Sept 29th

I recommended Mozilla Firefox to a friend today who shot back this comment:

"I am quite happy with internet explorer at the moment and do not want to complicate my life with 3rd party stuff that miscrosoft will possibly stuff up in future updates. Just call it paranoia. It is wierd that my contempt for microsoft actually creates an uneasy allegience - perhaps Billy Gates has got me. Arrrghhhh!!!!!"

I think I'll submit it to Mozilla too for comment.

So far so good with my own downloaded software.....

Sept 27th

Thoughts about educational matters for this morning:

• It's hard to think of educational matters when you are on Non Attendance Leave
• It's hard to think of educational matters when your husband goes to hospital
• It's hard to think of educational matters when you have the chance to visit your daughter who lives 5 hour's drive away
• It's hard to think of educational matters when your sister asks you to come over and sew
• It's hard to think of educational matters when the house is dirty and you are home
• Thinking about educational matters will come back to me when I go back to work in a week.......

http://susanlhl.blogspot.com/

September 23rd

Another day is passing and I want to write a few things down before it does.

I installed a new browser this afternoon. It got me to this site without any worries, so we shall see how it performs over the long haul.

It isn't easy to find the chance to reflect on new learnings. I guess that is what happens to all of my adult students. Life just keeps happening, regardless of whether a person is studying or not. On the other hand, you don't want to study all the time - an e-mail buddy just wrote and said her husband claimed she would be the brainiest corpse in the cemetery! I know people I care about won't remember me for the amount of study I did in my life. It's just something I like to do and find useful almost everyday...

Wonder what would happen if I subscribe to this blog at the blogline site then ask it to find similar blogs?

September 22nd 2004

Today I learned how to create a blog, among other things. I attended a session where Stephen Downes presided and while I have known about blogs for some time, I had not really considered how useful they may become to me.

Blogs have some great applications for teaching adult learners if only I can encourage them to give the technology a try. I think I would have a lot less trouble getting teenagers to embrace blogs - in fact they will teach me much about them if I can incorporate them into the online learning environment I am developing for them for next semester. Though that attitude is probably outrageously from the 'old school', and not about the new paradigm for learning at all - I just used the language of the stuck-in-the-old-paradigm-group. Probably I am going to be unable to shed that paradigm, pragmatically, though I guess I can think about ways I can become part of the subtle and gradual shift to a new way of thinking.

I like the idea of open access, open learning, sharing, networking and community knowledge dissemination. I'm a collaboarative community worker/developer in the 'real world' after all. I like the ideas Stephen revealed about some new ways to handle huge amounts of data intelligently.

Stephen, you have left me with more questions than answers today though. Thoughts about Wikis and RSS files and the nature of online learning in general are spinning around in my head. While I like to know about the theory and the back room stuff, I really am a very practical and hands on type person - I like to get in and use things straight away without spending TOO much time contemplating....but you may just make me spend some more time doing that very thing - contemplating.

It is late, and as I can do anything I like with my own blog, I am going to stop now and think some more before adding more to it.

Maybe tomorrow things will be a little more crystallised for me - or not.

:-)