Phronesis

Who else knows that I'm a furry fractal?

I'm getting hugely excited about the new site and logo that Lucy Pepper is making for me. It's going to bring all the different parts of me together in Joomla (a CMS that comes as an easy install with DreamHost).

I first met Lucy when she was Vitriolica on Unkempt women and I was in Em Duas Línguas. We met through our blogs and discovered we lived down the road from each other did some blog chick bonding at my house in Setúbal.

The process of getting to my logo design could only have been done with someone who knows me - how lucky am I to have such talented friends?

The end of January and it should all be ready. Got to get my skates on.

Writing as a social event

I'm in Porto - that place you're bound to get lost if you're driving  - where we are going to do a two day writing session at a workshop we called CIBlend. What a treat! Ten of us from Australia, UK, Portugal, who have never written together before and our plan is to write an article(s) for the Community Informatics journal.

Real collaborative writing is an intimate act and also with a lot of tensions. I'm intrigued to see how this goes.

Asynchronous time is not free

"Dear Beverly

I know you are very busy, so for that reason we can communicate through new new tools and electronic means.

Yours"

It serves me right. I find that as I try to reframe people's expectations about how much time I can invest in a project or a new set of relationships I get an increasing number of replies guiding me towards making better use of new online tools that will help us develop our communication.

Dear friends

The busier I am the more I rely on synchronous discussions and thinking on my feet. Asynchronous conversations are a luxury I no longer have. Furthermore, asynchronous time is time.

Gasp.
Did I really say that?

Informal Learning - Etienne Wenger

I've put up my notes on Wenger's session at the eLearning conference in Lisbon on the conference blog.

Etienne talks about learning as a question of who we are in the world. Who we are as learners is not a technique it as an experience of being alive and of being in the world.

This seems so key and so fundamental to all the work that I do. A social perspective on learning is a perspective of learning to become a person who has a certain experience of the world. This perspective is integral to my designs for learning. People ask me for techniques, methods, tools, recipes, activities, communities of practice. And I can earn an income from selling them those.

But really all I have to offer is something of my own trajectory and my own being in the world.

My being in the world is increasingly complex and covers many domains. I engage in many different domains, personal, public, professional, academic - and what's more, my domains cross languages and cultures. The question facing me and other people is: how do I manage myself in a meaningful way at the intersection of my involvement in  these different domains?

No Skype days ahead

It's a massive decision, but I've done it.

Skype is off. No longer do I see my friends online. The door is closed, the birds have stopped tweeting.

But it's got to be done while I concentrate. No more kidding myself that I work better seeing my friends come in and out the door (with Growl). No more kidding myself that I have to be there, in case ...

Focus.

Negotiating boundaries

Yes! I love this video!

Getting down to business

I'm in the Pyrenees, with good, close friends and family.

Tomorrow I'll help to clean the feet of the sheep. We have to turn them upside down and scrape out the toenails. It's a messy job.

My own world - designing for learning in online communities - seems both so close and so far away.