There are good reasons to encourage more people to do this, to share thoughts and ideas online, to reflect on their work, to aggregate ideas (like a portfolio), to generate and share content.
What do you think?
Why have YOU embarked on this journey?
What will motivate you to keep doing?
How about every day for a year?(the goal of us early bloggers in 1999).
P.S. And an age-appropriate photo will replace the happy Dad of 9 years ago that you currently see. Intellectually I feel like a 19 year old - fighting fit and argumentative. The way I will go down here on in.
I have never gone grey, not lost much hair, still swim a mile or more a week ... avoid the sun, but tan easily.
I do NOT need reading glasses ... but my skin, in places is starting to look like rice paper ... I'm a baby of the 60s.
Thrilled to be alive, highly mixed up in e-learning ... a century ago (like my grandfather) it would have been planes, motorbikes and cars.
About to go out and eat on an extraordinary evening on the South Downs with views across the English Channel with the three people who matter the most to me in all the world, my wife and children.
Have I done my bit?
When they emerge from university and have five years steady employment, with a partner ...
When do you let go?
Given than my mother's parents, aunts and uncles reached their 90s ...
I feel, and celebrate that we never let go.
If in 50 years time my mother and my siblings and our cousins and second cousins and our children are all still present ?
P.P.S. I am neither jingoistic or necessarily a patriot. The above is a statement of circumstance. Those millions of us living here ought to reflect more often on how great it is to live a life in peace, with food, a roof over our heads, clothing and friends. The challenge of the next 100 years is to educate some people not to abuse it: flytipping stinks, littering is no better. There are too many people in our society who frankly don't give a monkey's +@#
I got an iPHone three weeks ago.
Today my son (13 years 3 months) loaded the Carling APP, and a fish pond.
He then showed me how to turn it off. So one of these and one of those
I do now follow various foriums with the RSS feed to my email, picking them off as the happen, responding from time to time, rather than letting them stack up.
For the second time today I did a Google search only to come back to this student blog, whilst in one respect chuffed, it doesn't help me correct the considerable volumes of nonsense that exist here.
This possibly explains the 1,000+ page views a day.
The last time I went on a Geography Field trip was January 1982. This was a School of Geography trip to Majorca. We stayed on the south of the island and took a coach every day to the beautiful, scenic, and for the purposes of this trip, featured covered mountains (limestone), rather like North Yorkshire but not so wet ... with trips to the coast where cliffs showed the geology (rather like Hope Gap here in East Sussex).
If you experience of running a field trip of any kind is rather more recent than mine you might care to comment. I added in some practical matters such as risk assessment.
I can see that at this size it isn't legible.
Click on it and you go to the Picasa Web page where it is held and it can be viewed any size you like, or downloaded.
Keen to get the initials of e-learning authors/academics I put 'Hawkridge, Morgan and Jeffs', into the search engine Bing and was directed to a not very helpful student blog ... this one
Whereas Google offered the correct journal, and paper authored by these three and corrected Jeffs to Jelfs. One click and I had the paper downloaded (for the umpteenth time) as a PDF.
I don't bookmark or save documents anymore, I just Google it. Now, is this because Google is intuatively following my choices? I hotdesk between computers though, I'm on my wife's laptop now, was on my son's desk top earlier on ... while during the week I'm on my own laptop or iPad.
I guess it depends on how I am signed in. Who knows. I should (but don't).
This 6,000 word assignment is in its final draft.
My current estimation is that it will take another 16 hours to complete; it is due 12 noon on Monday.
Why so long?
The content and narrative is in place, and running at 8,000 words it should be just a case of judicious editing and referencing. The challenge is how to create the required, or my desired, weave of references, quotations and illustrations while not 'losing the plot' or making something straight-forward confusing.
Whilst two years to get to publication for an academic seems extreme, I do nontheless now appreciate how and why these things can take so long. However, I question why the marking system and the objective appears to be to turn us students into the writers of academic papers, when for most of us the desire, certainly in the Masters in Open and Distance Education is far more practical, indeed the Sussex University e-learning diploma is assessed through the completion of a series of workable e-learning modules or activities that can lead to students applying this content directly in their workplace or joining any of the many e-learning and web business along the Sussex Coast.
Listen - Engage - Create Simplified to a traffic light (see below) 
With the additional thought, 'you can't understand social media unless you do it'.
This IS the new TV, new Radio, new wordprocessing ...it will and is transforming the way we do things forever.
We'll have dropped the suffix 'e' with a year and the descriptors such as 'digital' sooner.
Learners should not be defined by the technology they use, whether books, TV, computers, or interactive web-content; they should be defined by the processes of myelination that is going on regardlessly, in it's most mysterious ways, under our thick skulls.
Who indeed is the 'digital scholar', an academic now an 'e-reader' in 'Enter Subject Specialisms Here'.
Some answers are offered in Martin Weller's book 'The Digital Scholar'.
My favoured observation post is to watch out for this slippery fish in the OU Student Blog Roll, more a stream of fish-fry commencing their online, 'electronically-enhanced' learning journey, than a mere list, more news feed, though refreshing from the perspective of the new, rather than the rehearsed and practises mind.
Once a fish, now a fisherman?
I have another 12 months in these waters, more if I postpone completing the MA (more by accident than design, I've not registered for the next module yet - whatever that might be).
The choices are bewildering, not least because I can drift off to do something with a different Faculty.
Part of the brilliance of The OU to enable such choices. Creativity and Innovation with the Business School is attractive.
Monday 26th Submit EMA (by previous Friday preferably) then a day off everything. I may go for a swim.
Tuesday 27th Have no choice but to accept that having been 34 for the last 16 years I am now 50. Take part in a conference call to discuss webinars. Birthday lunch or dinner, or both.
Wednesday 28th (if I am still living) get stuck into MOOC 2011 while attending 'The World of Learning' if only to speak to Laura Overton about benchmarking through 'Towards Maturity'.
Thursday 29th Attend and video an inaugural lecture. (Cherie Blair QC)
Friday 30th Supervise uploading between 6 and 15 interviews with our new MBA students to our website (Business School).
Saturday 31st fly to Grenoble, pick up hire car and head to Tignes for a weekend skiing on the glacier where I asked my wife to marry me 20 years ago.
Spend a fortnight skiing various European glaciers.
Some of the above is wishful thinking
(Three days later I have not submitted my EMA; I am working on it today. I should be doing a paper edit of some student interviews then will be cut in my absence on Monday. I need also to finish a script for an MBA workshop.)
Or should that be 64 things and 14 academics ? (a number that could be doubled from our reading lists with ease).
What about the others?
What have I missed out?
Some tools:
Do please add some of your own to see if I can get it up to the cliched 101.
If Boyer's four main scholarly functions were research, application, integration and teaching, then I would propose that those of the digital scholar are engagement, experimentation, reflection and sharing'.
Weller (2011 in Chapter 4, 20% of the way through, Kindle Location 1005. Is there a page number related to a print version? Amazon say not in a polite, informative and lengthy e-mail. What therefore is the answer to this referencing conundrum?)
Does Weller's suggestion make anyone who keeps a student blog and shares it openly like this a scholar?
Making us all digital scholars?
(I love the term as a hundred years ago in Census Returns it was used to describe anyone attending an academic institution, whether school or university).
Goals of the Scholarly Activity
Reference
Boyer, E.L. 1990. Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Princeton, NJ.
Weller, M., (2011) The Digital Scholar
I've picked this out of Martin Weller's new book 'The Digital Scholar'. (2011)
This book is published under a Creative Commons licence that throws away the old concenpt of copyright and ownership, inviting people to do as they please with the content so long as he is attributed (indeed any of the other authors/academics he quotes himself).
He is either on a mission, or playing at the edge of digital scholarship by inviting others in, expecting more than peer review for his thinking followed by publication years hence in an academic journal.
The stance I take, is that the outside, the novice, someone from a different discipline or culture, can, act in many ways to amerliorate knowledge, either as a catalyst for seeing things differently, or by seeing things differently themselves and in time being able to articulate this in a convincing manner.
They don't have to wait for permission or acceptance, they just do it.
So long as we can see (as you can online, say with a wiki) the trail of changes (editing, additions) others coming to this fluid material may draw their own conclusions (if a conclusion is now ever possibly given that a work offered online in this way is never complete).
Water-Cycle Images offered under Creative Commons
http://quizlet.com/2634344/water-cycle-with-pictures-flash-cards/
How I see learning in Web 2.0 where everything is digitised, shared, communicated and changed. Simply write over the terms and phrases here with:
... and so on
Weller, M (2011) The Digital Scholar. How technology is transforming scholarly practice. Bloomsbury
This OU profs new book 'The Digital Scholar' deliberately had a Creative Commons licence allowing all kinds of things to be done to it.
All I've done is read it cover to cover, type up notes and my thoughts along e way and then posted up ALL of this. See Below or use the 'search this blog facility.'
The most a busy blogger can do when unable to blog is to jot down some notes in the hope that in a quiet moment you can return.
After a protracted absence from work I have that to catch up on, as well as an End-of-module Assignment (EMA) to deliver in 10 days times (far earlier I hope).
I need to return to:
I drew all I needed to share from this mind-map (to upload indue course). Most telling for me is being just as interested to engage face-to-face so I need to do this regularly. Social Media is complementary, not replacement technology.
I found the process as well as the likely outcome to be fascinating. For all you H810ers, the Chair of this module was the observer in the TV Gallery follwing my behaviours and actions. More to come.
What the outsider cannot appreciate is the extraordinary depth and quality of thinking that goes into what the OU does.
Another vital lesson that in a two hour form (they could edit the video from its six hour length) ought to be part of an induction package for anyone coming into Higher Education in a content creation role. More to follow once I have H800 out of the way (end of September).
Having failed to register for the next module I'll have good time to reflect on the content of this blog and migrate most, if not all of it, over to my external blog My Mind Bursts or to a new blog focused exclusively on e-learning.
Get out more, and get a business card.
I can reflect on far more after an evening with strangers, but that will have to wait. (Strangers no more, and one I've been in discussions in LinkedIn for months).
Face to face works too, people have time to understand each other and see responses, facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, even hesitation, how and when they join in.
'If Boyer's four main scholarly functions were research, application, integration and teaching, then I would propose that those of the digital scholar are engagement, experimentation, reflection and sharing'. Weller (2011).
Reference
Weller, M (2011) The Digital Scholar. How technology is transforming scholarly practice. Bloomsbury
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