After the party finishes- the mini beckons

There is plenty of clearing up to do, as well as seeing if there is anything lingering....

Well in my case 8 days away from on-line facilitation and planning my future have had a significant impact, with one I once again am well behind with my work and reading and with the latter I have changed tack, probably best to do that now rather than further on course.

I missed, through poor time management the 2 2nd life opportunities, which means I will have to find other ways to look through it, I appreciated Sarah's comments on the need to have a thorough look and not make immediate judgements. I am enjoying both listening to recordings and taking part in synchronistic sessions; Tuesday's with Nellie Muller was most interesting and with other speakers she was very stimulating not only in her manner but also with her easy use of various tools we are being introduced to. E-portfolios seem to be available through mahara and google, they are high on the 'get to' list for me. Coach Carole has just put an announcement up about developments for her with e-portfolios, which looks interesting too.

Some of you may be interested in Vasi Doncheva's e-daily, http://paper.li/tag/eqnz I hope this works, it is my first ímplant'. This is fairly recent start-up. Whilst we sat discussing the huge world of on-line tools or applications I mentioned how challenging it was to cope with them all, so Vasi suggested I use tweetdeck http://www.tweetdeck.com/desktop/ try it out and see wha

t you think.

I am thinking deeply about cultural competence at the moment. It's value is highlighted by spending over a week with 3 Taiwanese grand masters [martial arts] and listening to one interpret for the 2 who had minimal English. These 2 travel the world teaching and rely to a vast extent on interpretation by students, cultural competence is hugely important for their messages which are sent kinaesthetically and visually.

I am going to have a look at delicious, it offers a good way to hold all the websites I am gathering, among other things.

Now, onto assessment things. Part of this course requires us to put on a mini-conference. As we have all come to this course with e-skills and are adding to them each day I thought it would be interesting to look at some of them in the mini-conference. So this is my thinking:

Would 4 people volunteer to involved in a discussion? They would be in 2 teams and each team will chose 2 tools to promote to the audience, hopefully made up of other participants. I will ask the 2 teams to go into a room each and put onto a whiteboard the pros and cons of each tool, then after say 15 mins come back into the large room and not only present their whiteboard but also champion their tools to the opposite team, perhaps getting a debate going. I will then ask for a vote for which group of tools is the most favoured from everyone.

SO, can I please have some volunteers!