A World view!

My Readership!

For the past 2 years or so I have been blogging.  I have been using blogger and at one point WordPress.  In fact I have plans to return to using WordPress again at the beginning of the New Year.

In that time it has been interesting to see the number of different countries that my blogs have been read in over the years. Some posts have been read by one or two people some by more than a hundred.  

Why do we blog? In my case to keep my interests.  We are flooded by so much information today.  Some relevant, some interesting and some in the category of "where did that come from?".

The digital community has great benefits to understanding of others and communication instantly of new ideas and opinions.  It would be interesting for me if some of you that read my blogs to join me on a Google+ circle.  Google + is starting to grow on me as a subtly different process to to Facebook and Twitter.  Twitter has become almost a ticker-tape of views with very rarely any feedback.  It is starting to become a little congested unless you run something like Tweetdeck you have a fleeting chance of picking up relevant tweets!   

The other blog that I am currently working away at is:

http://kritirecharge2012lifelonglearning.blogspot.co.uk/ 

At the moment I am experimenting with learning spoken Mandarin Chinese and Greek.  Spanish is another  world language I am also going to try and master.  A few Google+ hangouts with native speakers would be interesting to participate in.  I will use Google Translate a few times just to see the response to the tool.  We make a sweeping assumption in England that is somebody can't speak English why should we bother to learn their language. Wrong!  For many reasons not least from a point of view of excluding some people. 

In terms of exclusion Dyslexia affects between 5 and 10% of the population in the UK.  At the top of each blog I am adding a link to OpenDyslexic  fonts to redress the access issues!

Web 2.0 for business and Educators

Started Tuesday 22 March 2011 0550 GMT
Words 394
S.I.= 78.8 %

Twitters Fifth Birthday


A social app has reached what used to be in this country one of those milestones five years old.  I have been watching the news coverage of Twitter.  I am anthropomorphising the Microblog site because the more I look at it the more it seems to have some functions of a living organisms.  We teach young children in the UK the seven characteristics of living things (or used to not so sure if they are supposed to discover the knowledge themselves).     MR GREEN is the mnemonic often favoured.

M- Movement
R- Reproduction
G -Growth
E- Excretion
E- Excitiability ie senses itself and own envionment
N- Nutrition

So at the age of five we would a few years ago we would have been sending our children to school for the first time.  Now they are taught and formally assessed from the age of three.  In Europe formal education starts later at seven.  Twitter being five, is already drawing predictions of its demise.  Before it's character has even developed properly ( children learn the most before the age of five) it's imminent metamorphosis into a bad character is being predicted.  This is also being mirrored in the UK by the constant inspections that we have been subjected to over the last 30 years.

The effect appears to be a society that has not matured beyond the age of 13.  A society that is still reacting as though in the playground and the biggest bullies are people who are supposed to protect those who cannot protect themselves by this I mean the old, the young and the vulnerable.  The bullies are the local and national  service providers funded out of the taxpayers pocket.

The sixties cry "you and whose army" and "talking about my generation" appear to be beginning of the ME generation, also known as the Baby Boomers.  As they have progressed to leading society from the 1960s, great population expansion, new towns the race for land in Kent then Essex the do as I say don't do as I do has become more prevalent. George Orwell's Animal farm personified.  Nowadays the  pigs with their snouts int the trough are usually paid for by honest hard working tax payers. Is it time to get off the merry round?  I certainly am not enjoying all the fun of the fair!

PS Budget day looming!   

Monday Morning Week 6 of Chinese New Year

Loch Ness  monster spotted on Holiday in Crete

Started Monday 7th March 0530 GMT
Words 531
S.I.= 106.2 % Aspirational Target not met
Week before the Ides of March


looking at the calendar planning what is going to be a very busy week I stated to think of the associations with the times of year.  The Ides of March falls next week on the 15th March.  I have not had a look at Pepys diary for a while, I wonder if anything has changed (ie similar situations different names).

What do I need to achieve by the end of the week?  The first priority is to make sure that I have considered a Wellbeing strategy.  I have found some of the course notes and literature from 2006 when I was a Wellbeing facilitator in my previous job in a school.  As a staff governor ( I really need to update my Linked in profile to reflect my experiences adequately) I took on this role at quite a difficult time for the school.  Special measures  looming again (we just avoided it again), eventually a change of head, acting head was in place, School Re-organisation taking place from 2007 (moves to close Middle Schools in Suffolk, happened in Haverhill and Lowestoft but unsurprisingly not happening anywhere else in Suffolk).

Against this background the one thing that senior management should have been putting in place was a wellbeing strategy but this did not happen.  Now I am running my own business with a view to employing others in the future it is time to make sure that I build my business to be a stress resistant organisation since I can set the agenda and learn from these experiences.

The first question should always be what do we want to achieve?  The second question is what are the benefits to us?  The this what are the costs, both financial and from an emotional intelligence perspective?  The most important out of the four process is the do next bit setting  out aims with a clear time frame and success criteria evaluation.  A detached non-emotional evaluation of the aims then needs to a priority no matter whether there is success or failure.  To quote one of my Twitter communicants    (I will not put her link here as you can search for me and then locate janeaninspires if you so feel inclined) "Tomorrow, instead of looking at what you don't have, examine all that you do have and be grateful! I'm just saying..... :)". Even better  is her comment, "Even if you win the rat race, at the end of the day, you are still a rat! :)" although I still like to win but maybe do it with the original spirit of Baron de Coubatin.

PS also start Advanced Electricians course to be able to install and certify Solar Panels.  A distance learning course I will be using the Wednesday Blog (have achieved career change so do not really need to revisit preparation phase) to be able to keep a reflective diary of the e-learning practice.

PPS Forget almost what was happening with Samuel Pepys? A little bit of blowing his own trumpet (but that is what most diarists do to a certain extent)?  And he was contemplating a career change.  Even then Lawyers and barristers were earning obscene amounts!

Micro entrepreneurship. What has worked well

Taking the Bull by the Horns,
Minoan Bull

 Started 7:30 am Friday 30th December 2010  
Words 577

Micro-entrepreneurship  is the sub-theme of this blog.  After evaluating the blog yesterday (Blog content) this is the first part of the new cycle.  So what have I discovered and achieved this week?

First is that small can be beautiful.  The danger with a lot of social networking tools is that they can take over and become a means to themselves.  Many businesses are finding that employees are spending a lot of time on Facebook, for example to the detriment of productivity. 

Personally, I do not visit Facebook all that often, owing to the fact that I do not want to know everything that a person is thinking.  Mystery and secrets can be wonderful things.  Also not clever if a recruiter wants an insight into your character.  A small blog article when written well and focusing on a single topic may be  more effective than a display of all your knowledge.  This often leaves a reader a little overwhelmed much as it does in a conversation. The discipline of micro blogging via Twitter removes a lot of the stunned and wonder factor.  However, my experience of Twitter is that there is a lot serial twittering, how do they get the time, whose message sometimes becomes diluted because of the sheer volumes of tweets.  From some sources it is almost like spam email, especially teacher recruitment agencies.  Do they not realise that if you are teaching you only have a small window of opportunity to indulge in tweeting?   

Linking activities and drawing almost Chinese walls between web presences is another conclusion from this week.  Why repeat the same information in a blog (dynamic presence) that could be better served by a static  presence,  a web page?  After all a blog should be like a reflective diary.  It should not be an out and out sales pitch.  Written in a journalistic style it can intrigue and lead people to want to know more.  They  interact and find the information you want to give them.  Then you can do the micro-entrepreneurship from your static presence. It is about time management.  What is the most effective use of your time for producing income streams as a micro-entrepreneur?  

I have spent a bit of time this week looking at a number of areas. Use of Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing and how to make people come to you for your services (which will appear on Tuesday).  Institutions for professional development, which will appear next Wednesday.    On Thursday, those tricky work-life balance issues.  As a Wellbeing Facilitator/champion in a former employment I have over the years acquired some knowledge of this often murky topic.  Which brings us to the free running or free blogging of the weekend, general on Saturday and Lunch on Sunday.   Monday is for that aspirational moment and the intention to ski uphill.

So how long should it take.  About a half-hour per day.  You can always go back to important issues at a later time.  They won't go away, if they do they are not as important as you thought.   This time frame is not difficult, as a teacher I have used reflective practice on occasions.  The trick is to focus on the positive benefits of the experience to best practice.  An Australian technique that was championed by pupil behavior gurus many years ago (do not hear about it too much now) was the ratio of positive to negative comments.  This also applies to any form of communication.  Nobody likes a miserable basket!