This was the first-ever entry of Spinning a Learning Web, my personal blog. In a sense it marked a change in my thinking about what a blog might be. It went on to change too as the months and years went by, but it’s nice to see what gave me the impetus back when.
This is a blog I have been promising myself for a while. A blog where I can simply chart the happenings of each day, the curiosities that emerge, the lovely things and the sad, the intriguing and the rolling pattern of the seasons of my life. The blogs I keep apart from this one are more like casebook entries in work projects. I needed somewhere else, as in a trusty old journal, where I could keep thoughts along with images and links. This is the first entry of what I hope I can keep for at least a year. We’ll see.
I’m feeling very creative right now and wonder whether it’s just that I have time to notice how I feel. With the students now on summer vacation, there is time to take stock, think, plan, and generally give myself some time. What’s emerged has been a desire to write, to take pictures, to read, to learn more. It feels nice to be feeding the flame again, to be finding the energy to do, to want to do all of these things. The Create World 2006 Conference at Griffith U last week probably helped. Some of the work being done in the digital sphere and collaboratively is inspirational.
I lashed out yesterday on a digital SLR, my first, and the first SLR for many years. It’s a NIKON D40 which comes highly recommended. Nice, nice lens, and with all those pixels to play with, cropping for detail is going to be great fun. I’ve found myself a good digital photo site hosted by the genial Derek Story whom I’ve been listening to for some months now on the iLife Zone podcast. This site has a photo assignment each month and I am going to try to keep up even if I don’t post the outcomes of my “capture” (new term this one!).
As for the writing bug, I want to investigate the open-source Omnium Project when it is released next year. If it works as it should, then the writing and development of the one person show being developed throughout the year by my third level students could find a home in a collaborative environment. I’m intrigued by the aesthetics, administrative simplicity and the general principles behind the Omnium Project, a non-profit, community focused creative organisation hosted at UNSW College of Arts. The writing project which I want to extend from the pilot I tried this year, will I think, work better from the outset if each writer can see the others’ work, and if it is easy and pleasing to use. The first thing I need to do is however, to map out the course activities and this before I head off to Mexico for a family wedding and a drop-in back to Hawaii in January. It’s a busy time, but I’m loving being neck deep!
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