Funny how life is isn’t it. Sometimes a smallish idea can manifest into something that could be great. Sue Tapp set up a Flash meeting tonight for Oz educators as an opportunity to touch base and make some connections outside of our blogs and twitter. She planted a seed and didn’t even know it. It was great and I want to publicly thank Sue for making the effort to get this meeting organised – 20 people participated and it was useful but we did have problems with the setup. This led to the always thinking Sue Waters moving to ustream and then elluminate to see if they worked any better.
Once in elluminate the seed started to grow. I came in late after attending to homework and kid’s bedtime and the discussion was in full swing. Vicki Davis was acting as moderator with Sue Waters and the discussion focused on digital citizenship and the best way we could educate our students, parents, colleagues, administrators and education departments about the value of participating as global citizens via digital means. As a reult of the discussion, a Google group has been set up – Advocates for Digital Citizenship, Safety and Success. If you’re a Teacher-Librarian join and contribute to the discussion. This is an area where TLs should be active and an active TL is their own best advocate. We don’t need policy documents drawn up to prove our worth -we need to be active in our schools and leading the charge in terms of modelling and no-one will question the need for TLs in schools.
There was a lot of energy in the session and twitter talk was buzzing afterwards. It’s promising to have a global group forming and will give people an avenue through which ideas can be shared which may affect perception and initiate education and change. Let’s see what kind of tree grows from the small seed. (Being an Aussie seed it’s bound to be a eucalypt – huge with lots of vigorous growth!)
Lucacept - intercepting the Web 
Sue definitely did an excellent job and is such a good idea. It was good to see people’s faces and hear them talk. We should all thank Sue because she is the reason why everything happened tonight .
Also it was a bit of fate – I was meant to be away but Mr13 not well. Vicki had got up early cause she had a headache and saw my twitter. Obviously was meant to happen.
Ustream was just one of those things. Hubby and Mr9 already left for the holiday so I had extra play time. I was keen to compare Ustream cohost with Flash meeting. Unfortunately there was no way cohost wanted to send me the message to ask requests.
It was good that I had Elluminate available just a shame that video in Elluminate tends to cause problems with bandwidth.
Vicki Davis is amazing and it was excellent to have someone with her fantastic moderation skills move it along. We’ve needed this to take the issues with student blogging from just talking about it to actions that can start making a difference. Sometimes you just need that extra person that looks at the topic from a different angle to make things happen.
We planned for the next meeting to be in 2 weeks time and I hope to bring together information about it next week when I get back. Have a good week while I’m away — should be a bit more peaceful for you.
Could not join y’all this morning but saw the Twitter buzz going on (and joined the Ning site Vicki set up). Have just started reading Clay Shirky’s HERE COMES EVERYBODY. He talks about how the internet has allowed for a third alternative to organization over free markets or bureaucratic management – rapid group coalescence around common themes without either managerial direction or outside profit motives. Your group is a perfect example.
Thanks Jenny it was pretty amazing the way the whole series of events played out! I hadn’t used Flashmeeting before, but there were twenty people there to chat with as you saw and it was quite a wonderful experience – ‘old timers’ and newbies all saying hello.The fact that Sue waters could be there helped transform it from the chat session it was to something that really went to the point and then Vicki transformed us all. Simon Brown is running the next meeting and I can’t wait to see what happens next
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