Major Fun I salute you

Some days synergy makes you think that we are more 'connected' than we realise. I sent my a parcel of Terry Pratchett books to Bernie De Koven in San Diego last week, having promised him them for months.

Bernie is one of those people, that thanks to the Internet, I have come to know and call a friend even though we have never meet. In his BRILLIANT blog, he espouses all things 'fun'. He has been a source of great inspiration to me in his alter ego guise as 'Major Fun' and I'm going to write more about him in a future post,

I have been a 'correspondent' for him in the past, tracking down stories of general fun and merriment, but today imagine my surprise when he tells me in an email this very morning that not only has he received my package of books (for which he is very grateful), but that he has also linked to my 'Badly Laced Shoes' post within his own blog. I am deeply flattered to see his description of me therein with such kind words.

All I can do is quote to fictional monoliths; as Lizzie McGuire might say 'Well, like WOW!'. and like Captain Corcoran in HMS Pinafore, Major Fun has made my 'bosom swell with pride'.

Oh wad some Power the giftie gie us....

We all have lice, image from Flickr originally uploaded by Antonia Pneumonia.

...to see oursel's as others see us. So wrote Robert Burns in his famous poem 'To a Louse' which is often used in an allegorical way to describe how the mighty fall. As yet another Burns Night draws to a close, it seemed somehow apt to quote the Bard somewhere in this post.

I love the phrase 'too see ourselves as others see us' - it reminds me of Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby from The Water Babies. And this is a philosophy by which I have tried to live my life. Hence I believe in the altruistic beliefs that led to the HUGToB campaign last year.

It also gives rise to a quite different notion - how do others see us? And how do we choose to let others see us?

I am perfectly happy for this Blog to be representative to others of the sort of person that I am. I am lucky in that after trawling around the Internet searching for websites on which I can be found, I could not find a single entry that I regretted - not even my posts to the BBC making some pedantic complaint about my favourite TV show!

Bill Thomson makes an interesting post in which he discusses the way today's young people treat their Myspace account as disposable if they forget their password. They prefer to create a new account in such circumstances - whereas many people of my generation would covet their Myspace site having nurtured it over time and would rather jump into a shower with Michael Winner than lose the site they have cultivated. The interesting point he makes is that MySpaces huge membership numbers may actually be being bolstered by a large number of young people registering a new account having ditched their old one.

Another aspect of this is the phenomenon of 'facebooking' where young people use the facebook website to observe changes in social relationships. This site also allows employers to find out about job applicants or parents to find out details about their daughter's new boyfriend!

I am anxious that young people cannot cope with this sort of technology - no matter how much of a Digital Native they may be - as was illustrated by 3 female pupils of mine several years ago.

In the early days of social networking sites they created, at the age of 12, a joint site which contained many candid photographs of themselves and friends. The name these 12 year olds chose to give themselves? Dirtylittleteenagesluts! I was alerted to this site by a concerned pupil whose image had been put on the site without her permission (in the end this was the case for at least 20 other girls). Silly decisions such as those are what can make social networking sites such a dangerous place for young people and its this personal experience that has led me to my stand on the use of such sites in my school. Nice to see this 'mom' has decided to subscribe to MySpace to see how the site ticks and in order to keep an eye on what her children are doing there. Way to go mom!

Social networking is a powerful tool but in some cases, some young people just aren't equipped to handle it. We need to enable them to handle such tools in a better way and portray themselves in the way they would like people to think of them in years to come. In fact Burns couldn't have put it better when he wrote: 'For a' that, an' a' that, Their dignities an' a' that, The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth, Are higher rank than a' that.'

Badly Laced Shoes

Okay. Notice anything unusual about those shoes? Okay they are tatty, but apart from that do you notice anything unusual? Well I guess the title of this post kind of gives the game away, but I'll explain.

A few months ago I was sat on my sofa having returned from work dog-tired, and promptly fell asleep. I still had my shoes on. I was awakened by some furtive activity at my feet and looked down to see my six year old daughter admiring her handiwork. She had undone my shoelaces and now proclaimed loudly that she had managed to lace them back up again.

Now, I felt I should be cross at her - after all you don't do shoe laces up as shown in the picture. You just don't. But wait a minute, she did! She chose to lace up my shoes that way. So just because they are not laced up the traditional way, is there anything wrong in that?

This set me thinking, we as teachers are so quick to judge the work of our students based on them producing out put that conforms to our expectations. Harry Chapin once sang 'Flowers are Red' - a song that resonates with any teacher or parent who wants pupils to be as creative as possible. It concerned a teacher who told a couple that their child was no good at art because he painted flowers all sorts of colours but 'there's no need to paint flowers any other way than the way they always have been seen' ie. red petals and green leaves.

So my daughter through her interpretive lacing of my shoes taught me a lesson about creativity and I just could not get cross at her. I was just proud - a VERY proud dad, that my wee girl had laced her first pair of shoes.

Her lacing made me focus on the outcomes of some of the work done in my Moodle by students at my school. Work that I had skirted over before and perhaps not given proper credit to now looks astonishing in the way it has innovatively made use of the available tools. I will post articles on these later.

Two personal examples that can be used to illustrate this point come to mind. Firstly there's this blog. Now in and of itself its nothing special - it's full of misspellings and poor grammar. But it was written by my son. My ten year old son. He has an interest in dinosaurs and Euan decided, off his own back that he wanted to make a web site to tell others what he knows about them. What better a mechanism for him to gain personal pride and self-esteem than by writing his Blog? All his posts are written by him, when he wants to write them. Through the fog of misspellings you can still see what he's trying to say. And I think that's amazing. You simply can't buy the feeling of pride I feel as a dad seeing his Blog.

The second example is this Blog by a former GCSE student of mine. I suggest you take a moment to read the text of a couple of her posts. This was her self-evaluation and diary covering the progress she was making on her GCSE ICT coursework. A post containing the seemingly inane comment 'Return of the music!!!!! I would like to point out that while I have been listening to music I have done THIS much work. When I wasn't I had only done this much work. Now I'm almost on my 10th page which may not sound like much but for me...' is followed by the far more valuable 'Grr, every time I change the font size all the 'spelling mistakes' reappear. They're not even mistakes the computer just doesn't recognise .bmp or whatever.' This idiosyncratic voice which the student had found for her Blog would not be acceptable in a formal GCSE coursework, but does that mean it is of no value at all? I think not.

I still have my shoes laced that way - 4 months after Shona laced them for me. In one way I'm a proud dad and when people ask me why they are laced that way I tell them the story. And hey, the lacing is functional - its fit for purpose and my shoes have never ever felt so comfy.

I WALK TALL in my uniquely laced shoes.

Walking on Glass

At long last this Blog sees the light of day - haha. After a somewhat turbulent year in my life, it has taken a collision of some unrelated events (reminiscent of both the fantastic film Amores Perros or Iain Banks's 'Walking on Glass') to focus my mind back to the Blogosphere. So it's a joyful moment for me to be back blogging again.

Firstly a trip to the wonderful, but ever-expanding Bett Show, reminded me of this blog's title. For it was there, at the Bett Show last year, that the irrepressable John Davitt referred to a group of 4 fellow teachers and Moodle users, and myself, as being 'DIGITAL MAVERICKS' because of our HUGToB project. At the time, and even now, I take this title as one of the greatest honours anyone has ever paid me.

Well my spirit for 'maverickitude' has not diminished, but rather it has been sidetracked a little by some events in my personal life. Still the enoucouragement of friends (you know who you are) and a recent upsurge in my reading of other people's Blogs (such as Ewan McIntosh, Ian Usher, Miles Berry and Josie Fraser) and just the inspiration that some individuals have given me (such as Dale Jones and my very good, Liverpool-supporting friend - sometimes the little prods are all you need), has fed a need in me to get Blogging again. Also my son Euan is inspiring me with his wonderful new Blog.

I'm involved with a few projects in school and out of it and I felt re-establishing a Blog would ensure that I could write about those too.

I have had a paper accepted for the forthcoming CAL 2007 conference which I see as really exciting. At the last CAL conference (in 2005 at Bristol) I was joint winner of the Teacher Poster competition, which was all the more amazing given that Miles Berry and some other notable educationalists were also involved in that event. So I am chuffed to have been accepted again this time.

Anyway, enough blathering for now. I'm away to think about my first meaningful post for this Blog.