Barbara Dieu

Hello,

Thank you Nick for the warm welcome and let me introduce myself to those you do not know me. I'm Barbara (Bee) Dieu, a secondary school teacher at the Franco-Brazilian school in Sao Paulo, Brazil and I have been online, working on collaborative projects since 1997.

To tell you the truth, I did not know I might be a facilitator until I googled online facilitation and read George Siemens post about it, five minutes ago :-)  Still have a lot to learn from all of you and looking forward to it.

One thing I can assure you, Boracay is really worth visiting and I am sure it will inspire lots of facilitation ideas.

Thank you very much, Michael, Sylvia and all involved for this dynamic and interesting session, from which so many diverse perspectives emerged.
It gave me the opportunity to get acquainted with people from areas very different from my own, each with their special needs and contexts.

I will try to join you for the next seminar.
Warm regards from Brazil,
Bee

PS. I would like to invite all for the next session Blogstreams Salon to be held on March 4th at 21GMT at Tappedin

Blogstreams is a synchronous text session I hold every first Sunday of the month and also a place where you can find a number of blogging resources, archives from past sessions and recordings with guest speakers.

Here is the naked link. It opened for me.
http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/review/wiliarty-reconstruction-review

The IT dept at school did not give me a position yet - but the links open at home so will study them this weekend.

Thank you Terry. The Horizon white paper goes very much along the same lines as the Future Lab Uk research programme which evaluates the impact of technology on learning and teaching.

If you like black humour , you can contrast Ken Robinson's inspirational message to Rowan Atkins', who shows how most schools manage to

motivation and enthusiasm for learning.

Last year, Aaron Campbell, Rudolf Ammann (with whom I co-run Dekita.org) and I wrote an article  P2P AND LEARNING ECOLOGIES IN EFL/ESL, which briefly introduces the peer-to-peer (P2P) concept and applies it to an educational context. We discuss both the pedagogical and technological prerequisites for peer-centered learning to occur, suggest possible social tools, and provide examples of EFL/ESL projects.

I have just got a mail from the Academic Commons announcing a special issue on blogging: You.Niversity? A Review of Reconstruction's Special Issue: "Theories/Practices of Blogging", which may prove an interesting read for all in this discussion forum.

I agree that forums may be more suited to discussions like the ones we are having now. I recently conducted a workshop on Open and Participatory Webpublishing with a group of teachers. The questions for discussion were published on a wiki and were to be answered on the blogs individually to be commented on by the others.

I had a dual aim when I established this:

• ownership: make participants reflect on their learning process in their own spaces so that they would keep their posts for further reference.
  
• aggregation and syndication: make participants experience RSS and how to read and manage their blogroll

However, I feel that the conversation was a bit too distributed and dispersed even though I was using Cocomment to track what was going on and how it evolved. I feel the process may have been richer if we had interacted on a forum like this one. Afterwards people could either pull THE thread that interested them and expand them on their own blogs or make a synthesis of the main threads adding a personal comment. Lessons learned from experience and observation.