Long time, no meet!

Today's Language Teacher Development Project gathering was jam-packed with firsts.

• First gathering in a long time (since August 2004)!
  
• First time the coordinator forgot to put up signs directing people to the meeting room (at least in recent memory; my apologies to anyone who had trouble finding it).
  
• First live participation from overseas: Yasuyo stayed up late in Toronto, Canada, and joined the new cohort by exchanging direct messages with everyone on site. Thanks, Yasuyo - Your fingers must be tired! For some of the participants this was a first go at instant messaging (IM), in English at least, and online interviewing. Comments, please, on what you thought about IM.
  
• First go at wikis for most, if not all participants: Everyone got to see how wikis work, and almost everyone got some hands on. One participant who hadn't actually contributed to a wiki in session decided to make doing so one of her project goals.
• First team of guest presenters: Thanks, Rick & Joe, for sharing your insights and ideas for using wikis, and pointing out all those spaces ready to use (podcast presentation available at iTunes Store - requires free iTunes software, first). I won't wait five years to put them to use!
  

Getting ready for RSS

My mailboxes get filled by discussion board and mailing list messages faster than I can read them. Yesterday, I hastily reviewed and disposed of hundreds and hundreds of messages, in just two prefiltered mailboxes, culling only a few which struck my fancy. Even though I'd searched for, and previewed items in one of those mailboxes containing my favorite term, "collaborati," and had sorted messages in the other mailbox for posts by members whom I know and respect to preview, on threads that had already caught my interest; it was a long, tiring, unsatisfying, and largely unproductive process

So I'm planning to start making use of RSS feeds and aggregation technology to create several focused collections of collections of related source materials that I enjoy reading, and find useful (or potentially so) in my work. One collection will combine SCoPE scheduled seminar feeds, with Online Facilitation mailing list posts that usually go into the two mailboxes that I emptied yesterday.

http://scope.lidc.sfu.ca/rss/file.php/12/177/forum/132/rss.xml
http://rss.groups.yahoo.com/group/onlinefacilitation/rss

The question is, where and how to put these together, for my own ease of reading and uptake. Elgg..., Safari...? Hmm. Perhaps that depends on where I will be most likely to view and digest them in a deliberate and timely fashion.

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Blogger settings visited

• Basic: Add...to...listings - No
• Formatting: Time zone - Japan [UTC + 09:00]
• Comments:
  
• Only registered users
• Backlinks - Show
• Show word verification for comments - YES!

• Archiving: Weekly
• Site feed:
  
• Publish site feed - Yes
• Article footer: Add some sort of Creative Commons license?

• Email:
• BlogSend address - [none]
• Mail to Blogger address - [username].potpourri@blogger.com [- publish]
  

• Members: Add team members - Option (by individual email invitations)
  

One or two in 25 without...

One or two student-teachers or practicing teachers participating in the Pigate workshop today reported not having email. Another two participants, an ALT and a teacher educator, didn't have cell phones. So they were unable to complete a workshop activity to learn how to use cell phones to email photos immediately to new Flickr accounts that we all cross-linked to new Blogger accounts. Nevertheless, the workshop was honest-to-goodness techno-fun on a steep learning curve!

Joe & Rick do Pigate @ KGU

Joe & Rick do Pigate @ KGU
Originally uploaded by pabeaufait.

Joe & Rick conduct a blogging workshop for Pigate members in a Windows lab at KGU.