Last week we hosted an exciting event here in Nelson- a CORE Education Breakfast. The Loop Regional Support programme NEN extension group sponsored the breakfast with DK as our invited guest speaker. To my knowledge this hadn’t happened before. As our regional cluster comes to an end the sense of urgency of getting our messages adopted seems even more acute and DK sharing his thoughts about using social media and developing a personal learning network fits well with our cluster goals.

DK shared his insights with graphical examples and plenty of good humour. A couple of things resonated with me in particular.

•  The first being that of ‘desire paths’. I hadn’t heard of that concept before. But I like the notion. We get where we need to be in the best way we can. That desire path takes us where we want to go rather than where others might like us to. We do what we need to to get the job done and sometimes designers who think they know best for us- don’t.

•  Aim for goals not instructions. I tend to hand hold when I am helping people with their ICT. People are generally grateful for that and maybe it is time as the cluster draws to a close to pull back a little and let people work it out for themselves more (resilience). I still have some problem with that though cos I think back to my own experiences when I started blogging. I didn’t know anyone else who was doing it, had no idea where to go to find out really apart from Yahoo! And I didn’t know what questions to ask a web search engine any way. I spent hours, days, weeks trying to get it sorted. If I hadn’t been so determined I would have given up as the whole thing was so new to me. If I can help cut out some of the struggle then maybe that’s a good thing. What do you think?

• DK also suggested that it was the metacognition around blogging that was the best thing about doing it. The thinking about it was the most important thing. I know that for me there are many posts that never see the light of day. I craft them in my head, write them up and the moment passes and I don’t actually publish them. The reflection involved in blogging helps me sort stuff out in my head.

• Your blog will be successful if it is an intersection not a destination. My class blog has now over 94,000 views over time. How did we get there? We got there because people go to the blog to be taken to other places like other web services that we need like our maths wiki, or our Google Apps Log in  or whatever. I hadn’t thought of it like that but DK is right. The hyperlinks on this blog and my class blog will take you to other interesting places and hopefully encourage you to return to find more interesting links with new posts or looking through the categories.