Betty Online – Time Out

This whole holiday has been amazing. I’ve had time to read more new blogs and I’m having so much fun doing so. I’ve learned so much and just really begun making amazing connections.  Blogging is truly an adventure.

I used to teach with an inspirational teacher, Karen Stewart.  Karen taught all of the senior Humanities courses at the University Transition Program where I was the coordinator.  She not only had my upmost respect, but she single handedly was responsible for truly turning more than one of the amazing highly academically gifted students in this special (Canada’s only) radical acceleration program who came in set on a life time of Math and Science, into English, Literature or History majors at university. But what I loved was having the opportunity to be outside with Karen.  Now understand, I’m a hiker.  I cycle, I power-walk, I swim and I even go to the gym.  Karen doesn’t do these things in the same way. Being outside with Karen was always magical because I honestly believe that she sees the world through very different lenses than I do. On one trip to Bamfield there I was letting my more competitive staff take off on the West Coast Trail with the keeners, while Karen and I were left behind with the not-so-keeners, often the kids who hadn’t slept in tents before and so really didn’t want to hike at all, preferring hours and hours of being in their tents to being on any bit of the trail with us.  We walked with Karen, up the steep start to the trail, and with her we saw the vines with different eyes. We laid down on the path and discovered frog eggs. We learned stories about cedar trees. I memorized a Shakespeare sonnet that I still remember to this day. Well, almost.

So what do blogging and Karen have in common? Wandering and talking with Karen was always a new adventure for me. She made me think about things differently. She questioned, ever so gently, what I thought I knew? She listened to and watched for everything around her?  She encouraged me to open my eyes. I think she even helped me see the students in new ways.  Reading blogs is like that too. Every one that I read, well almost each of the blogs, brings up a new little twist on something. I get asked to think about new things or old things in different ways.

Most recently, I stumbled upon Paul Bogush’s New Year’s blog, Blogush.  He put out the following New Year’s challenge:

If you are an old time blogger please update your blogroll with all of those new blogs you found after your initial plunge into the 2.0 world.  Nothing against the big guys, I was just looking for something fresh and new, and wanted to find people who were more like…well, me.

And he’s right.  So, I’ve decided to take him up on it. I’m going to start mapping a little more of where I go and where I’ve been. I’m not an old time blogger, but I am going to regularly update my blogroll with what is new that I’ve come across. I’ll keep track of what I read that makes me want to remember that person and go back. Watch for updates. I’d encourage you to do the same.

I look out my kitchen window at our cherry tree all decked out in snow.  It will be a beautiful white Christmas this year, something that doesn’t happen often in Vancouver.

Yet now more than ever I’m wanting this holiday season to be a green one. While I truly love this time of year, the warm feeling that comes from the smell of pine trees and hot apple cider clashes bitterly with the sense of consumerism and waste that we indulge in.  So the email greeting I received last year with a link to the Story of Stuff really stuck with me.  (It is very worth watching if you haven’t yet seen it.)

Now with the added awareness of the danger of “stuff”, I struggle with the demands from my children and the media messages telling us to save the economy and shop! Perhaps we really just need a new economy, but how to get there? (Have you seen Affluenza?)

I don’t have the answers but still I’m proud of the changes I’ve made over the past year. In my family we buy fewer, more consumable presents. I’m striving to buy more organic and to cook more natural and wholesome foods. After watching The Disappearing Male on CBC’s doc zone recently I’m paying even more attention to the chemicals I buy. I’ve taken to using a mix of cycling and transit regularly especially on the days that I just go to and from the university. I’ve got the Teaching and Learning for Global Perspectives diploma program off the ground and I’ve accepted a volunteer role as a Sustainability Ambassador at Simon Fraser University.  Clearly not enough as yet, but I’m making progress.

I tell you all this not to say “wow, look at me!” but rather to put the question out there to all of us, so what are we each doing to sustain life on our planet? What more will we, can we do this year?

I still have a long way to go, but I decided my next step would be to write this blog and challenge each of my readers and friends to do what you can to make this holiday season and the upcoming year be a step towards a more sustainable future for us all.

May you and your family truly enjoy the season!

My previous post, Or This with the Girl Effect video, prompted Dave Truss to update his Pair-a-Dimes blog with a lovely post about the inspiring women he knows who are educational leaders. His post caused a bit of a furor, as readers wrote in challenging his choice to be gender specific.  Liz Davis, one of the educational leaders he named, politely told him that it was perhaps  “a tad condescending.”  In response, Dave posted again explaining what may have come across as unintentional bias.  One again, he was inundated with comments. The dialogue on Dave’s site has lead me to write the following:

I believe that public acknowledgment of the accomplishments of women in any field is beneficial although I also understand where it may be taken as condescending. However, there is definitely a bias in the world I inhabit, which I don’t believe is all that unintentional as a general rule. Sure, I know many men and women who never intend it, but it is everywhere as Dave points out.   We don’t think critically enough about it often enough. Blog posts like this with the accompanying comments therefore are useful in the much needed raising of awareness. Though honestly, it is only a crack.

I don’t know any women who aren’t aware of an “old boys” network, as Vicki Davis (aka Cool Cat Teacher) speaks of, in so many areas of our lives. Certainly edtech.  And the way I see it is that “being unbelievably good” so as not to be ignored even carries bias because “good” in this context means participating in that male network in male-ways-of-being-successful.  This implies that being successful might mean something different for women and I think that is really what Silvana is referring to.  If so, I heartily agree that we need to caution against holding up women being measured against male standards of success as the role models for our children, both boys and girls.

Giving a very personal example here, I will never move high in the ranks of our school board, take on a principal position or be the best blogger or best edtech person around simply because I will not give up that kind of time with my family.  I see myself as highly successful, but perhaps not in most of the ways that count in the “male” world.   I work hard when I work but am most dedicated, as is my husband, to our family and the causes we take on together.  In that way we are working to be the best role models that we can be for our two daughters and our son.  To be honest, I don’t worry a whole lot about who they look up to outside of our family, after all my best role models were definitely my own mother and father.  From them I took what I agreed with and changed what I decided I needed to do differently. So I work at being the most “successful” I can be without ever having my family come second.

Photo from Flickr by Funadium

Ok, but this doesn’t really get to the problem of encouraging women to participate, let alone be successful in this world.  Although more and more I meet women who just choose to opt out.  (Why participate IF it is a male dominated world?)  Louise Maine raises an excellent question when she asks “Why do the female teachers think they do not know enough to speak at a conference?” Or Dave Truss’s own comment about women being cut off at meetings.  The world I want to participate in is one which has shifted towards more inclusive ways of operating through forms of dialogue such as appreciative inquiry or any model that allow for every perspective in the room to be heard.  I want to work where we encourage decisions based on consensus rather than lobbying, bullying, back room deals and even majority votes.  Certainly if we want to move towards giving women voice, we need to be sure that we make room for them to be heard.  Then, I believe, we’ll start to see a really different and interesting measure of success and it will be easier for women to see and feel the value in all that we do.

Back on November 16, I wrote a blog post declaring my intention to give Twitter a try for a full month. Today I’m going to summarize what the experience has given me so far.

1) An amazing network of people: Initially I had a four people to follow from my short venture into twitter last spring; as I picked it up again I added a few more, and then a few more until I got up to a critical mass of about 29. At that point I figured out how to go to the twitter pages of the people I want to follow and check to see who they follow, so I found a few more and so on and so on. Eventually I got a tweet from MrTweet who’s bio says “I am your personal twitter assistant – add me as a friend, and I’ll suggest to you which influencers and followers you should check out. (More coming soon! ).” True to his word Mr Tweet somehow looked at who I had already decided to follow, checked out who they follow (are you following?) and recommended who else I should follow. I took his advice and now have 82 that I am following, with more being added as I find discover more people that I want to network with.

2) New tools for connecting: So Twitter probably wouldn’t work without good webtools to make it easy to keep up with. A month ago I was using Firefox but knew that there had to be an easy way to see tweets as they came in. Firefox wasn’t doing it.  Then Claire Thompson suggested Flock, so I downloaded that to give it a try.  Today I’m still using it though probably not yet to its full potential but I do like what it gives me. I can have twitter on in a sidebar, or switch to Facebook which I use more for my family network.  There is even the potential for network in flicker and possibly so much more.

A couple of weeks, or about 20 tweets, into my trial I started noticing some posts that said posted from Tweetdeck. That sent me off looking for Tweetdeck which I’m now using.  While I still often have my sidebar in Flock on, I find that using Tweetdeck at the same time works well. It provides a better system for reading back through past posts whenever I come back on line, a nice consistent alert systems, and system for sorting the posts more easily. There are still functions in it I’m just learning about but even in this simplified way I’m using it, I find it very useful.

There are still tools I need to check out and learn more about. These include twhirl and twitterfox (maybe I left my firefox browser to quickly). And who knows, if Santa’s good to me this Christmas maybe I’ll get to try using twitter on an ipod with twitterfon.

3) Increasing involvement: By far the most exciting result for me has been the fun I’ve had getting up the courage to participate in the interaction. Twitter offers a kind of light weight connection, if you will.  With it I’ve become involved in a network of people, many whom I’ve never met, but who have agreed by letting me “follow” them, and often “following” me back, to allow some conversation between us.  These are folks that I don’t know well enough to email out of the blue given that I’m a relatively shy person. But folks with whom I seem to have a lot in common such as an interest in education, specifically technology in education and/or online tools for communication and education. So more and more I’m finding myself willing to try a response or even (more daringly) a direct message in response to some tweet from someone else.  The first one I received was exciting; the first one I sent, a little scary. But more and more I’m having fun with it and really learning a lot. I’ve started engaging in conversations that I wouldn’t have joined into before. The next conference I go to I think I’ll be much more willing to step up and introduce myself.

4) Great new resource, blogs and updated information: Perhaps this is all just the benefits of an expanded network but with regular tweets coming in as people complete accomplishments from posting a new blog post to publishing a book, I’m finding myself much more up to date with relevant and important information.  I’m reading new blog postings much more immediately.  I’m learning about good tools and resources that fit well with my work.  For example, through Twitter I learned about Liz Davies revised edition of 21st Century Technology Tools; Tutorials for Teachers, 2nd Edition which I’m just settling in to read. You can be sure though that I’ll be keeping my twitter on while I read.

From http://www.girleffect.org