Learning with the Fang

Dave (LifeKludger) Wallace and I caught up with the illustrious Nancy (FullCircle) White during some spare moments of her AustralianOctober tour to talk about connections. Dave documents the meeting and the upcoming podcast on his blog.

I want to leave a somewhat circular trail of breadcrumbs for Nancy – links to things we discussed and saw today. So here goes:

(Nancy, I will UPDATE some of the links over time – wanted to post something tonight)

The earliest connection we could recall was with people at TechSoup – either Marnie Webb or Beth Kanter started the ball rolling by sharing information about an upcoming presentation they were preparing. There was an overlap between their presentation and one Dave and I were working on for CISA’s ConnectingUp2006 conference.

Shortly before our presentation in May, 2006 I left some audio feedback with the NetSquared podcast, which Britt Bravo kindly included in their next episode – forging a link between our event and theirs. If you check out the youtube video of our presentation, you will notice I am wearing my EvilGeniusChronicles T-shirt and talk about my connection with Dave Slusher (about 17mins in).

Around that time I had hooked up with the EdTechTalk (Dave Cormier et al) crew as part of my work with LearnDog. They were very excited in one of their podcasts to be speaking with Nancy White – some sort of legend in the online community world.

Dave and Beth Kanter had been exploring Second Life – in which Dave asked for a virtual wheelchair (that started some interesting discussions). Dave tried to introduce me to a very busy Beth at TechSoup’s mixed reality event in secondlife – after which Beth kindly appeared as a guest via skype in our extraordinary everyday lives (eel) podcast. All this mixed reality stuff got me interested in making some machinima remixes of Lawrence Lessig, Stephen Downes and the Popular Science / Creative Commons music gig in secondlife.

While doing some consulting work in the Education sector, a blog post by Beth Kanter informed me of a podcast by Nancy White about a paper she had written for her upcoming visit to Australia in October. This paper was published by the Flexible Learning Framework people in the knowledge tree publication (that Stephen Downes sometimes links to).

Having left a few comments about Nancy’s podcast a connection began that led me to attending an online event hosted by Nancy prior to her trip, in which I presented her with some virtual chocolate – which Beth Kanter found somewhat amusing.

A few blog posts, emails and one phone call later – Nancy, Dave and I find ourselves at the same space-time coordinates and make a little podcast to capture and celebrate these connections. Only on re-listening to this did I figure out that Nancy and Beth collaborated on that first presentation which started this little chain of events – somewhat circular eh?

Some other things we saw / talked about:

- Geotagged photos by blogging Adelaide teacher Al Upton at Glenelg Oval, very close to my house. Al, Graham Wegner and I hook up at a talk by Barbara Ganley. A local community of blogging educators sprouts some leaves.

- myPLE, the Glenelg foreshore where I scan large amounts of audio while riding my bicycle. This is the heart of my self directed, re-education.

- More geotagging experiments, including a diagram of my windsurfing trails and recent shark attacks.

- photos of other Adelaide landmarks (I will try to remember to tag them with AustralianOctober).

Here endeth the trail of breadcrumbs.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:australianoctober