Dear All,

This was an exciting Sunday morning for me and many other webheads around the world. After our usual meeting at Tapped In, we headed to WorldBridges, which is becoming a routine every Sunday, too. But this time, Jeff and Dave had a great surprise for all of us, a live webcast with Stephen Downes and Will Richardson. I first heard of Stephen Downes back in 2002 while attending the Networking 2002 conference in Australia where some Webheads presented with Michael Coghlan about Croscultural communication (Btw, the icon I use on this blog won me a prize at this conference, a nice book on graphic organizers which was sent to me to Spain where I lived in those times). Stephen was the reporter of the event in his "Networking daily  overview". Since that time I have followed his wise comments about technology on his web page where he keeps a record of his talks, articles, links, etc.

I learned about Will Richardson for the first time, at the EVOnline session on Blogging in Jan. 2005 moderated by Aaron Campbell, Barbara Dieu and Graham Stanley. They had several guest speaker talk about setting blogs and how to use them in education. One of these guests was Will Richardson who gave at talk at Learning Times on RSS: Rss: The New Killer Appl for Educators. If you want to learn about RSS do not miss this talk (you need to be a member of LT to access the recording of the session - free membership).

Well, today we had the opportunity to listen to an enlightening interview with them, while chatting with other colleagues at WorldBridges:

Do not miss the recording which will be available very soon.

Daf

Dear all,

It's been a while since my last entry due to the summer holiday. Here I am again, this time I am devoting this post to a course I have been kindly invited to attend by its moderator, Vance Stevens. The course deals with "Multiliteracies for Collaborative Learning Environments". We are pretty familiar with what collaborative learning environments are, but... MULTILITERACIES...Hmmm, what is that?

Well, that's what we are supposed to get to in the second cycle of the course (in the first cycle we introduced ourselves and interacted informally with the rest of the participants in Moodle ).

After reading the different enlightening works done by other participants, I decided to take a look at what goes on inside my classrooms, and I created this Web page

I would appreciate your comments.

hugs,

Daf

Barbara Chap, one of the guest tutors in my English for Architecture and Urban Planning courses, has just sent this message that I would like to share:

Dear Daf and her classes,

Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to present the Eiserner Steg.  I never would have put together a photo story without you:  I usually need a reason to do something creative.  I had a lot of fun, and I hope you can use it again and again. (......)  Of course, all the old pictures are not mine.  But starting the segment 2005, they are all mine.

One of the students asked for the names of the bridges I mentioned in the presentation.  They are, of course, Eiserner Steg (The Iron Footbridge), Alte Bruecke (The Old Bridge – when exactly folks began calling it the “old” bridge I don’t know), Neue Floessebruecke (The New Rafting Bridge – earlier people came on rafts and launched their rafts from there), Obermainbruecke and Untermainbruecke (Over Main Bridge and Under Main Bridge – indicating their positions in relationship to Alte Bruecke).  Unfortunately, there is not a lot on the internet – even about Eiserner Steg – about any of Frankfurt’s bridges.  What is there of substance is in German.  A lot of my material came from books we have around the house about the city.

Weren’t all the presentations interesting?  It was also interesting that each one of us took a somewhat different approach.  By the way, on our way home from Chrissan’s we stopped by Sus Nyrop’s house and had a nice snack and some beer from her home island.  I’ve attached pictures.  It was really great to get together with them.  My husband asked how I knew I would get along with them (that means constant chatter) . . . but he’s only just beginning to “get it” about women and especially about Webheads.

Take care.  Please send any questions your students might have.

Hugs,   Barb

PS.  Sweden and Denmark are full of all kinds of bridges.  If I get to it, I’ll send a little, I mean really little, photo story of them…including some nice pictures of Sus’ bridge connecting Sweden and Denmark.

*************

I created a page for all the guest tutors we had in our courses: http://dafnegonzalez.com/id3125-05/content/guests.html

Daf

Dafne, 2005

Hi everybody,

I have not written for almost 3 months, ever since I went to Spain for a month in March (shame on me!). I have several things to share, but now I am just going to post a message for my "English for Architecture and Urban Planning" students at Universidad Simón Bolivar in Caracas, Venezuela. But this time I will not write the message. I have recorded it using Handybits ;-)

  Click on my photo and you will hear my message ;-)

See you all!!

Dafne

Valencia, Spain is a beautiful, lively city with many beautiful parks in spite of being located in a dry area with very little rain. But its parks are well-kept and  they really invite their visitors to come back. An example is the Turia Park which crosses all the city. Take a look:

                                                                       Don't you feel like jogging?

                                                            The Serrano Towers (used to be one of the entrances to the city)

                                                                               The Royal Bridge

                                                                                               Isn't it inviting?

Well, if you want to see more, just click on this link, and you will take a tour of this park with some narration and music.

Enjoy!

Daf

Many people left for the beach and mountain for the carnival holidays. What
nobody expected was that the weather conditions were about to change. Saturday
and Sunday were cloudy days but not rainy; however it started raining on Sunday
and has not fully stopped yet. The results, floods all over the country,
especially in the coastal areas. More than 9.000 people were isolated by the
rivers going out of their beds, and stayed without electricity, water and food
until they were rescued in helicopters and boats. Today, many people are being
sheltered in schools and other public buildings because their houses were
destroyed by the force of the water. Schools and universities have been closed
until Monday.

Below are some pictures:

Last week, I attended an event called "I Encuentro Nacional de Formación Virtual en la Educación Superior" at the Universidad de los Andes (ULA) in Mérida, a small city in the Venezuelan Andes, in the border with Colombia, a 10-hour drive from Caracas. In the photo below you can see Pico Bolivar (5007 m) (16,427 feet)

This is a view of the City:

 Many of our universities were present to show the audience what they are doing regarding e-learning. Unfortunately, for what I could hear and see, there is still a long way for e-learning in this country, with the exception of some private universities and some personal projects. Most of the people sent to this event were Engineers and technicians with very little background in education, if any. The presentations dealt with platforms being developed, or selected. Educational theories and teaching methodologies were very slightly mentioned and  sometimes?? without grounded knowledge. It was both, a disappointing and frustrating experience. The only university (present in the event) that is really involved in e-learning according to the presentation,  is Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (UCAB), a private university in Caracas. Most people there believed that ALL universities should use the same platform. The idea is that a platform is enough to deliver any kind of course. Synchronous tools were hardly mentioned, and one  presenter even said that chat was not an educational tool. Well, what can I say, my presentation was the only real instance of e-learning in action. The title: "Cursos “blended” con Herramientas Sincrónicas y Asincrónicas: Un Nuevo Contexto para la Educación. Los Casos de Inglés para Arquitectura y Métodos de Investigación" (abstract en pdf) 

This is me at the presentation:

Well, do not think that I go to my academic presentations dressed like that. I was supposed to present on Thursday afternoon, and I arrived to Merida by plane on Wednesdat at noon, went to the hotel, left my suitcase, and took a taxi (well, 3 actually, two blocks after taking the first taxi, the taxi driver stopped the car, and asked us - my colleague and I - to take another taxi because he had to wait for his wife on that corner- we took the second taxi, and half a block later, he stopped the car and prompted us to take another one because he was late for a funeral, we got to the event in the third taxi, finally), when we got to the university, register, and sat down to comfortably listen to the presenters, ahhhhh I read the program, and there it was, I was to present in a couple of hours on Wednesday, so, no time to change to the nice academic outfit I had taken with me for the occasion :-)   Why the change? Well the night before the event, the university Vice-rector, ordered the organizers to change the program :-(

Well, I took some pictures to share:

 Left to right: me and Gabriela

The Main Market:

 A 3-story multiple-height building.

A view of the university campus:

Well, after 2 hours at the airport, the plane was 2 hours late, so the trip was almost as long as if I had travelled to Europe :-)

I am back home now :-)

Yesterday, Michael Coghlan, in Australia, had a presentation at the Elluminate virtual room in Learning Times about Cutting edge tools in the ESL classroom. Bee (in Brasil) and I (in Venezuela) were invited to speak to the audience, Bee about blogs, and I was to talk about two of my blended experiences. Webheads had been invited to be there, and Buth (Kuwait),  Christine Bawer-Ramazani (in Vermont, USA) and a student of hers (in Hawaii) attended the presentation. Teresa (in Portugal) was with us for a while, but it was late for her and she had early classes next morning.
This is what the room looked like:

                                     
While we waited for Michael to appear, Jonathan, of LT, kept us company and, as usual, we enjoyed his company and cheerful conversation. To tell you the truth, Michael, while you were "loosing with temper" with the technician, we were having fun chatting in the virtual room ;-) and I did not notice your bossy voice, I don't know if the others did. Well, the session went well, but due to the technician being late to install all the applications  needed, the talk started 15 minutes later :-(, which we did not notice because we were having fun. We are still under the spell of the:

                        screenshot from Michael's ppt.

Yes, after 3 years working with CMC tools, we still feel fascinated with the possibility of interacting and sharing in a borderless world. Of course, this wow factor needs to be complemented by content, meaningful activities and right use of the tool to achieve our objectives.

Well, during the presentation, Bee and I had to stop our presentations at some point because Michael was running out of time... But let's see what he says in his report to the Webheads about the sesssion:

Well that's another Webheads MVP done. I *think* it was OK. Listening to
the archive on playback was interesting as always. I think I sound a little
irritable and bossy at the beginning! This is what happened:

1) the agreement was that I would meet the IT support guy at 8.15 am (45
minutes before start time)
2) he arrived at 8.45
3) I had to load Elluminate (this was supposed to have been done beforehand)
4) we had Elluminate up and running and sound checked
5) I tried to play my movies and found out the laptop did not have a recent
version of Media Player
6) loaded and installed Media Player 10
7) before I could stop him the IT guy found some other problem and rebooted
8) as I was using a temporary log in this meant Elluminate and Media Player
had to be reinstalled!
9) we got started at 9.15 (15 minutes later than scheduled start)

By then I was annoyed and trying desperately not to be but you can hear it
in my voice! (:

Thank you to Christine and Buth for joining the presentation (Buth was up
at 2.00 am her local time in Kuwait!), and especially to Bee and Daf for
their excellent input. (Bee and Daf, sorry again for being such a time
freak! I hate cutting people off but I always seem to be running against
the clock.) Also thanks to Jonathan for keeping the whole thing flowing
online before and after. As is nearly always the case, the conference
audience was blown away by the MVP (multiple venue presentation) aspect of
the presentation, and couldn't wait to get into Elluminate in the workshop
after the presentation. I think they were quite amazed too at what Daf has
being doing with guest lecturers and oral presentations.

I have created a page <http://users.chariot.net.au/~michaelc/els/pres.htm>
where all the tools referred to are listed. The archive is at
http://home.learningtimes.net/learningtimes?go=638193 (slow loading but it
does work).

Now I can officially go back on holidays!

- Michael.

This is not an uncommon experience. Those of us who have participated in this MVP events know that this is usually what happens. Even in the classroom when we need to rely on others to take care of the technical part, or in online courses when our computers decide to have a temper tantrum. On Tuesday in my graduate course, the server at the university went down and we lost half an hour of class. Moral: we need to always have a plan B and sometimes a C. In this case, Michael's only alternative was to ask us to stop at a certain point, but the WOW factor had made its effect on the audience :-)  Bravo, Michael!!

Michael showed a slide with a comment to the WiA list about what is "Cutting edge tools in ESL":

                                                                      screenshot from Michael's ppt

I agree with this comment!

Thanks for the invite to be again in one of your live presentations, Michael. I think I have traveled quite a lot with you ;-) Remember when we went to Hawaii? I still have in my mind the view from the room where we were presenting (a paradisiac balmy beach with swinging palm trees) The wonders of CMC!!

Buth has created a page reporting the event: http://alothman-b.tripod.com/wia_mc_cuttingedge_050120.htm

Daf

Teresa and I are starting our first week of Becoming a Webhead (BaW) for the second year. The turn out has been impressive. During the 2-week registration, participants started to interact spontaneously, and by the end of the first week, there was even a project going on with 3 teachers in different parts of the world who are already working as a team in Webcollaborator. Yesterday was the official kick-off of the session, and we reached 173 participants. We had to start a new interactive map because we had 100 entries on the first one, which is the maximum for the free service. We have teachers from all over the world, with concentrations in Latin America (especially Venezuela), East Coast of the US, and Europe, take a look:

Apart from interacting, there has been reflection about the readings assigned for week 1, which have been posted to our forum, and general reflections about the session posted to our blog.

This is becoming exciting, the group is so motivated and eager to share and collaborate that I am really looking forward to the next 6 weeks :-)

Stay tuned!

Daf 

In our EVO session "Webpresence" (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/webpresence/) list, Vance wrote:
"I notice from pictures in the YGroup and comments in the blogs that Daf and Damian have something in common.  What is it? (Scavenger hunt!!)"

Well, I could not hold my curiosity and run to check the blog at http://webpres2005.buzznet.com/user/?id=776980, read our messages and observed our photos very carefuly, but could not find much, anyway, I realized some common features, which I sent to the list:

"Hmmm,
Let's see what Damian and Daf (me) have in common. I can say we have two things in common:
1. We have greek names: Damian  -Daphne (I used to spell it like this, but in my country people had trouble pronouncing it, and I ended up being calledby very weird sounding names:-(  so I changed the spelling)
2. We end our messages with a "hug"

As for the photos I could not find anything else - I have not grown a beard yet ;-) "

However, I was mistaken, see what Vance wrote back:

"If Dafne can't find it, I guess I need to provide a couple of hints:
(1) Damian's photos uploaded to YahooGroups,
(2) Daf's message at http://webpres2005.buzznet.com/user/?id=776980 "

So, there I was, going to the blog again, reading my message and then to the YG to check Damian's pics. While observing the photos I realized we have a similar smile, but I could not believe that's what Vance was talking about, until ......I found it...yessssss :-)  My immediate reaction was to send the answer to the list, but then I thought I should let other participants do their hunt. Instead, I sent this message to the list:

"Got it, Vance ;-)   very nice indeed! But I will not say it. I will let others find it :-) "

I will show here what we have in common, though (he he)

                               
                                               Damian's personal paradise, as he calls it

Now you can compare his personal paradise with my personal tropical jungle, that I showed on my previous post. WoW! Damian we have many things in common besides being Webheads ;-)

No, this is "A view from my garden", but doesn't it look like a tropical jungle? How do you like it?

The orchid is our national flower. The one on the photo is a "Cattleya lueddemanniana ". My sister is an orchids nut. She grows them and spends many hours pampering them. I took this picture on Jan, 2, 2005. The other red flower is a Hibiscus,  "cayena" in Spanish.