Sunset

Sunset
Originally uploaded by netopNyrop.

This is from a sunset, travelling by train one week before winter solstice.

I' now trying to contribute this postcard to the Webheads Happy new year wiki, so I needed to track the correct URL - and found out I could do this by blogging it from my Flickr!

Nordic Voice conference update

The Nordic Voice online conference runs for two more days.

Tomorrow Fridayat 14:00 GMT will be my turn to let a hundred tongues speaking. I've invted a few virtual guests, Language teachers from Webheads in Action,We're going to share some stories about working with collaborative blogs and inviting guest teachersto create authentic learning situations. Sergei Grid from the University of Minsk in Belarus will join me, perhaps also Dafne Gonzalez, PhD, from Venezuela and Teresa d'Eca, Lisbon, Portugal, Rita Zeinstejer from Argentina, Wendy Seale-Bakes from North Vancouver - we will have to improvise, as there has been as well personal as technical constraints.

at 16:00 GMT we are expecting Arne Theo Schenk from Germany. He is going to share with us an intercultural project where students from six European countires were brought together to workwith the idea of a borrowed identity, taking different roles and playing in front of a camera, then producing a DVD with multimedia material for discussion and reflection.

I'm looking forward to this session as I will be participant in a project meeting later this month where Anne Fox and Theo will also be present.

We had to cancel last minute a session with Katarina Lundin Akesson from the university of Lund, as she has lost her voice. One of our most qualified Nordic Voices... hopefully whe will be able to share her research on Nordic youth and their understanding of neighbour languages, with our community of practice on a later occasion.

I wanted to show some Flickr badge, but...

apparently the Java flash code was not accepted by blogger.

Bundsgaard's contribution to Danish language ICT didactics -

The Danish language teacher is usually the primary home class teacher in our folkeskole (primary and lower secondary). And, information and communication technologies may foster a changed view on language literacy

Jeppe Bundsgaard, Ph.D defended his thesis on Friday 12, at the Danish University of Education (where I've been studying since 1994, a never ending love story) and I decided to attend the ceremonial event. His research and theory building seem to be extremely relevant to our work with the Nordic Voice online conference that we're preparing, so I decided to print the press release that was just ready, and bring it with me, just in case I met people who would like to know. I would like to dive deeper into this research study and find ways to introduce this to our Community of Practice, with an invitation to Jeppe and his research partner, Lisbet Kühn - for future collaboration. Their book and exemplary action research would make some good inspiration and discussion stuff as a contribution to our CoP (still under devleopment, not yet a reality).

The Nordic Voice conference and my proposal

We're almost ready with our homepage for the coming online conference & CoP, the Nordic Voice online http://www.nordiskestemme.dk (still need to fix some bugs and update content).

This is my proposal:

Let a hundred tongues speak online – virtual guest teachers encourage students to speak up
The language in function develops through authentic conversation, but many students find it difficult to engage in conversation using a language they aren’t good at. The net brings easy opportunities to invite a virtual guest teacher into the language classroom, to encourage authentic conversation.
Different ways of exchange among language educators has become a common practice among participants in Webheads in Action (WIA) – a virtual and international community of practice of language teachers and others sharing the interest of virtual learning environments and teaching strategies. The active WIA participants are collaborating since many years around their own professional development, peer teaching, experimenting with tools, and they have developed this collaboration style through informal meetings, mutual help and mentoring, and their experiences are often documented in articles, in public online conferences, and in education research.

Swedish blogosphere: kulturblog from the Book fair

Tomorrow opens the Swedish Bokmässan (Book fair) in Göteborg. A sign of the time is that a team of journliastbloggers are getting paid (apparently sponsored by the giant publisher, Bonniers, as well as the daily tabloid journal Expressen - to blog direct, on location.

As I'm not much into Swedish journalism. their names are not familiar to me - Isobel Hadley-Kamptz and Björn av Kleen. But now I can read what they read on their long travel by (train I suppose), whom they have made interview appointments with for the coming days, quite a lot of name dropping - and other minor reflections. They also try to make some ping pong with comments. Apparently sketchy styled, instant writing on the fly, but even the spontaneous looking could be prepared in advance. I like the idea of instant journalism as it is used here, although I don't know how much I would pay attention to this sort of blog myself - not unless I had the intention to go there myself. I used to go to the Danish Bogmesse for many years to get inspiration for my reading and to hear some of the authros tell stories about their books, but lately I have found this kind of mass venue to noisy and too crowded for my liking - and my tinnitus. So yes, perhaps a Danish Book fair blog would attract me and make me read day for day. After all I am Danish, I live here and this is where I would find the books that are published here; we only rarely see books translated from Swedish to Danish. Which does not matter to me as I read Swedish with ease; but it does matter because Swedish literature would not be exposed and discussed often here. Same goes of course for Norwegian, Finnish or Icelandic literature. And even less I know about Faroean authors from today. If there is any worth mentioning.

SO -I will keep an eye on the Swedish Bokmässan Kulturblog in the coming days and see if I get to know a bit more about what's shaking hinsidan- on the other side of Öresund - now that we do have the new Öresundsbron, the bridge connecting Sealand in Denmark and south Sweden, there should be access to a broader exchange of culture.

http://expressen.se/bloggen/kultur/

Wiki wise collaboration

Wikis, wikis - are they really as easy as peanut butter? This is what Jay Cross is exploring and reporting. He's currently prepareing a conference with a dozen people , using a wiki system called pbwiki.

I like how he introduces the Wiki concept and advantages to his fellow group members, pointing at simplicity, transparency and the need to get out of your confort zone and try doing new things!

I am working on a wiki-based project plan right now as well; I used to find wikis a bit tough, yuou would have to write html code, and I could not keep track of pages: today's wikis are less intimidating because you work with a rich text editor and a hierarchic system showing pages and subpages. Also, I was skeptical because I did not trust the openness: I was fearing that evil intruders would spoil the fun; but apparently there is no loss of data, you just go back to a previous version. I'll get back with more on working wiki wise. Our wiki is a wikispace, good looking and easy.

Blogosphere in primary school - according to Steve o'H

For some time, I've tracked the tag blogosphere, and today I I found the most beautiful bid on what this means to young learners, primary school kids in the UK. It is a film with interviews of teachers and students explaining why blogs is just such a great deal. The film maker is Steve o'Hear whose deep insight in ICT, children and human kind(ness), facilitates the mission of this video. Although most of these enthisuast young children interviewed were just ordinary girls and boys from the after school blog club, I was most of all deeply impressed about the autistic children's approach; Their teacher explained how the way blogs are constructed helps them focus and gives them a voice! Also, some foreign children reported that blogs allowed their distant families living abroad to stay updated with the child's work.

I'm hoping to obtain Steve's benevolent presence as one of our invited guest speakers and inspirators, in the coming EVO 2006 blog course (more about this soon).

The Blogosphere video will be streaming from Teachers' TV

Tagging in Blogger

I have not yet found out the best way to tag posts in Blogger blogs. Leigh Blackall agve me a hint some days ago as a comment to my cry for help. Now I'll try a traditional HTML hand coded string and see if I got it right; I tried to do this from my Blogger for word program (where a menu bar takes me straight from inside my Office word document and to this very blog) - but with no good result

This is a test! I think I'd better do this in Edit HTML mode that in the more wysiwig style Compose window - here goes:

tagging

Cool Tools 2005 evaluation

Cool Tools 2005  evaluation
Last week,  I had the pleasure to participate in the Australian Cool Tools conference, and today they sant a survey to ask for my degree of interest and satisfaction. As always, I prefer the extra comments that were also encouraged, over the simple grading of statements. So, as not lo lose sight of my evaluation thoughts, here they are.

More and more people become confident and feel at home in Elluminate, like I think they were in those two sessions I participated in, and this creates a pleasant flow in the conversation with presenters. This is a meeting competency so much needed by educators and presenters,  which I've remarked is  developing over time, indicating that we do need to encourage playful practice lab sessions at any possible moment!

Well - I find that "this type of event" is getting better and better for each time I join something happening online. Just keep working ahead, these social technologies and the individual skills to use them for common needs, always will grow best in dynamic, interactive community contexts, and so it be!

Podcast solutions book by Geoghegan & Klass

Podcast solutions – a book coming with a cd packed with podcasts about the book

Just started reading the book that just arrived from Amazon, UK  - to my home here in Farum Denmark. I'm a regular listener and chat participant in the edtechtalk podcast every Sunday at 2 pm GMT. They even invited me for a spontaneous Skype  interview some weeks ago - to talk about a weekend course in blogging was facilitating at Knowplace.

Ever since I've been sold  - simply need to find out how to work around podcasting on my kichen table - how can teachers to make language learners want to listen and talk?
This is what Webheads are talking about - every week, from all over the world. Just listen  - so many different accents!

I'll follow up with postings in my blog about this book and what I get to know, from now on.

Michael Geoghegan’s blog

UBC Lamberson & Lamb on RSS in Horizon Wimba

This evening's Horizon Wimba session was devoted to yet another presentation of RSS
Enlivening your course with RSS
by Brian Lamb and Michelle Lamberson from UBC. Vancouver BC. Rich contenbt, many inspiring examples, they did app sharing & webcams and apparently no major glitches, just a bit of echo (when one of tghem forgot to turn off his microphone when she was talking).

We were using the newest update of Horizon Wimba, my audio listening worked smoothly and I think I had more access to some control over my own window, also I found a (cryptic to me, but potentially interesting) connection log, might help me detect when and why I am disconnected from time to time in almost every online session I'm in - even on Skype. And of course also figure out how to troubleshoot similar events happening to other users.

Apart from my observations on the virtual classroom functionality, tis session was another proof of the folksonomic wave now also invading education, with updated content on topic oriented RSS aggregated pages, tagging your curriculum, etc etc. Students will need to learn developing critical evaluation skills more than ever before in education I think - they have access to tons of information updating minute for minute, but what should they trust, and how to create a blogroll of one's own! This kind of stuff is part of digital literacy of tomorrow - and of today, now is here!

TAFE session: social software, tags, creative commons

Listening to a great presentation by Sean Fitzgerald and Leigh Blackall from TAFE just now, they're sharing their knowledge and links for all sorts of collaborative www2 social software - blogs, wikis, tagging, blog rolls, creative commons. Here's a link to their wikispace

Now, right now I'm wondering where I can tag blogger posts! Don't see any tag place in this Rich text editor (logging in from mac today, may have to look for how this looks in Windows.)

Which blog tool for 2006?

Which blog tool would you prefer for collaborative work with students in 2006?

This is an inquiry to find out how to make the most out of the coming EVO 2006 session on blogs. Anna Koorey is coordinating a proposal, Bob, Jane and I have accepted to teamwork on this while Bee and some other key persons have said that they would like to present when we get to the real thing.  And today, Anna and I have been brainstorming which aspects of blogging in education we would like to focus on. At http://elgg.net they have developed a tool for collaboration and portfolio building, it is still under  development and a major update is about to be released soon I think, hopefully with as more up to date rich text editor that does not require HTML skills. I do like their FAF feature, a cluster of friends of a firend that allows you to read  text and image blogs across participants in a group, or rather people whose interests are connected somehow. Still, it is a very small community with only few active blogs as far as I can find out. There is a file folder for each and perhaps also for groups – will need to dig deeper into this to find out pro & con. Design is not fancy, simplicity rules, but probably this would change whenever someone starts designing nicer skins for your choice.

Another possibility for the collaboration part of the session would be working with blogger , as in this group blog. I’m personally fond of their newest gadget which is a plugin for MS Word – I’m now typing and formatting from a Word document, using a Blogger menu bar with four buttons: Blogger settings, Open Post, Save as  draft and Publish. Very neat tool. And Blogger is so easy to explain to newbies  - they can start instantly working on postings and not worrying  about formatting as they have a nice interface with tools menu, links creator, etc. Also the access to post audio messages from audioblogger is good.

And then, there’s Yahoo 360 that has merged with Flickr, and from where you would also have access to your Yahoo email, your groups, your Messenger contacts and your  own homepage editor  at geocities, etc etc
http://360.yahoo.com/susannenyrop
http://elgg.net/netopnyrop
http://worldofwebheads.blogspot.com

Edtechtalk featuring; Sus Nyrop about blogging enhanced

This weekend, i have been quite busy online, with the workshop at knowplace about blogging enchanced with images and audio, and with the interview in Edtechtalk, where I was invited with a short delay by Jeff Lebow, the developer of Worldbridges.com
This was really fun and a good experience for me to practise my spoken language. First, we had a long voice chat with Daf on vacation in Spain, using a cell phone and being Skyped into a conference webcast direct. We're still pretty new to this innovative format - but I find this is not hard to do. Welll - it was very improvised and I would like to find out what I really said when it came to my 25 minutes interview.

You never know who would be listening to his, but surprisingly I had several Skype calls while being on the air which I had to refuse as I did not kn ow what to do with them; it was not my conference and there is a limit of five in the Skype conf room. Geoffrey Kaye from Australia was listening and would like to ask some questions in the call during the show, but talked with him later; we met online some years ago. He's currently working with some third world countries as an edtech consultant, and we discussed how satellite cell phones may help to bring information, communication and e-learning to people in remote areas. I would indeed wish to learn more about his field of work, in some African states. I hope that he will get in touch with the Worldbridge people and suggest a topic for a session.

Welcome back dear Wacom pad!

Welcome back dear Wacom pad!

Did you ever try to make a drawing with the computer mouse, with a desperate feeling of being brought back to the scribble age? Then you would probably imagine something more well known to your hand movements, such as a digital pen tool. That was one of my very first computer gadgets - a Wacom pad with a pen, allowing my drawing efforts to look not so clumsy. But after I moved over to a modern laptop, I could not use it because the old Wacom pad used the mouse port on my keyboard - and newer computers use USB or firewire. I've been missing this tool indeed.

When I saw a modern USB version Wacom Volito 2 on sale today, in Netto -  for just 249 Danish Kroner (about thirty-some Euros or US dollars, I was instantly hooked and went home, happy as a child, to rediscover how cool it is to be able to draw just naturally with a pen, or a sharp pencil, or a smooth broad brush, or an eraser.

My Open Weekend on blogs 2: add images and audio

** Blogging with Images & Voice facilitated by Sus Nyrop who returns after the success of her initial workshop on blogging. Come one and all: new to blogging or experienced bloggers. Blogging (the online diary) has become a hyper popular and easy way of creating and sharing online content. This goes for the educational as well as the business purposes, from creating students’or teachers' portfolios like work in progress, and group projects, completed with comments from their peers and visitors, to corporate efforts to create loyal consumer community around their products or services.

There exists a multitude of free blog services that you could use for text blogs. When you want to supply text with images and voice (or even video), you would need to find the help programs to realize this.

In this weekend, we’ll have a look at examples using blogs with images and audio, and hopefully also sharing own experiences and trying to help each other with questions and eventual trouble shooting. We'll look at tools and techniques in general. If there's any interest, I plan to host an online synchronous session, probably in my virtual Elluminate office at LearningTimes.

Bio:
Sus Nyrop has been actively experimenting and exploring how to practice online cmunication and to use the internet for knowledge sharing, cultural exchange and social interaction with educators and students around the world.She has many years of experience with education in general. Today, she works as a free lance online education consultant, community builder and mentor. As an active member of Webheads in Action since 2001, she has taken part in many online blog experiments as a guest teacher conference presenter and mentor. In this weekend workshop, she will use examples from language educators collaborating around blogging, and also share examples from the world of small online business where images and audio blogging help creating the homely atmosphere of a loyal group of clients and consumers.Please jump in and share your ideas - or find out why blogging has besome so popular!

For this purpose, I've created an external blog at the new Yahoo! 360 - fresh & clean from the kitchen lab :-)

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/susannenyrop

Thinking aloud in the blogosphere

Reading other people’s thinking is sometimes surprising me. And often making me laugh, as well. Only now and then I feel like I could almost have been thinking this or that myself. But I enjoy trying to understand what makes people think what they do – and write it down. After all, thinking is a private action and only when you manage to communicate your thinking one way or another, the thoughts become part of the social communication between tow or more persons. A conversation with only two participants can be very intimate, and may never pass the edge of privacy. But as soon as thoughts are transformed into printed text and published, there a potential audience. Just in case the search engine finds the blog text, or you’re promoting it, perhaps in emails for your friends or on mailing lists. I know I do have a handful of readers and that I’m not really careful with my blog; who are the target readers and for which cause am I blogging? These are questions I’m raising in my thoughts, discussing with myself and occasionally also with some others. What I like best of all about blogs are the feedback you sometimes give to others, or even receive on your own blog. Only a few times I’ve had to delete meaningless or harmful messages thT were posted in my blog disguised as comments. In general, the comments are relevant and very welcome.

Blogging as a phenomenon of making thoughts go public has meant that many people who would perhaps otherwise never have managed to get a voice in public, start thinking of writing for others, instead of just for your dear diary, or the occasional letter among friends of family members.

Blogs - just as easy as text editing

Only those who know the limitations of simple editor for blog posts would understand the ease of being able to publish a text to my blog from a normal text document. This means I’m able to read my message in one frame before posting. I suppose this will make a difference for using blogs in education, such as portfolio blogging.

Blogging from inside my Word program!!

This is really a helpful feature – Blogger for Word!
I’ve installed a Word –to-Blog plugin (for Windows only, sorry mac users), and this means I get my menu buttons in Microsoft Office Word for Blogger settings – where I can login directly to my blog!
Now this will be my very first testing of this tool; I can see many ways this would ease writing and editing before submitting a note on my blog.  

Thanks to Buth in Kuwait for this tip!

Webheads meet Puerto Rico

Today Karen Garcia was back home in Puerto Rico, at the university where she was once a student (must be quite a while?) Karen was presenting at a conference to an audience in a big computer lab, using the Elluminate virtual classroom so that there was room for online presence as well; Doris Molero Martins from Maracaibo, Venezuela, and Renata Suzuki from Japan were co-presenters in a lively dialogue. Also present online in the Elluminate office at Learningtimes were Daf, Venezuela, Tere, Portugal, Sergei Minsk, Belarus and a woman from the UAE (Nuna?) - and at the end of this session we were joined by Vance, also from UAE, and Bob from Texas; a pretty global group. I'll look forward to read the paper written for this presentation!

The presentation was referring to last winter's amazing experience where Doris Karen and Renata were the key persons in the weekly course over 13 weks, Doris in a classroom with colleagues from the university, and about a dozen webheads from all over, working with learning theories applied to practice. We were using a free video material and lesson plan for this, applied in the actual context (Will have to check details and add some links later, but wanted to blog this event before bedtime ).

English for Urban Planning, a Venezuelan student blog

Veronica is blogging about our recent collaborative Bridge project; she is a student in Dafne's English for Urban Planinng class. She reported her own thoughts and some supplementary research, and added some photos. This blog demonstrates how students can use blogging for their portfolio.

English for Urban Planning

OK - from mess to systematic order

Inspired by Rosa Say and David Allen's Getting Things Done, I've been clearing up some shelves and binders with messy papers that I may or may not need. Only those that seem really relevant in the actual context are now placed orderly in a box with 8 "pending folders".

This processing task helped me decide for the chapters of my paper, as well as getting rid of useless and irrelevant stuff.





This is how the situation looked like before:

Reading Management With Aloha

Rosa Say, a former resort hotel manager from Hawai'i has written an amazingly wise and thought provoking book about how to "manage with Aloha" - bringing Hawai'i's universal values to the world of business. This is the book I've been waiting for from Amazon for weeks. Although I've only read parts of it yet, this will be a must study project. The way Rosa describes the everyday life world of hotel management using traditional Hawai'ian life values has many principles and values in common with the Covey Seven Habits approach, but somehow the Aloha management is easier for me to comprehend and accept. I think there are three main reasons. First, hotel care for costumers may have many similarities with the preschool and pedagogy field where I come from. The examples sometimes make me think of situations I've experienced where the parents of small children also need to become part of our community and share our values.
The other reason is her language, the linguist approach where all these values are derived and motivated by using Hawai'ian names and the hidden meaning of each term is explained in details. I'm so fond of learning another language and the related philosophy that it will take me some time to put this book away. A third reason for my strong attraction is how Rosa Say has developed a strong internet presence and community. Even before reading this book, I've been receiving newsletters and involved myself in discussions, posted comments in her blog, etc. This really matches my own future dream of writing a book-with-a-blog and becoming an online mentor & coach. But first and foremost, I must see to get finished with my final exam paper writing.

I've been talking about Rosa Say and her book Management With Aloha earlier in this blog, and will contibue to do so as I read. And my only reason for not spening more time yet on all this, is that paper, I've made a promise to my mentor that I will devote maximum attention to the writing project which means I've only been online for a very short period every day.

Image hosting in Blogspot (www.blogger.com)

If you're using a blogspot account like I am on this blog, you will find the new image feature helpful. Until now, you had to create external links to images hosted somewhere else on the net, such as Flickr or Picasa. Now it seem to be possible for us to upload images directly to the blogspor server; the message editor has a new image icon button in the menu bar.

Yes, it works. And the title of your image does appear underneath!

Great Bridges day

Great Bridges day
Read more about this Webheads event at my blog www.xanga.com/susnyrop
and see my slides presentation in my flickr album www.flickr.com/photos/netopnyrop/sets/491420/

Revitalization of small languages

"I ka ‘ölelo nö ke ola, i ka ‘ölelo nö ka make." In the language there is life, and in the language there is death. Hawaiians have a proud history of taking advantage of a wide range of media, from song to dance to print, to preserve and the life of their language and culture. Now they are using the computer to provide one more powerful voice for language use and revitalization, and their example can be of potential benefit to other indigenous communities throughout the world." Read more in an article by Mark Warschauer and Keona Donaghy, University of Hawaii, 1997

This is parallel to what now happens in so many places around the world, such as Greenland, a country still closely connected with Denmark ecomonically and culturally, but now struggling to revitalize their own language. Some days ago I heard in the daily Greenland news broadcast (in Danish), that the streets are now renamed as they used to carry traditional Danish names. There is also an ongoing discussion whether Danish or English should be considered as the future first foreign language in the schools. In Denmark people have a tendency to ignore that we used to have colonies in the past, and often romantizing the almost paternal care taking for the Inuit people in Kalaalit Nunaat (which we still know as Greenland). No doubt that there were also rich resources to exploit, as well as todays' very strategic position on the US military world map. Can a more direct access to active usage of their own language embedded in their cultural heritage help the indigenous population to feel pride in their roots and seek to develop local strategies for survival as a people? I think that knowing your own language in an uptodate version must be powerful in achieving this.

Managing with Rosa Say and her Hawaiian Aloha approach

In the past, I've been working more or less systematically with getting hold on my files, my emails, my links - all that external knowledge that my memory does not hold willingly. I've been looking into the self management ideas that are so trendy nowadays, suffering myself from serious disorganization in my everyday work. Well, these bad habits of not getting things done do not include those time scheduled appointments that I don't miss; after all, the traditional one year paper-and-spiral calendar has been part of my habit since I was in the pre-teens. And I know where I store my library books and I'm timely getting them back where they belong, almost always. I know where I can find my own books, too - and I have bookmarked important pages. I even keep my printed material in binders, but from there it begins to get harder to retrieve - the systematic is not consistent, and perhaps I even forgot that I've printed out those papers anyway. What has made our lives both funnier and more complex to manage and keep hold on, are of course the digital content.

Well, and all this brings me to some popular best seller management advisors, such as Stephen Covey's 7 habits and David Allen's GTD, or getting things done. In the entrepreneurship class project that I'm following once a week this year, our brilliant and engaged teachers are approaching these principles from many different views - personal life management, project planning, accountability issues, mentoring, business and career coaching, networking and more. And they all have their personal preferences and ways of sharing the good news. I guess that's just me who need to find out my own way and even intuitively resist against too many quick fixes with smart oneliners and neat diagrams. On the other hand, I can feel how all of this is fertilizing my ways of getting things done - first things first - using a compass instead of a time planner, etc.


But who's this Say?

Some weeks ago, I was reading a book discussion at the Virtual Chautaugua and was struck by someone apparently talking to me directly in her blog, in a voice that resonates with my mind! Her name is short and poetic, Rosa Say. She's from Hawaii, and her book is called Managing with Aloha. And, her well written and thought provoking weblog is commented by a lively community. This makes me want to have a more systematic weblog myself! I've been playing with blogs for some years, how to use blogs in education and for professional development, but not really making any effort to keep my blogs focused, topic oriented and straight forward enough to become of real value in a community context. This is going to be another future goal...

Aloha defined in Hawaii to English dictionary

When I am challenged with new words I need to find out what they mean, even if teh language is totally unknown to me. Before Rosa Say's book Management with Aloha, this term gave me images of rich tourists welcomed on palm beaches with flower garlands around their necks. After all, Hawaii is very far from Denmark!

I found an online dictionary that helped me find more about how to interpretate the so-called Aloha spirit, and below I'll copy & paste all that. Just to save it and read again soon! For now, it is far too much as I need to get back to work.

[Hawaiian Dictionary(Hwn to Eng)] aloha

nvt., nvs. Aloha, love, affection, compassion, mercy, sympathy, pity, kindness, sentiment, grace, charity; greeting, salutation, regards; sweetheart, lover, loved one; beloved, loving, kind, compassionate, charitable, lovable; to love, be fond of; to show kindness, mercy, pity, charity, affection; to venerate; to remember with affection; to greet, hail. Greetings! Hello! Good-by! Farewell! Alas! The common greetings follow: Aloha ʻoe, may you be loved or greeted, greetings (to one person). Aloha kāua, may there be friendship or love between us, greetings (to one person); dear Sir. Aloha kākou, same as above, but to more than one person. Ke aloha nō! Aloha! Greetings! (The nō may be prolonged for emphasis.) (Gram. 4.6) The following greetings were introduced after European times; Aloha ahiahi, good evening. Aloha kakahiaka, good morning. Cf. aloha ʻāina, hanaaloha. Aloha aliʻi, royalist, royal love. Aloha ʻino! What a pity! Alas! [Expression of regret, either great or small.] Aloha akua, love of god; divine love, pity, charity. Mea aloha, loved one, beloved. Aloha makua, considerate and thoughtful of parents and elders, filial. Aloha ʻia, beloved, pitied. Aloha pumehana, warm aloha, affection. Me ke aloha o Ka-wena, with the love (or greeting) of Ka-wena. ʻO wau iho nō me ke aloha, I remain, with very best regards. Aloha ʻoe, ē Maria, ua piha ʻoe i ka maikaʻi, hail, Mary, full of grace. Ē Maria hemolele, e aloha mai ʻoe iā mākou, Holy Mary, have mercy on us. Aloha aʻe ana mākou i ke ehu wāwae o ka lani (chant for Ka-lā-kaua), we remember fondly the footprints of the king. E aloha aku au i ka mea aʻu e manaʻo ai e aloha aku (Puk. 33.19), I show mercy tothose I want to show mercy to. Aloha nō ia mau lā o nā makahiki he kanalima i kūnewa akula! Affectionate [memories] of these days of fifty years past! hō.aloha Rare var. of hoʻālohaloha. Cf. hoaloha. (PPN ʻalofa.)

Aloha coach Rosa Say, you made MY day!

Dear Rosa Say,

and welcome to my virtual home office! For some weeks, I've known about you as an innovative writer and coach, with your Hawaiian woman's powerful approach to "Aloha management", and as soon as I joined your community blog at Talking Story the night before yesterday, I was very heartily welcomed, with a personal style welcome email from you, encouraging me to introduce myself. The headline of your mail was: You made my day! And all I can say is that this really made me feel good inside and want to come back for more!

I've been wondering what's your special approach that makes me relax and just like what I read without resistance, and I think I'm touched by this way of involving your readers so naturally in an online community. Another gift from you that I feel connected with, is your personal way of mediating practical life wisdom and profound insight in the local Hawaiian way of looking at life, expressed in the usage of Hawaiian terms to explain simple things and rules for your mutual engagement with others, also called Managing with Aloha, the title of your book.

It was introduced and discussed in Lisa Kimball's May book club at http://www.virtualchautauqua.com but I have to admit I was one of those silent readers, learning vicariously from the conversation of others. Too many time taking, meaningless engagements and useless stuff need to be thrown out of my life, before a more relaxed and back leaned summer where I can work at my own pace.

I've skimmed the first chapters of Managing with Aloha, but resisted to buy it yet. I'm directly touched and I see that I'm already on the move since the start of this year, and I've come a long way with some of these ways to keep my life more organized and leave out needless activities, scrap artifacts and time thieves that are noisy or irrelevant; But after reading your blog and joining your community, I cannot resist much longer :-)

OK, this was not much of an intro to myself. This blog would tell some more, and I'll be back soon with more thoughts and inputs. In the meantime just had to say,

goddag from Denmark

yours,

Susanne

4 NETS to better search stragegies

From Bernie "Webquest" Dodge's page I found a simple guide on how to narrow down your search engine hits. I was happy to see that this is how I do myself.

Start	Narrow
Use	Exact Phrases
	Trim the URL
Seek	Similar Pages

A Moodle meeting place, showcasing Moodle 1.5 beta

http://facultyroom.org/

This is yet another Moodle developer & teacher community, facilitated by Tom Murdock, Gina Stevens and Sheila Gatling. I've seen three courses here: Introducing Moodle, Teachers using Moodle, and Moodle features demo.

To me, this offers an opportunity to try out the new Moodle 1.5 beta version. It has Instant messaging, and I can choose between many different skins. What more is new? Will have to check it out and come back to share.

Virtual mystery guest blog - collaboration with students

This was an experimental, collaborative blog project with students from the University of Minsk and their English and ICT teacher Sergei Grid, another webhead who invited me to be their mystery guest. I posted some riddle-like information about my country and my life, and they made many guesses to find out something more specific; I think they may have had some hints from their teacher as I found it a bit challenging to find out what to tell and what not. After all, they was also a mystery to me, from the beginning. But we came to know each other better and better, and they were eager to write comments to me like interview questions.

The free and open conversation turned out to be successful and we decided to meet synchronously in my Elluminate office at Learning Times. They prepared a Virtual Potluck for this event, with student made PPT slides and oral presentations of Belarussian geography, education, art, traditions and their language in both Cyrillic and Latin letters. They had even prepared to sing a Belarussian folk song in choir, all ten of them, just for me! It was heart warming and made all of the volunteer hours spent on this worth while.

goinupstream.blogspot.com

PS Yes, I know - the weekend workshop is over, I had mentioned this link in another message but wanted to have a more detailed description here in the Moodle, And I'll blog this mesage as well.

Good memories: Elderbob On The Trail blog 2004

In our blog workshop, my good online friend and virtual colleague, webhead Elderbob Brannan shared his marvelous blog with photos and voice interviews following a historic Cattle trail in Texas last summer Elderbob On The Trail


I felt instantly inspired to post a comment over there: I've never even been to Texas or any other US state. I'm on the other side of the ocean in Denmark. But I've been following this trail per blog, as well as its making by Elderbob the Great blog boss. It's been amazing. Listening to all these interviews, looking at pictures and finding the locations on a map. And then, in a Google search, I stumbled over another historic (photo) trail in California, Lassen County. Where I learned that the founder of California is said to be Peter Lassen who founded Susanville, he was a pioneer and a smith who immigrated from - Farum where I live! I've heard his name before and I see his memorial three minutes from my home every now and then, but now his life and destiny came so much closer to me - inspired by this very blog...


This is another way that blogs are interconnecting. The comments are important, and so are the Blog This! button from someone else's Blogspot blog, you can go directly to your very own blog and write your message!

Blog workshop - first attempt: Jo's transition world

Our weekend workshop is running now, enough participants to have the conversation going. Several new blogs begin to take shape. I'm wondering how to repond to this cry for help from Jo as I would need to see exacly where she is stuck, to find a correct explanation.
She asks "I followed the blogger instruction and did this: transition world I can't find a way of editing it. I tried the "edit-me"link at the right hand side, to add a link, and it didnt give me what I needed. The instructions say "Use the tabs at the top of the page" but there aren't any! What have I missed?"

Hmm. Well - from where I see it, once I'm logged in and I've clicked on the upper left corner of my blog page, at the orange and white fat B icon, I do get to the Dashboard and then the Edit facility. I wish I could see your screen, Jo :-)

Half an hour later:
I came back to the workshop and saw that Jo found the solution to her problem. And when I wanted to reply, for some reason the Knowplace server did not answer. So - I'll post that message right here!!! Otherwise It would get lost in transition...
Bravo Jo!

I hoped you would find out how to get to the Edit page.

Some time ago, when I read your cry for help I rushed over to your blog, and in the top line, I spotted the Blog this! button that I only rarely use; this way I had a surprise popup window adding a message to MY blog, so I blogged something about your problem because I did not know how to help you. I felt I would have to see your screen to get the problem.

Perhaps I should now get back and edit this post in MY blog, now that you seem to have figued out the tricky detail :-)

Blogpoly - the online board game of blogging!

BLOGPOLY

Cool cool work by Littleoslo, a anonymous & genius web artist with a great idea for putting the most important tools and features related to blogging on one slate. Ideal for having fun while learning new stuff, or memorising known stuff.

Elderbob shared this link in our Blogging workshop at Knowplace, and I cannot wait to check it out more in detail.

Working with blogs- Open Weekend at Knowplace

Hello Webheads,

if you would please join us at Knowplace this weekend and make it
become alive and active, I'm hosting a 48 hour workshop discussion
about blogging in general - and you're invited!

Working with Blogs

Welcome to an Open Weekend where we will discuss and share some easy
ways to keep a weblog, or just blogs.
Blogs can be used for promotion of your thoughts and ideas, for
professional or personal reflections, as well as for group oriented
work online. Blogs can have text, images and even voice recordings.
They're updated online, like a diary so that your last entry will come
up first. No need to download software or upload text content, as you
can just subscribe to a free blog service, such as

www.blogger.com or www.xanga.com

During this weekend, I would like to encourage anyone to report own use of blogs if you already have one, as well as starting on a self made personal blog if this is your first try.

yours,

Susanne Nyrop
(blogger since 2002)

www.xanga.com/susnyrop
worldofwebheads.blogspot.com

PS:
Knowplace is using Moodle, and if you're a new member, you'll be asked
to create an account before you can get access to the general Knowplace
site and read more about the Open Weekends, as well as other Knowplace
activities, such as week long courses related to online work and
learning from many aspects as well as longer courses developed for
Capilano College, Vancouver BC, Canada
http://www.knowplace.ca

These Open weekends are always starting on Friday evening at 17 GMT
and ends on Sunday evening at 17 GMT. During this time slot, you can
access my weekend page directly at

knowplace.ca/moodle_1.4.3/course/view.php?id=65


These hours are quite strictly administered; you will not get access to
the workshop page before and after these hours; in case you find
anything of special interest, you'll need to save that information
locally, or subscribe so that it comes to your mailbox. One problem
about working with this volunteer task from a different time zone is
that the Canadians work while I ought to be asleep, and on Saturday
European time, I'll be away with my family, celebrating birthday until
late; so just in case some of you blog savvy Webheads would jump in and
encourage the action, please do not hesitate!!!

Blog workshop in Qatar, with virtual presence

On April 30, webheads were invited to follow a workshop on Blogs moderated by Vance Stevens - that means webheads are online, with a lot of people present in a computer lab in Qatar with Flurin, their teacher. Some participants got help direct in Tapped In, and the PPT presentation with Vance's voice and webcam from Qatar, in Elluminate at Learning Times.

The first fresh baked blogs created during this session are at:
www.activstudio2.blogspot.com and www.abuyusif.blogspot.com
- and Bee Dieu from Brazil was presenting her work with student blogs at www.beeonline.blogspot.com
- Sergei Grid, Belarus and I presented our collaboration with the Mystery Guest blog with students in Minsk at www.goinupstream.blogspot.com
- Teresa d'Eca from Portugal was showing us her beginner class blog in Portugal, grade 5 students, also using voice
- Buth Alothman's blog project with university students in Kuwait was also presented alothman-b.tripod.com/162_fall04_stsblogs.htm

What's a Plog?

What's a Plog?

It is...
a page-blog (Teresa Almeida d'Eca, webheads in action, APPI conference presentation, April 05)
an open source code for creating blogs named pLog, released in a version 1.0 March 05
a password protected, personal plog® (customer service offered by Amazon)
a project blog for management of projects according to Ronald Piquepaiile's technology Trends blog, May 04),
- who is referring to an article in the CIO magazine online, May 15, 04 by Michael Shrage: The Virtues of Chitchat

a well known Danish poetry log

And then, I agree with the Reflexive-Blog a quad-error in this message quoted below from Dec 12, 04 :

Project + Blog = plog : quad error

1) project = blog = pblog
Because blog = web + log

2) plog = project + log

3) pLog

4) There are thousands of words starting by p, personal, professional and private for examples.
It’s silly to reduce a whole word to a single letter.
The more you remove letters, the less information you give.

Besides, according to Rebecca Blood, with her blogging expertise: A blog is a coffeehouse conversation in text, with references as required!

Audioblogging live from Farum, Denmark

This message was recorded on the phone by a free service called audioblogger
It was easy and fun. After opening my account, I was ready for my call (00)1-661-716-2564 (blog) - and a voice guided me through the process: first, type my local phone number given in the registration (I had to twist mine and use the two digits 45 used for international calls to Denmark before my ordinary number so I had 10 digits. This works!) Then enter your pin code - and start speaking! After this recording, press # - and your voice guide will tell you to press 1 for save, 2 for listening and 3 for delete. If you wish, you can then make yet another recording (press 1 and start talking).

Now, this was simple, right? And then, to my pleasure, when I open my Blogger account, I see my recording as a post that I can now edit and name, and it will come up directly in my Blogger blog. So, from now on, this blog is an audioblog!

Hello APPI and Teresa - an audioblog

This message is meant for people at the APPI conference in Portugal, April 21, 2005, for Teresa d'Eça's presentation about online communities of practice Also called CoPs)

I'm going to join you virtually this afternoon - but was inspired by Michael Coghlan, Adelaide, Australia, to send a voice message, just in case something went wrong!

After all, it is no secret that we're now and then struggling with technological mismatches, incomparable systems, or hitting our heads against firewalls and other communication glitches, where alternatives can be necessary! The good news is that we know how online friends can help overcome a technical problem, or perhaps suggest another way to get in touch. No matter where in the world you're located.

One for all and all for one - this is what it takes to become a Global Webhead!

Xanga - another blog of mine

As I've been involved with many blogging experiments over time, I've got more blogs than this one. My preferred one is at www.xanga.com/susnyrop - where I've been posting since 2002, about matters that relate to online culture learning and life in general. Things that I would like to remember myself, or comment.

That's why I decided to dedicate this one @ blogspot, named worldofwebheads, for more portfolio oriented blogging, show casing my work. This was opened in a workshop context. I am still looking for a poignant name for my presence. This is a VIP matter for me.

Quick Portfolio Blogging - samples from my online presence

For my professional development, I need a documentation page showing examples from my online experiences with learning and teaching with multimedia and interactive communication, and the fastest way I can think of just now, is to start blogging these as I find them in Google. There will not be a stringent chronology or soring of categories; this will be my next step ahead to get a more pro face to the world around me. I'm a playful person who likes to experiment and have fun while learning together with others, and I consider teaching as part of this, as we're always learning something new when working with students, this is even more true when it comes to the technical aspects of online interaction; we do need to find a shared vocabulary as well as developing a helpful spirit of easy going access to working with things.

My online presence started back in 1994 when I had my first modem and became an enthusiast participant in a Danish online community experiment, PolOnline, with about 4000 participants, using a First Class server solution to host our topic-oriented discussions about all and everything. Computer tips and tricks (of course:-), education, family matters, domestic animals, travels, reading books - you name it.

In 1995, I passed a bachelor exam at the Danish University of Education, in communication and Multimedia. My project was a digital, interactive book for young children with language difficulties, "The little house on the screen" using Hyper Card programming and the facility to let kids use a microphone for practising their vocal language.

In 1996 I was visiting 6 village schools in the south of France where they were pioneers in online communication on a penpal level, working with homepages, journals and collaborative multimedia projects.

In 1997 I went on a study travel to China. I visited a business school in Beijing and was introduced to an interesting pioneer project for young women.

(to be continued)

TLNCE 2000 Toronto: Emerging trends and needs

in 2000, I was invited to do a poster presentation together with Sylvia Currie from the Global Educators' network, for the TLNCE 2000 conference in Toronto, and I was lucky to get an internationalization grant from the Danish University of Education. TLNCE is for the Tele Learning Network Centres of Excellence, a Canadian state funded project under the direction of Linda Harasim , Lucio Teles (and others). Sylvia and I were collaborating online and met for the first time in the conference center when we were setting up our poster.

With Inspiration software, I created a mindmap, a diagram showing some trends in current e-learning, inspired by the ongoing moderated theme discussions taking place in the GEN, Global Educators' network.

Knowtips 2005 - Chaos and complexity

The first all online conference Knowtips 2005 - Tips and tricks for Thriving and Surviving online. We used Moodle for our conference homepage and discussions, and Elluminate for our synchronous sessions.

I - Susanne Nyrop - was engaged in the pre conference commitee as well as hosting a panel presentation of Webheads in Action, from a chaos and complexity viewpiont of learing in an online community of practice. In this panel were: Dafne Gonzalez, Sergei Grid, Vance Stevens and Susanne Nyrop.

TCC 2003 conference

TCC 2003: The Student Experience in Online and Hybrid Courses
Eighth Annual Teaching in the Community Colleges Online Conference (22-24 Apr. 2003
With an invited discussion panel of Webheads in Action leaders and students (Vance Stevens, Aiden Yeh, Dafne Gonzalez, Susanne Nyrop etc)

Teaching English as a World Language in the Information Age

6th international Belnate IATEFL conference, November 3-5, 2004
Minsk State Linguistic University - Minsk, Belarus
Teaching English as a World Language in the Information Age

This event was taking place in a computer lab, using an Elluminate classroom sponsored by the online Learning Times community. From my home office connection, I was co-moderating an all online Webheads workshop session with Dafne Gonzalez, Venezuela and Vance Stevens, UAE about Webheads in Action history and examples. We were also involved in the pre-conference planing commitee with Sergei Grid who is teaching at the University of Minsk and responsible for this succesful conference.
http://www.ir.bsu.by/kel/Teachers/onlinevents.htm

Invited guest teacher in TESOL classes

Using groupboard (with shared drawing tool), as a communication starter in a chat session with Buthaina Alothman's female students, Kuwait 2002 (from the archive)
http://alothman-b.tripod.com/sus_chat_090.htm
www.groupboard.com

Playing the Mystery guest online

From a Mystery guest in the virtual classroom

How many lives does a good olde Webhead have?

I had joined this workshop plus some other TESOL EVO workshops, well aware this was going to be a pretty tight schedule for me. I'm skimming, surfing and sometimes finding time to join a workshop live session or two. I'm working on Moodles, on blogs and now also soon on a TikiWiki, all of these projects would have been impossible for me to manage all on my own, but I flow around in cyberspace tinkering with tit & tat, grace to our amazing and inspiring Webheads community (that I joined back in 2001, hey, I'm a veteran) But I really wish to get on working seriously again with some older homepages that need updates. They were created with an outdated HTLM editor plastering lots of cryptic code strings into the HTML source code And I agree - to do so, careful reading is needed. At least, I swear I'm not as inactive as may seem from just reading this discussion. From that you might suspect some sort of web absence!

Just now I come from a joint fun project with Wendy - I'm a mystery guest in her EFL Grammar and composition class, encouraging her sutdents to ask all sorts of questions "about me". We got the inspiration from Bee but did not really know exactly how go come around this; would I post in the classroom blog directly, or what? I started a new account at Blogger as the Mystery guest, was reading their personal blogs and sent a few comments with invitations to my mystery blog, Wendy posted a message for her students, and then went sick and stayed away from school. This is a Blended learning class, but they're not yet familiar with blogging, Or were. Because they have really taken it now! As Wendy says, they all know where to find my blog, and how to post comments. They have asked all sorts of questions, and they know now that I live in Denmark, and it is just crazy how hard it was to figure out what to tell so they would become curious enough to ask, and what to hide so they would not know at once. And, even in Blogger (mac/Safari), I need to type in some code, to feed it with dollops of HTML, as Vance says. (over at the webpresence workshop - this is a semi-cross posting)

Keep smiling! We were just having some fun. The magic works. And hopefully they were forgetting all about grammar and style while communicating for getting to know someone unknown.
http://mysteryguest.blogspot.com and
Wendy's Advanced writing and grammar blog at http://ievcc.blogspot.com/ and
Wendy's meta-reflective, personal English Studies Blog at http://ievcc.blogspot.com/

Complicating or simplifying things with experimental blogs for online content and interaction?
Hmm, changing the tipping point perhaps!

virtual hugs,
yours ubiquitous
Serendipity Sus

(will cross post this to keep groups & blogs vibrant)

_________________________________________________

Surviving and thriving online?
Meet the Webheads in Action - and 20 other presenters
in the knowtips 2005 online Tips & tricks conference
23-28 February 2005
@ http://www.knowtips.ca

A rose in white

A rose in white
Posted by: susnyrop.

I've posted some snow photos at http://susnyrop-winter.buzznet.com/ and they offer me the opportunity to Blog This. Another new feature to cross link and create a more consistent web presence :-) Now let me see how THIS works. Might be a good shortcut to share photos

Another blogging workshop

Although I've not been carefully updating this blog that was created for a workshop last year, I will start using it again, for the ongoing workshop on weblogging at the Electronic Village Online http://groups.yahoo.com/group/weblogging

Well well - I'm a bit behind because wer'e already in week 2. But I'm catching up later this week. I've added my pin on the Bravenet world guest map - so many participants, almost 100?

Sus