Nine great reasons why teachers should use Twitter

Laura Walker's paper on Nine great reasons why teachers should use Twitter is a great starting point for considering the role of Twitter in education. Still, is this a practice that would exclude some of our students? Could this be integrated with the VLE and/or SMS service?

Some of my favourite TED presentations

TED stands for Technology, Education, Design and have some brilliant presentaitons. Today's choice to watch included:

• Clay Shirky's presentation to TED on the new media (incl Twitter, Facebook) & politics (http://bit.ly/swtw3)
• Evan Williams's (co-founder of Twitter) TED presentation about Twitter, its uses and how its developments happen,
• And just for fun: Raves's TED presentation on texting with emoticons. Strange, but good braintraining ;-)

Cycles & lifecycles

It started with thinking about how to balance the latest urgent and importnat tasks (and not Iasm writing, as it is important to me to clear up my mind, to be able to concentrate on the urgent things later... this night/morning).

I was wondering which of the blogs to post to and the decision cycle kicked in:
- Is it worth doing it? Can I change/use it or shall I accept 'no change' ? [see * below] - Is it relevant to this group? (Shall I post it?)
- How much level of detail is needed & how much time I can afford to spend on providing the content? (Sadly, the time is often exceeded, and the quality of the final product is only 80% of the desired perfect version)
- Shall I do it NOW, or postpone it for later and spend the time on a more important/urgent task?

Then it was the turn of my typical workflow & development cycle:
Act, reflect and move on to the next act enriched by the experience of the previous...and staying positive because of the learning that has taken place. (yes, it reminds of Kolb's lifecycle)

Still, often it is not so easy to stay positive and the emotions cycle is in full force:
I started trying to formalise this cycle: curiousity, confusion, frustration, exhaustion, or excitement... It did not look right; reminded me of Kübler-Ross's grief cycle, but had a positive start and then I found this model of the Market Emotions cycle, which helped me with this task (I had to think of a context to test whether it is 'correct': i.e. when I pilot/test a new web tool or gadget). And here is my emotions cycle:
- Curiosity;
- Thrill/Excitement;
- Euphoria/Anxiety;
- Recognition of reality;
- Desperation/Satisfaction;
- Despondency/Relief;
- Urge to talk about the findings, the impressions and the feelings in search of conceptualisation of the value of the 'object of my affection';
- Quiet observation (depression?hope?Optimism ?);
- Acceptance;
- Satisfaction with the ooportunity to test object and self.

I wish I had more time to find what theory is available on these cycles... [Action point]

And through this journey throught the cycles, here is what else was 'discovered' :

* I did not know that the prayer to have "the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to challenge those you can, and the wisdom to know the difference" is attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr? I thought it's much older than 1934...

** some beautiful thoughts on human curiosity and ingenuity required to go through the lifecycle experiences (heroic qualities? :-) ).
"Some of the transcendent qualities that underline scientific inquiry become focal: curiosity to know just for knowing’s sake, knowledge sought regardless of its utility, and ingenuity and persistence in the search".

I am a student (again ;-> )

I have started my first formal online tutoring course with Oxford Brookes. I have attended many workshops (both online and face-to-face) related to different tools, techniques and approaches to e-learning and e-tutoring, but most of them were 1-4 hours long. This course lasts 1 month and the most exciting thing so far is the fact that the groups is so diverse in location and background.
There is another great point about this course - it encourages the use of a learning diary, which is a great news for my blog - finally I will give a higher priority to this little 'corner' of the virtual universe and will make time to post on a more regular basis. My major reason for not writing here as often as I want is that I still struggle to find the balance and the right approach. Currently, at this very quiet time (in terms of teachign responsibilities) I have 2 blogs within the University VLE, one for my online students on Research Methods and another one as a member of the BU community (OK, in fairness, I has posted only a couple of messages there, of which one was to direct people interested in my life and posts to this blog). I have resorted to maintain separate blogs for the benefits of my students - I am sure they would either be confused if they see a comment that relates to another course, or would have to sieve through a lot of other posts that are nor concerning them prior to finding some useful for their unit post. Yes, I can hear the comment that they will learn more from reading other posts, e.g. the Diigo one, but the reality is that my workload will increase due to the number of questions/complaints on the difficulty to use this source of information. And, yes, I have given due consideration as to whether discussion boards and announcement boards could not be used for some of these details, and the answer is that blogging is the best option. With 180+ students on some units and 4+ units to teach + a general research blog as part of my day-to-day life, I am trying to find some pragmatic and effective way of managing these blogs.

Any advice from those who are familiar with this problem and have found their optimum solution will be very welcome.
[OK, sadly, it's time to stop and get kids ready for school. They need to be there in time and the most frequent cause for this goal being missed is me and my work. If there is anyone that really works hard and has achieved some progress in improving my time management, these are my daughters. Setting all watches 4-5 min ahead does not help in my case... Time for coco pops :-)]