Choose a title -OR, WILLIAM BLAKE'S MAN-MADE MANACLES AS INTERPRETED BY ME

This past week I learned.


This past week I lagged behind with assignments.

I stressed out fretting over assignments.

And I put 2 and 2 together. I experienced something I hardly ever experienced as a student in formal education. The need to complete the task no matter what.

In other words, I put product before progress (Freudian slip -meant process). A notion completely against my teaching beliefs. I don't intend to analyze why at the moment, but I did it. And it sucked -forgive the explicitness.


Especially because I was enjoying all the things that made me get behind. I engaged in different levels of communication and connection with various people;
                          I tried out new things and felt that cherished desire to improve for pleasure. I asked questions I'd  have never let myself ask -in the words of J.R (wonderful NLP Master Practitioner): I asked for my fried egg.


I received a few comments not intended to cheer me up, even though they did -simply a coincidence, serendipity, that brought me back to focus. From a team partner, from a tutor, from my inner voice, from someone in a website team, from my PLN, from some who will perhaps be part of my PLN (perhaps they already are).



I like process. I like pacing - wandering off - losing data that makes you revise and edit without intending to.



I like continuity and constancy in progress. I like fun. I like people.



                                                  And I could never enumerate all the things I learned this week.

Learning, learning everywhere

It's rather late and I wasn't going to blog today, but I've just had a look at the "practice wiki" we use on the course I'm taking (Digital Materials Preparation Techniques) and a smile flashed across my face. We started on Saturday/Sunday, and Tuesday's just gone but I've already achieved a lot! There's lots more to learn, of course, but it amazed me how different it felt to read the introductions this time. There were already a number of them the first time I saw it, when I wrote mine, and I remember feeling a bit daunted. Now I felt at ease and from the Voicethread introductions I was able to put some faces and voices to some names...

I'm also taking Images4Education, which is what I devoted the most time to today -that can be seen in the fact that I now have a Flickr account -with photos!

I still need to get to grips with the third course on Multiliteracy (I'm supposed to tag a post evomlit by the end of this week...this one would be cheating, right?). I'll tag it but not make it count.

It's all actually very exciting. And today I also had a mini exchange in Russian again! (I had to frantically look up words and go back to check which character comes first, but my interlocutors were patient. I hope to meet them again). That's another tool I found on the Web this week: Russian keyboard online . I've been searching for Cyrillic fonts on and off for years now and just this week I find a much simpler way to use the characters and people to use them with!

Let's end it with one of the photos I took today: