Hear Us Roar

I wasn’t going to sign up. I wanted to, but wasn’t sure if I had the time. The, I got an email from one of the organisers who’d been tipped off to the fact that I was interested. Come along, said he. Drop in and see what you think. Doesn’t matter that we’ve already started. You can catch up.

So, I went along and dropped in. I thought it was pretty cool. Now, I’m catching up and getting ready for week 2 (of 6) at

The Webcast Academy | Collaborative Learning Community for Webcasters via kwout

The Webcast Academy “is a hands on, collaborative training center for people interested in learning how to produce and host live, interactive webcasts. You can learn more about The Webcast Academy., check out our resources, and register to post comments and questions in the forums . Our next session (Class of 2.4) will begin on January 13, 2008. If you’re interested in becoming an intern, you can apply here.”

I titled this post Hear US Roar because going through the ropes at the academy with me is fellow Aussies Jo McLeay, Judy O’Connell and Sue. We’re online at 6am every Monday morning to participate in the session for that week. Did I mention 6AM?! Oh well, that gets me up and going for the week!

Our week one homework was to post a short audio introduction. We did this by recording in Audacity and then uploading it to the academy site. If you would like to listen in to me introduce myself, here it is!

intern intro

Also, stay tuned, as us Aussie interns might have a show for you soon…

I Swim Therefore I Blog Pt 2

In my last post I wrote how I’ve started swimming and got to 26 laps in my (just over) half hour swim! I was really enjoying just chilling out doing my laps, and wondering whether I was swimming properly or looking like an absolute idiot. I prefer to think I was looking pretty good but with a few areas for improvement. Then, two lanes away, Miss Pink Cap got in. Well, there she was in all her speedo-ed glory. Cap, goggles, those really sporty looking bathers that cross over at the back. Then she started swimming. Oh, the power, the ease, the gliding! AND she even did that little turn thing at the end of each lap so she didn’t have to stop. The fabulousness! So, I watched. I could have felt totally intimidated and given up my meager efforts on the spot. I could have let it make me feel like an absolute hippopotamus with 7 legs. But I didn’t, and it didn’t even occur to me to feel that way. Instead, I watched and I learned.

I learned that you are supposed to be making splashes with you your feet which means you need to be as flat as you can on the surface when you’re swimming. Currently I am not doing too badly at that, but my legs are on a bit too much of an angle so there are not little splashes happening with my feet. I learned that you can actually glide a fair way and I learned that she stops after a few laps for a breather too!

As I watched Miss Pink Cap I started thinking about how, just before I went swimming, I was feeling totally overwhelmed by all the things I have to get done over the next couple of weeks, and was questioning this that and the other. I was even wondering whether I should bother to keep blogging because I didn’t feel like I was contributing much at all. Just sitting there watching someone who swan so easily (yes, ok, I want to be here one day!) made me refocus and tell myself a few truths. Everyone has to do this now and again I’m sure. Anyway, my truths were:

I didn’t feel overwhelmed by this swimmer who was obviously so much better than I was. I knew straight away that she had had training and had been swimming for ages.
I’ve only been blogging for a little while. I’m reading lots of blogs by people who have been doing it for ages and even train other people how to do it too! Rather than feeling like I should be doing exactly what they’re doing, I should just read and learn.
I choose to swim and I choose to challenge myself to be a better swimmer and to increase the amount of laps I do in a half hour session. I’ll never get there if I don’t get in the water and swim.
I have chosen to take on the things I have on my plate right now, and I want to do them (except one which is now too late to back out of, but that’s ok, financial renumeration will come my way for it), so rather than grumbling and procrastinating, figure out a schedule and get on with it.
I have to take regular little rest stops after a 4 or so laps. That’s ok. I’m a beginner and I’ll get there. I can already see an improvement in how long I have to rest for over the past week.
I’m still in the process of thinking about exactly what I want from my blogging (see below for links to posts on this) and I do need to take a few breaks, step back, reflect, think again, think more, draft, think, reflect read more, reflect etc to keep in touch with what my goals are (when I figure the exact ones out).

So, I’ve touched base with reality again. I’m managing that full plate. I’ll be swimming more laps tomorrow.

To read more on my online identity crisis and really thinking about blogging, check out: Online Identity Crisis and Being Yourself for the Betterment of Your Blog.

Image is ‘Swimmer’ by mag3737 from FlickrCC

I Swim Therefore I Blog Pt 1

Or is it I blog therefore I swim? I have just started swimming laps in an attempt to get much fitter than I am. I also do a bit of running, but don’t seem to really be ‘clicking’ with it and it is usually an effort to get out there and go. I am very good at finding excuses not to! So far, it doesn’t seem to be that way with swimming. A friend of mine was going twice a week and seeing as it had been something I had been meaning to get to (you know those lists!) I said I’d go with her. I’m a reasonable swimmer, definitley not too streamlined, but not an absolute disaster and I can manage to swim in a straight line. Anyway, I really enjoyed it and I’ve been back 4 times now to swim my laps. I swim for half and hour and the first time I really struggled with 20 laps (25m pool). I was stopping alot. Next time I managed 22 and stayed there for a couple of sessions. Today I got to 24 in half an hour. I lost count a bit and thought it could have been 24 or 26, so I did a couple extra for good measure and so did 26 in just over 30 minutes. I wanted to do more, but was a bit tired and thought I better no over do it. I was rapt with my effort though. I seem to have finally found some exercise I look forward to doing. I even went this morning because I was feeling a bit overwhelmed with all the things I have on my plate for the next couple of weeks and I wanted to relax. I have never ever picked exercise as a way to relax before in my life! There is a whole new and hopefully fitter world out there for me now which I can’t wait to get into. I might just have to buy that summer pass with 6 weeks of unlimited swimming until the end of March.

Stay tuned for the lessons I learned about swimming from Miss Pink Cap, and how I related it all to my blogging.

For another blogging similie, check out 5 Ways Blogging is Like Running a Cafe.

Image is ‘Underwater’ by Mazintosh from FlickrCC

Searching the Depths of Your Online Self and Quoting Others

Here are two great little web tools I’ve come across lately:

Lijit is a great little search tool that Sue Waters recommended to me. With Lijit, you can create a customised search engine that searches ALL of your content on the web – you delicious links, you other blogs, your LinkedIn profile, your You Tube channel – the lot! Simply sign up for an account, then enter all your details about the trail you have left all over the web, customise the ‘wijit’ and off you go! You can find my lijit search ‘wijit’ on the Resources page of my other blog, technoLOTE. Lijit is a great way to keep your readers on your blog/s and within your network.

Another great resource I’ve noticed mentioned in a few different places and finally decided just now to try out is Kwout. Kwout allows you to take a screen shot of a webpage to post to your blog or flickr account. That’s how I did the Lijit image above, and how I’ve done the one below as well. As you can see, it lets you decide whether or not to have a border around each quote (sorry: kwout) and it gives you a hyperlink to the site you have quoted. Notice I deleted that from the Lijit one above – just to see if I could! Only problem with that is it takes the hyperlink away as the image itself is not a link. So, if deleting that part make sure you are putting a link in somewhere else in the post!

Ah, I love little discoveries like this. Got any more for me?

kwout | A brilliant way to quote via kwout

6 Tips for Taking Control of Your Unruly RSS Feeds

I have subscribed to (what for me is) quite a few blog and discussion feeds and on many occasion I find it very overwhelming to even open my reader to see all the posts I’ve got there to read. I’m one of those people who likes to have everything neat and tidy and finished, so I struggle to leave too many unread feeds for too long. Yes, I’ve done it. I’ve hit ‘Mark all items as read’ from time to time. I honestly don’t know how people who’ve got hundreds of feeds (I’ve got 80-odd) actually cope with them all. Tell us your secrets! Anyway, I sat down yesterday and tried to take more control of my unruly RSS feeds and here are a few tips that I came up with. Some of these tips have been adapted from a post on Zen Habits called Email Zen: Clean Out Your Inbox

1. Be Cruel
I found that I was just skipping over posts in some feeds because they were rehashing the same thing that many other people were writing about, and that there were just a few feeds I had subscribed to because I thought I should. So, I deleted a few. If I need them again, I know where to find them. The trick is not keeping something because you might need it, it’s knowing where to get it if you need it again. Be honest and be cruel. Delete those feeds you know you don’t really read. Be realistic about how much you can read and how often.

2. Organise into Folders
This really helps me to make sense of all the feeds that are coming in. I love categorising things and making lists, so grouping feeds into folders is something I can’t do without. With folders, I can see which group of feeds has a few things for me to read and judging by what category I’ve put them in, I can make a decision whether those feeds are something I want to read at any given time. For example, if I am not interested in reading any blogging advice today, but I want to catch up on what’s going on with the MFL teaching blogs that I’m subscribed to, then I go straight to that folder and concentrate on those feeds for the time being. With a restricted amount of feeds in the folder it helps me to feel less overwhelmed by the amount I have to read.

3. Prioritise your reading
We all know which blogs we read the most because we find them interesting and important. For me at the moment, these are my 31 Day Challenge Team, MFL Teaching Blogs, AUS edubloggers and a few US and UK edubloggers. They are the folders I will always look at first. These are the blogs I am most likely to comment on (the ones I plan to comment on more often!) and really become part of the communities surrounding them. There are some feeds I subscribe to just for resource purposes, for example – the mLearning and eLearning Resources folders. I don’t make a point of commenting on these blogs, and don’t necessarily read the feeds each time. Knowing that I don’t HAVE to read them helps to make the whole process less overwhelming.

4. Browse quickly, star items and then concentrate on reading those
One thing you could do is to browse through your feeds, reading the first one or two lines of each post and maybe a heading that stands out and use this information to decide whether you will read the whole thing. If you decide to read it all, star it. Then, once you’ve gone through your whole list this way, go back to your starred items and spend some time with them. If there are lots of blog posts for you to get through, you will be able to quickly tell which ones are covering similar ground and you can then decide which ones of those you will actually read. If you are coming across lots of articles in your reader about the same topic, see tip number 1. The only thing with browsing feeds and starring things for later, is that you have to actually get back to them later! Oh, the challenges…

5. Print longer posts out to read later
I don’t know about you, but I can’t do all of my reading on a compute screen. I’ve had enough after a while, but I still need time to read those longer posts. I know printing lots of things out if not very environmentally friendly, but I am not advocating that you print every post, just the longer ones that you really want to read but keep avoiding. Pull them out when you are in the waiting room at the dentist or doctors, or when you are on the train or even just when you prefer lying on the couch to sitting upright in front of your computer.
6. If the post is short enough for you to read immediately, do so.
One trap to getting things done is to fall into the ‘I’ll do it later’ hole. Oh there’s a lot to read there, I’ll do it later. Hmm, I’ve got a lot to say in that blog post, I’ll write it later. Of course you can’t always do everything on the spot, but doing as much as you can helps. Once you put something in the ‘I’ll do it later’ basket, how often do you come back to it? Honestly? If you do, that’s fantastic, but for many of us, putting it in that basket often means it stays there for quite a while and then either gets thrown out because the basket is too full or the ‘Mark all items as read’ button gets pressed! If a post can be read right then and there, read it. If you are sitting down thinking you are going to check your feeds when you really should be doing something else therefore you have no time to really read them, then don’t even open them up. Being rushed will only help you to feel more overwhelmed. Well, it does for me anyway.

I hope these tips are helpful. Please help me add to them! How do you manage your feeds? Don’t keep it a secret!

Just in case you were wondering, I use the reader in Flock to read my feeds because I really like the nice big layout they have. I sometimes feel that Google Reader is a bit cramped and I like things to be clear. I regularly export my feeds from Flock to Google Reader though, so then I have an online version as well. More on what else I do with my Flock browser soon!

If you’re interested in reading some blogging tips, check out these posts: Hey Good Lookin’ – advice for choosing a blog theme, 5 Ways Blogging is Like Running a Cafe and Being Yourself for the Betterment of Your Blog.

Blogged with Flock