The last few hectic weeks leave me to ponder where there was time to work and keep up to date with the rest of life. Once my Ching Ming Tai Chi Chuan experience in Bacchus Marsh, Melbourne is over I will have the mental space to make some in-roads to the readings from this course, and comment on them here. The easiest homework are the YouTube clips. I have yet to work out how put up links with ease and accuracy and want my blog to reflect my growing confidence with the myriad of tools available. I have added to my goals making You Tube clips which I aim to put on my website, I wonder if this is possible.

One of the many things I appreciate being self-employed [but not yet earning any income], is that I have the time to look, for example when we moved to this house the garden had experienced a scorched earth event, when all the trees bar one had been chopped down and the stumps covered with black plastic and river stones. One Totara survived, its limbs well chopped back, due to the timely arrival of the police called by the neighbours. Since then I have been planting fit to bust and one particular species I like are aloes, I like their structure and line. Now 6 years old many are tall and beautiful shapes, this season they have bought added bonuses to us. The flowers which are vertical, large and colourful have attracted many wax eyes, on some pollen laden flowers there may 6 birds, so beautiful to watch, how they worked out that this year was the one to visit our garden I don't know but they have certainly added enormously to our life.

On to our weekly considerations on the course: to do this I will go through the posed questions and provide answers, this acts as a good development prompter, as I prepare to become an on-line facilitator.

Is this activity or event in an open or closed environment? Well there multiple avenues to travel down and so multiple events to consider. I am keen to establish a wikieducator site and put up some community education ideas, I have established a profile, need to get some comment/critique on that and so if someone reads this and would volunteer, that would be good. The WE would be an open environment, the on-line facilitation closed, the blog open and so it goes on.

Do I need to target my marketing to specific people or use the Internet to spread as far and as wide as I can? The basic answer is far and wide, but in a managed way and using tools appropriate to the market, this may have to include Twitter which is a tool I don't yet have a handle on.

§ What networks do I need to develop and what communities do I need to access in order to market my event/activity? I need to develop networks in sustainable community development, these will mainly be found in the Social Enterprise community and Corporates that presently philanthropise. I will develop local and non-local networks which will require me to consider how, who and what: how I do this, what tool/s I use and who I know who would be willing to assist with introductions.

§ How can I leverage or make the most of the serendipitous nature of the Internet? Leveraging will require me to respond in a manner that interests the enquirer and provides them with reason to take the contact forward, this means the manner in which I communicate must be appealing, thought provoking and useful to encourage enquirers to forward my site to others and thereby experience serendipity. The requires planning, connections to be working well and confidence in me in the tools I will use.

§ Will the event/activity/project be free or does it have a cost involved? The most obvious answer to me is that some of the activity will be free to interest/excite the reader and some will come with a cost around it. I will have to self-moderate to an extent, but also discuss this with people in the field to find benchmarks and then consider what styles of charging I will operate, eg a not for profit charge and a for profit charge.

§ What tools shall I use - free or proprietary tools? I will use skype initially and perhaps moodle if it is still free, initially I need to be using these types of tools, they may also be tools familiar to users which will be a double bonus. As I will do some work in the SE sector an aim may be to have the on-line facilitation activity either sponsored or subsided by a company providing the activity.

§ Will the speakers/participants incur a cost? Don't know and also don't know how I will set up charging, if anyone call lend a hand here please do!

§ How will I support people to access the technology before the event/activity? Well this is preparation, same as when I taught, I will offer participants practice sessions prior to the event/activity with me and perhaps with others already signed up for the event/activity.

§ How can I market my event to and support people who have minimal access to computers and the Internet? I have come across this so many times in Adult Education, the solution was to market to the community organiser and the community site which had access to these essentials, this may mean agreements or arrangements with that larger organisation. Then there are networks and these can be tiny but enabled to grow larger through the notion of sharing tools.

§ Is there a place for integrating the cell phone? Well yes, and is the course going to include downloads onto ipods which will mean students can stay up to date with resources and take part using say Skype.

§ How can I put information online in a format that can be printed cheaply for people who have limited Internet access. Don't know-help!

• What do you need to do develop an effective online network that you can use for your online facilitation?
• WIIFM [what is in it for me] I need to have something others want too, I need to know people and can find people with similar interests, so I need to find these people on-line and pitch my product/event. Similar to a face-to-face event a well known and liked guest speaker is a powerful start, good graphics and stable platform. I must have my website/blog up and running with regular updates happening and this to be on the move in a growing network of interest.
• What tips can you share about online networking that will help us improve our online facilitation skills?
• I will come back to this, I wonder if people intending to facilitate on-line would be assisted by running a trial and hearing a playback to find out what of their style does work well and the converse. Explaining that time lag is inevitable would be very helpful and give some information on that, such as what to wait for, and perhaps have a symbol on the screen that reminds people to click the microphone off before they do anything else, it seems to be a sticking point.
• What worked well? Our on-line session was full of bumps in the road; Karen's connectivity and audio was a real downer, which means there must always be a plan B, we did have this but then didn't follow through with the idea, I would do that again. Exampled was the DimDim session going onto Eluminate. Allocating people specific tasks and times I think would help, we tend [any session] to talk over each other, so perhaps a section of the session, not jumping around with inputs.
• What did not go so well? Setting up rooms, which was frustrating especially when I took part in a meeting with Coach Carole and found how relatively easy it is to do. The connectivity ofcourse was a real issue and led to disappointment for us all.
• What skills or resources do you need to network and facilitate meetings using Twitter? I wonder if this will be my temporary nemesis, even though I watched the You tube clip I could not confirm in what order the info should go into the discussion box and what I needed to have clicked before hand, very simple but totally eluded me and resulted in my first frustration on the course, which I guess is quite something. I do know Twittering holds really advantages for me, so as I said above a temporary nemesis.
• How do you see yourself using Twitter in the future, if at all, for online facilitation? Yes I WILL GET THERE, it may be the challenge area I have.