imperceptible voice of our inner thoughts. As if a sort of healing power, concealed in silence, could restore our bruised soul.

Too often merged in a turmoil of action we come to loose contact with ourselves up to the point where words sound meaningless and acts feel deprived of purpose.

We just aren’t genuinely present to what we say and do, as if our true self had migrated to a deeper layer of being, thus forcing us to beg for a higher truth and surrender to a more demanding love.

After five days of Teachers’work, we still can feel the strong vibration of holidays reverberating through the joy of being together again and the attractive look of fresh new projects. But this short preparation time is winding down already and in five days a new inspiring and demanding school year will be born again.

I wish we can all enjoy the opportunities, offered along the way, of stopping for a halt, and be restored in depth.

I would also like to list here my summer readings, for I was glad to finally  have been given time to read; in the end, most of these readings relate to our new digital era and the globalization process, and, in a certain sense, play a part in my initiation to “web2.0 philosophy of life”.

1. The World is Flat , by Thomas Friedman

Only while reading it I realized it was a “classic” already; fortunately I’ve found the 2007 edition at our British bookshop.  I will only underline the similarity between the crisis in school both in America and Europe: students from abroad – among us, mainly from Eastern Europe -  consider our studies level too low, while our parents complain that kids don’t have time to enjoy their infancy.

Other chapters in the book led me to think that perhaps both are right. I feel that, twenty years ago, it was much easier to keep students interested and working, even if the curriculum was heavier. We can’t go back, we just have to adapt to the new features of knowing and learning that are emerging in a new world. Web2.0 may conquer the hearts and minds of our students that refuse to learn in traditional ways and don’t know how to replace them yet.

2. Coming of age,  by several authors invited by Terry Freedman

These are wonderful testimonies that I try to spread around me by printing and binding the free download booklet. It shows web2.0 potential to revolutionize school life whenever teachers aren’t afraid of “thinking outside the box” and are eager to support their students along their first steps dealing with technology. I would like to translate these chapters with some friends, but we totally ignore the meaning of so diverse and complex English names for professions and jobs!

3. Horizon Report 08

I’m still reading it: how will “key emerging technologies, critical challenges and significant trends” identified in the Report impact in “teaching, learning and creative expression”? The subject is very clearly explained and the core elements unfold within a sort of epic atmosphere that takes your breath away.

4. Their Space Report

It is about our youth and the new ways they relate to the web. I just began reading it, but I leave it here, for the link may be useful to someone. I received it via Twitter, from nstone

5. The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb : I’m reading  it in Portuguese. It’s a piece of Literature; the central thesis is powerfully liberating, yet, sometimes one seems to feel abandoned, at the mercy of the foreign god of Ramdonness. It has something similar to the other books in that it keeps moving forward into a new direction, dragging us deep into the unknown. As our world is changing, we can’t possibly pretend to capture the meaning of this change by trying to encapsulate it in an ancient and uncritical frame of mind.

6. Notes from my Travels by Angelina Jolie

As a ONCR  Goodwill Ambassador, she reports about Refugees hard conditions of life and outstanding courage to go ahead as well as how she highly prizes the new connnections made in those distant lands where she wasn’t known as an actress to her new friends.

7. The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod a. Backstrom

I’ve read it in Portuguese. The emphasis is placed on the unparalleled success of decentralized organizations even under persecution of more traditional ones. Once again, the central thesis may be applied  to structural changes in our ways of  learning that are rapidly taking shape and pressing schools to become aware and adapt to it.

Now, I would be glad if you share with me one of your holidays readings. Will you?

Creating a Poll

As I returned home from a few days of holidays, I found that Michele Martin was asking us to vote for a web2.0 wednesday logo and to create a poll

Actually, I had been visiting The Edublogger and had found a very useful article about creating polls. I had immediatly tried to create one, intended to my young students, thus written in Portuguese. In this poll, I asked them to choose up to three, among 8 possible group activities, related to web2.0 tools, and meant to enhance their reading and writing skills.

I didn’t post it, though, mainly because kids are still on holidays, but also because I’ve been busy starting a new blog in Portuguese where I would like to “migrate” all the content directly related to school daily work

I have started to translate Miss W. posts about Students Blogging Competition, but when trying to embed a google documents questionaire, it just didn’t work. Now Sue Waters herself is helping me through Twitter;Edublogs is a great Community!

10 minutes later: She did it! How wonderful!

Now,  my poll from Vizu for this Wednesday activity  is not willing to be published either…But here he goes:

Summer Holidays begin today and they will last a whole month, it’s even hard to believe!

I have set up a plan to enjoy my free time and, simultaneously, to engage deeper in this new world of “web-school”.

Thus, I’m participating in a Wiki Educator workshop called L4C – Learning for Content – where newbies may develop basic wiki skills, such us basic editing, text formating, but also different ways to make internal and external links from a wiki page.

We  will also learn the syntax for adding images and formatting them; later we shall be introduced to Wiki Ethics with a special stress on collaboration and interaction between participants; we will then work with pedagogical templates and, finally, we will be enabled to structure educational content.

I didn’t know Media Wiki before, nor the rigourous laws of Coppa – Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act -. I only hope it will be allowed to work in such a wiki with students under 13; this could turn into  a problem if  our  pbwiki – now nicely upgraded to 2.0 – were to be closed as the pbwiki team changed the way users must log in; now a different password is required from each user, thus maybe excluding young students to enter the wiki sharing a single password, as we did before. I tried Wetpaint Wiki too, for my new 5th grade class,  but they remain under the scope of the same law.

Wiki Educator is a Community whose main purpose consists in “planning  education projects” related with “free content” and  building “open education resources“. I understood the Community is deeply engaged with projects that aim to help students from countries in need to have free access to knowledge and education.

This made me think about AJU the institution of social solidarity linked to my school; it is inspired in the founder of our Sisters Congregation . As it also aims to “facilitate children and young people’s learning ” I thought that maybe our wikis could be open to those students, thus sharing  resources and collaboration.

Up till now, Zemanta kept giving me tips about everything I wrote, but along this last paragraph, it sent me to a somehow philosophical article in Wikipedia. However, I’m perfectly aware the web is full of successful intitiaves and dynamic projects concerning  social solidarity. Perhaps the expression I choosed is unusual in English and that’s why  Zemanta couldn’t “grasp its meaning”.

Invitation to Twine

As Michele Martin has clearly explained, in our third  Web2.0 Wednesday we were supposed to invite someone that is totally new to the both fascinating and  somewhat demanding new world of web2.0. We should take in consideration that, often, newbies feel hesitant about “randomly joining online conversations”. Although this hesitation is familiar to me, I’ve tried to join an online conversation in the attempt of making it look confortable enough for a “different kind” of newbie.

Thus, I will adress this invitation to join Twine, first, to someone I admire and consider as a young friend: my ex-student Julia, that is just finishing her master’s degree for  Organizational Behavior master program at Portugal. Her interests are adult’s training, e-learning and b-learning; as for her web2.0 practice, she joined twitter some days ago.

Twine presents it self as a service issued from the semantic web as it is explained in the overview, were the key words are: Organize, Share and Discover , while Twine gets to know you trough your preferences and goes on making recommendations.

Its creator, Nova Spivack, calls it an “interest network” that synthesizes what we were aiming at with blogs, rss and social networks.

Which is the main difference Twine’s creator finds between “twinning” on one hand and blogging and social networking, on the other?

According to him, by interacting in Twine, he can better “participate in many different specific groups … around particular interests and relationships…” Not all different interest communities  can be blended together in a unique network. Or, in Twine, the author says it’s “very easy to create microblogs and microcommunities…”

Commenting this article inside Twine, Javed Alam adds:

“I think Social bookmarking/networking/media is an evolutionary phase of the “new Media” development. It will be very interesting to see who wins. The social networks like facebook, myspace where the members are the focus or the social bookmarking networks where interest brings people together.”

Howard Shippin says that Twine should also include blog features if it aspires to stand free above all the other interest networks:

“If Twine is to be more than a more clever and updated version of services like Ma.gnolia and StumbleUpon, I think that it would be sensible to place an equal emphasis on creating a satisfying interface for original authorship, since this is what would give the service vibrancy and genuine interest value.”

What do you think? The “new Media” development will give advantage to the services that both allow blogging and are interest centered? Do interest centered services bring more people together or, at least, in a more deeply way than member centered services?

Although it is still in beta under invitation version, the actual members have been asked to invite new friends to enrich the experience. I happen to be there by simple chance, I hardly knew where I was entering to when I first subscribed, but I’m enjoying it.

Thus, I feel encouraged  to extend this invitation to all the participants in Web2.0 Wednesdays as well as to all the members of edublogs and still far away, whenever there is someone feeling concerned by what is at stake. Just leave an email.

You could  come to Twine, have a look and judge by yourself. I hope you will come, Julia.

Drawing a Diagram

I must start by the fourth task of our Wednesdays, as I am still waiting for a friend of mine in order to fulfill the invitation to participate in our web adventure, that we have been asked to made up; it is a real invitation, I mean it, so I think it is worth while to wait.

After reading carefully the introduction of “this incredible list of tools” I decided to convert a simple table written in word into a colored diagram from Draw Anywhere after subscribing to the Beta Lovely Charts and after giving up my experience at Gliffy.

According to Cristina Laun, the author of this introduction, ” visual learners learn through seeing and retain more information when it’s presented in the form of pictures, diagrams”, and so on; I’m not a visual learner at all, but I love all kinds of “visual metaphors” as those I’ve found at Webilus I know I’m an  auditory learner and, according to Antoine de la Garanderie, this learning type of person does need to see graphics, schemes, visual representations of what they are or have been listening to, precisely because they don’t do it by themselves, they can’t see spontaneously with the eyes of their minds – when they are studying, for instance, I don’t mean it when remembering facts of life or when acting creatively. Thus I think both kinds of learners find different advantages and both benefit from being provided with some visual format of  their subject of study.

As my table couldn’t fit in the space reserved to the diagram, I only transformed the titles of this table:

In the Jing screencast words can’t be read; I don’t know why they became so small; in the diagram, on the contrary, I recognize that I exaggerated the font size.

I will try to do it better and then I’ll start again.

A Path along the Coast

There is a path along Cascais coast that may be taken as  something unique in both my culture and my personal life.

If you walk along this path facing the open sea you contemplate the Atlantic Ocean as it seems to widen and become as large as the whole horizon; if you walk facing Lisbon, where the river Tejo meets the sea, you will go directly to down town, at Cascais Bay. In any case, you’ll be following the route of the Caravels – the  sailing ships that, in ancient times, departure to or returned from  distant lands as India, Japan or Brazil with their precious cargo.

I often walk along this path, when, returning home, after school, I leave my car in front of the house and go visit my parents. As several collaborators in T.J. original invitation said, the proximity of the ocean is both relaxing and energizing, as if a healing power lay hidden in its deepness.

I stopped taking photos when my way made me turn inland, where an arch-like rock stands – called the “Mouth of Hell”.

The song that went with the photos was the story told by both a sailor whose ship has sunk in front of this coast and a lover who misses someone he calls “Crazy” – as in Carla Arena‘s brazilian song – that used to wait for him at a certain window turned towards the sea. But I wasn’t sure if I had the rigth to use it on line.

I won’t explain why I’m so late to fulfill this task – as Michele Martin won’t stand any such nonsense – but I would just like to add that to me, dealing efficiently with practical items – such as web tools – turns out to be far more difficult than trying to reflect upon splendid posts and put those thoughts in written words.

Thus, after several defeating trials, I just  gave up trying to shorten the presentation with  Windows Movie Maker; then I tried Microsoft Photo Story and Slides Share – but the files couldn’t be uploaded – . Finally, I uploaded the photos to Flickr but they are showed in reversed order and I can’t figure why. Here they are – I hope!

Should I have asked for more help than that which is so generously provided to us at The Edublogger ? Or it’s just a question of training and being patient?

The Path along the Coast

A Web2.0 Bilingual Approach

After trying hard to create an online portfolio – until I realized that I had only read half of Michele Martin’s last post – I finally understood what we were meant to do for our first web2.0wednesday

Then, having gathered some inspiration from the awesome contributions of my fellow bloggers Carla and Kevin I made up this one minute presentation of the prevailing values in web2.0; I used different possibilities offered by  Photofiltre to transform a photo.

The upload system didn’t recognized it at first and kept saying the file was empty; I noticed that I hadn’t name the file at all; I also saved it as a j peg. file, although I’m not sure I needed to.

Reading with Discipline

I’m very happy with the great news: Web2.0Wednesdays is about to start!

To me it’s like coming back home again, like the return to real life, like gathering again with loved persons. I’m ashamed of not coping so well with the total freedom “regime” we have been on the last two weeks, but I simply could not discipline my readings.

Every time I look on Google Reader, my Delicious or Diigo I discover yet a brand new useful tool – as gliffy –   or an irresistible discussion  – as “How do you use Metaphors…” -  or an international event – as k-12online 08 – or an amazing reflection – as some EURODL papers -  that keeps me under its spell: no way to stop reading until I reach the end.
The issue is that there seems not to be an end at all: inventive tools just seem to  pop up each day from every corner, discussions link to new perspectives that multiply into more conversations, deeper reflections  open over unknown territories of thought …we are, indeed, engaged in an endless quest.
From behind  this concert of enchanting and multiple voices I can still listen to  Kirsty Dyer ‘s advice: “Stay focused“. What  meaning  unfolds to me from this call?
I turn again to the Bamboo Project, I take once more Michele Martin‘s questions to discipline my reading, to silence all the inner voices and commit myself with the risk of sharing:

1. What have I learned today?

R: From a Colleague: The light of the Sun takes 8 minutes to reach the earth.

2. About the progress of a particular project:

R: My “blogging pioneers” started the process of commenting; some of them learned how to insert links.

3. My progress in achieving a specific goal:

R: I’ve stopped reading and started writing again. But that’s only because I’m so happy for a new Challenge is about to start!

4. Advice I’ve received from other people:

R: From Michele Martin: engage in reflective practice through simple daily steps.

5. A Question you have about anything:

R: I really  enjoyed reading about digital literacy in the paper: “Towards a Theory of Digital Literacy” I would like to go deeper in this subject, I wonder where to find more of this “stuff”.

6. Joy of the week:

Having been nominated for the Challenge by Britt Wattwood: that’s a great encouragement and a total surprise that I deeply appreciated. thank you, Britt.

Father Stan Came to Town

Every year – for more than 13 years now – a Franciscan friar from South Bronx, New York, keeps coming to Portugal, to visit and preach a retreat to his youth group – “Jovens de S. Francisco”.

Father Stan is a musician, he composes all sort of different kinds of music, such as Jazz, Folk or Rap; he sings and sells his songs all over the world to get some money in order to help his friends in Bronx, where he lives with other friars and friends that were homeless once.

He also goes all over the world to preach, sing and visit friends, specially young ones, as this time he did with us, giving his concert in our school, in June. He came earlier than usual as he was heading to Australia, to collaborate in the organization of the youth world meeting that will be held next July, in Sydney, Australia

Webilus, Understanding the Web trough Visual Metaphors

As Michele Martin says in “If you behave like a disease…“:

“…using metaphors to think about concepts is one of the more powerful ways for me to both learn and to get creative.”

I would add to that the surprising power of visual metaphors to show, simultaneously, a whole set of implications and co-implications that may lay hidden within a complex concept.

I will try to embed Webilus gadget in this post so that anyone who doesn’t know it yet may visit it: it is a French site where we can find the best illustrations and images circulating in internet and whose common subject is the web in general.

These images, duly quoted and linked to their source, may be useful for several different purposes, from marketing ones to educational, and it seems to me that knowing not only how to use them but also how to make them becomes part of 21st century digital literacy.