Paid Employment

I got a phone call at 6:45 this morning telling me that Dorothy had been knocked down with the flu and wasn’t going to be able to fly down from Auckland to facilitate our Waimea South ICT cluster’s Pedagogy and Podcasting day and could I possibly step into the breach! I have not taught for the last eleven weeks while I have helped my mother cope with a diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease so the prospect of paid employment was welcomed. Back to the chalkface next term though!

Filling Dorothy’s shoes was a daunting prospect but I had a good part of my ULearn podcasting wiki already prepared and was intending to put the finishing touches on the presentation next week. I needed advice with a couple of points so I turned to my Twitter mates for answers.

Firstly- could multiple people edit a wiki page at the same time? Thanks Chris Betcher from Sydney for your advice on this one- the answer is basically no! So we used Webnotes instead to record or podcasting topics and I will collate them to one page later.

Then I wanted to Skype in an expert in podcasting- luckily Jane Nicholls, from Dunedin was available and Paul Harrington from Wales offered as well.

Lastly I had forgotten the keystrokes needed to zoom in on the cursor on my Mac- not having taught for a while I had forgotten what it was (OPTION+COMMAND+PLUS) BTW- thanks again Jane! And I also learnt a whole new way I had never heard of before from John Pedersen from Wisconsin and Chris again from Sydney. You hold the CTRL key and scroll in with your mouse wheel). I love it- thanks guys!

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Anyway the day went well and the room was full of concentration and podcasts by the end- we even managed to embed some of the podcasts in our blogs using the Firefox Unplug plug-in and a clever bit of code that I had already given directions for in my Bling4yrblog blog!

Don’t tell anyone but I would have done it for free!

Virtual Support

Jane Nicholls created a Troubled post today that had me thinking. She is feeling troubled about the balance between spending too much time with virtual friends as opposed the face to face variety.

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I have spent the last twelve weeks in self imposed exile from many of my face to face friends as they follow their careers and family commitments. This self imposed exile from paid employment was brought about for the need to care for myself and my mother as we came to terms with her diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease and the failure of my knee joints to osteo-arthritis and cartilage depletion meaning I had to spend quite some time on crutches.

During this time I had more time than usual to explore things on-line and less time with face to face friends as I dealt with doctor and hospital visits.

My virtual friends were not there to help mow the lawns or do the household chores but then my face to face friends weren’t there either as they worked full time or pursued their own family commitments. Some face to face friends stayed in contact via Web2.0 tools- email and Skype.

Some of my global, virtual friends though offered me moral support as well. Although I have never met some they are as real as people that live more locally. They helped me feel connected and still part of things even when I was forced to stay at home. Paul (Wales) offered moral support and conversation, Sheryl (Virginia) invited me to join her in Shanghai, Chris and I worked together in Sydney, Miguel (Texas) lent me a hand with my tech problem, Ewan (Scotland) included us in the birth of his baby girl and I communicated with others via Twitter, email and commenting. Some of these people I will probably never meet face-to-face but I still call them friends. These people are all part of my real life.