• I started post-graduate studies. Moving from the field of education to computing proved to be a lot more difficult than I anticipated. Nevertheless, I have passed both of the papers that I sat
• I fought a couple of internal stoushes in 2010. I won a big one, and am in maintenance mode on another
• After several years of work with the Ministry of Education ICT Professional Development clusters, I decided to move sideways and work on the technical, infrastructure side of ICT in schools. This hasn’t always been easy. I now work in both Mac and Windows schools and administrate Windows, Mac and Linux servers. I am still more of a desktop specialist than a server technician. This might change in 2011 as I intend to do some study around networking and server environments
• At Christmas I was 10kgs lighter than at the same time last year. I may put on a kilogram or two the way we are eating at the moment
• I spent some time back in the classroom working with real, live kids. Much as I enjoy teaching, I re-discovered that it’s not for me
• I lost my photography mojo this year. For a long time I stopped taking pictures. Thankfully it has come back at the end of the year and I am Ms Paparazzi again, stalking my grandchildren, shooting everything in sight and even getting some passable shots
• In November I became a New Zealand citizen. After 37 years in the country it was time that I showed that I wanted to stay
• 2010 saw the usual round of illness. The spots have come and gone, reminding me when I need to slow down. I’ve had a couple of bouts of asthma and my kidneys reminded me how important they were in July
• We saw Carole King and James Taylor at the Vector Arena, Lydia Cole, Madeleine Peyroux, Melody Gardot and Diana Krall out at Villa Maria and The Topp Twins at the Auckland Zoo. Sarah MxLachlan cancelled her concert. I was quite upset about that
• In April I got a new (to me) car – a lovely blue Subaru Impreza
• My grandchildren continue to be a delight. Olivia is now 8, Keziah is 7 and Camryn is 6. Michael is almost 4. Their parents are doing a fne job bringing them up with love and wonder. Georgia Jane, my newest granddaughter was born on 4th November, 2010. Her parents, Esther and Andrew delivered the baby themselves in his old family home. I am far, far too young to be the grandmother of five
• My youngest daughter, Jesse, moved back to Auckland. It’s been lovely to have her closer to the family
• My youngest child, Ben, turned sixteen. I am enjoying guiding him to adulthood
• Holidays! We have travelled a lot in 2010. We flew down to Wellington early in January and then spent a week in Tairua before school started. In May we visited Dunedin. The July school holidays saw us in Tonga on a professional development trip. In October we spent a weekend in the far north. We visited Melbourne in November and, now, just six weeks later, we are ending the year (and starting the next one) back in Melbourne
• The Tonga trip was a huge big deal. Thanks to the staff at May Road School for including us in their professional development journey. I learned a lot. I confronted a lot of my beliefs about teaching and learning and about the role of technology. Most importantly I learned about myself and dealt with some demons
• I also made a very quick trip to Hastings after my mother became unwell. My parents’ health is an ongoing concern
• I went back to the tablet PC. My beloved 7 and 10” netbooks have gone to my children and I’m now using an HP TouchSmart. It’s not perfect but the multi-touch screen is well advanced from what I was using in 2005
• After losing my beloved Nokia E71, the insurance company gave me a Nokia E75. I hated it so sold it and bought a cheap Samsung Spica Android phone. Only one thing to say: Android phones rock. I am writing this whilst tethered through PdaNet (my Samsung is still stuck on Éclair)
• Blogging has slipped almost completely away in 2010. Instead I am using Facebook to communicate with friends and family (on a personal level) while my Twiter accounts are more open and general. I am reasonably comfortable with the mix although, like the rest of the connected world, privacy is a big concern

And finally, in contradiction of my opening statement, this is the most important …

• Our home continues to be a place of peace, love and happiness. I dearly love the people that I live with and the way that we live. Thank you both for putting up with me. May the love and laughter continue in 2011

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My catch of the day at the Huka Falls Prawn Park

A new decade – a new start?

It would be nice to be able to resurrect this space and do some “fun” writing again. The pressures of the last eighteen months have meant that, apart from tiny Twitter-bytes, I haven’t done any real writing about the things that I care about. These holidays have been tagged for a bit of R&R&R – Rest and Recuperation and Resurrection.

It’s not that I haven’t been doing the things that I love. We’ve done a lot of travelling around the place recenttly and I have uploaded a ton of photos to my Flickr account. Visits to Wairoa, Hastings and Wellington have been photographed, tagged and put online. I’m uploading some shots that I took around the lower Kaipara Harbour after an amazing cruise we did on Thursday. There are family photos too.

I’ve been geeking around too. Dropped 500GB hard drives into my laptop and netbook and upgraded them both to Windows 7. I’ve been playing with some Linux and Windows PE live CDs and looking at how these environments can be used in my world. This week I finally got around to setting up some extra network stuff so that our whole house has the right kind of internet access. Benn and I have taken on the task of stripping down all of our old junked computers and sorting out which parts go to TradeMe, which we can use and what just needs to go to someone else to recycle. Our home network is pretty shoddy at the moment – I need to think about placing our equipment more efficiently so that it serves us rather than we serve it.

We bought ourselves a Wii for Christmas and have really enjoyed playing some of the games and activities. The Wii Fit is getting a daily workout too! I’m planning to have a play with the ideas behind the Wiimote Project.

Porthole to history at the Museum of Wellington City & Sea

This year sees a bit of a change in direction for me. I’m going to start my post graduate studies. After several years heavily immersed in the educational ICT arena it’s time to step back and take another look at the world of silicon, ones and zeroes. I’ll still be doing my schools’ tech support work, my websites and looking after my business clients, however, it’s time to get thinking again and to think more widely.

The world of educational ICT is a great place to visit but it’s not the world that I want to stay. There are a lot of amazing thinkers in that world but unfortunately there are also a lot of people who can’t see beyond their own sphere. I think that it’s time for me at least to break out and to see if I can get a wider perspective on things. So that’s what I hope to do this year. I’ll still be on the fringe of the education world but by being outside of the ICT PD network, hopefully I’ll be able to see things with more clarity.

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At first the news came through to the family via phone and text. My heart started pounding and an old familiar phrase rose … “I’ll pray …”

But I don’t pray any more. I left that life a long time ago. So I got on the internet and found a news report. I scanned the family Bebo and Facebook pages but just hours after the event there was nothing.

Over the weekend we sent and received texts and phone calls of disbelief, hope and love. Then slowly the Facebook and Bebo pages started to fill with little messages. First it was other young people sending love, energy and affirmations to their friend lying in hospital. Then it was whys? and hows? Then the family started to leave updates and messages of thanks.

Social Networking as a twenty-first century prayer? It might sound facetious to many people. Consider, though, in times of disaster or emergency – personal or not – people want to get together and leave a token or a message that expresses a quiet public thought. Think about prayer circles that feature in Christian church communities the world over. Just last week I saw a little box in a school office, inviting parents to leave their email addresses in order to join an E-prayer group for those “less fortunate or in introuble”.

Social Networking as a twenty-first century prayer? Amen.

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I’ve had a fiddle with the Maintenance Mode plugin (which is where I got the idea) and will see how that works.

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Found at Google Blogoscoped.

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The new year has brought about new resolutions and ideas. I bet more than a few bloggers woke up on January 1st with ideas to up their post quantity and quality and with ideas to garner more links and at least a few dollars. My RSS reader is packed with “What’s gonna be big in 2009” and “Who to follow this year” and “Where I’m going to go this year” . And that’s a good thing. Goal setting and all of that. The stuff we do well.

One goal that we all could do well to think about is to consider where we put our trust in 2009. Are we trusting the freebies with all of our important stuff? Or are we taking responsibility for our own data and information?

Google have closed down their Lively service. Voicethread changed their terms and conditions. Advertisements are popping up everywhere and making it really hard to find the gold amongst the glitter. Most of us haven’t paid a cent for these services and so we are in no position to complain about things.

My advice is to use what’s out there. Enjoy the toys. Twitter, Google, Animote, Voicethread, Flickr to your hearts content … but remember the bills need to be paid. Subscriptions and advertising click throughs might be paying the way … or they might not. Enjoy the golden weather while it’s here but always take care of your digital life. Backup, archive and take care of your own stuff.

And look for the doorbell.

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Over the weekend I discovered that the National Library of New Zealand had been trawling the net and bulk downloading harvesting,

every publicly accessible website that falls under the nz country code, as well as certain other websites that are owned by New Zealanders or legally considered New Zealand publications.

This is because

The internet is always changing, and uses a myriad of technologies, so it is impossible to make a perfect copy. Despite this, we are hoping to harvest 100 million URLs during October 2008, giving us a snapshot of the internet at that time. link

I also discovered that if I took the usual measure, to avoid being crawled and archived, by using a robots.txt file inside my website, the National Library would ignore my wishes right to object to outside crawling of my site and take it anyway “to enhance the likelihood of our being able to harvest as full a snapshot of the .nz domain as possible“.

That’s OK though because I know that the National Library has my best interests at heart and knows better than I do about the archiving of my website. They know that although I might consider my few pages of rants, raves and links to be temporary, my grandchildren will want to benefit from the crazy thoughts that I had way back in October 2008.

But what about the people who have developed applications which generate dynamic webpages based on entry data – I’ve seen countless webpages like this. The astute developer will have done the right thing and placed an anti crawl robots.txt file in their website to avoid crawlers doing huge damage to their server traffic. I know you can opt in to opt out of being crawled, but you have to have seen it at the right time, followed up the user agents, worked out what was happening and put in your request. I didn’t notice until it was a bit life. Hu hum, life got in my way.

I’m in two minds about this idea of the National Library archiving everything in the .nz webosphere. As much as anyone I want the stories collected and collated for the future, couldn’t they respect respect some of our wishes for autonomy over our material? I have no robots.txt file on any of my websites at the moment – although I do want the right as a relatively savvy citizen to have the option. As it happens, it appears the biggest internet archive site in the world agrees with me.

EDIT: Aha! A rewrite rule with a Rickroll. Nice. Very. Nice.

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… you can’t win either way … Steal This Comic from xkcd

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The Flip Video is a great piece of equipment. Two of my grandchildren got hold of it yesterday and had a good time playing with it. The size and chunkiness of the unit means that even the four year old was able to comfortably hold and operate the camera. They were able to quickly work out how it worked. Quite quickly it was evident that”selfies” were more popular than filming their uncle or grandmother. One thing I will do before they grab it next is put it on a neck strap so that they can wander around more comfortably.

Footage from the camera is easily imported into Movie Maker 2.

I was also able to view camera footage on the eee PC which would make the little computer a great conduit for uploading to YouTube or other video sites. As I have no editting software on the eee PC I was not able to test that function. I was able to easily upload to my own webspace. I believe it works just as easily with iMovie on the Mac but as my Mac is being babysat by a daughter whose desktop is ill I was unable to prove that for myself.

If you are looking for a camera that’s small and easy to carry around, has no extra rubbish and takes good footage then the Flip is a good choice. If you want to shoot footage for the classroom or for the web it’s a great piece of equipment. This is not the camera to shoot for TV or DVD quality. It’s not HD or high resolution.

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While we visited she was able to give us some stories about her treatment and the therapies that are helping her to relearn some old skills and adapt to the new life that she has. Her words and demonstrations made me consider the quote mentioned at last week’s Ulearn08 Conference in Christchurch. I think Steven Carden quoted this Alvin Toffler idea it in his entertaining keynote,

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Which is a paraphrase of this,

The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction -how to teach himself. Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.    – Apparently the real quote from Herbert Gerjouy when interviewd by Toffler

I’m a great one for telling everyone else how to deal with change. I even held a round table discussion about it at Ulearn. Today I was refocussed.

“… how to look at problems from a new direction -how to teach himself …” I watched my sister-in-law hoist herself upright and maneover  into an electric wheelchair. She picked up an errant leg and plonked it on the footrest and tucked an out of contol arm onto her lap. Then she walked (wheeled) us off the premises so that she could carry on relearning.

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