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.

Venn diagrams, social networking and on-line facilitation

As I sat thinking about this blog Venn diagrams came to mind and stayed there, my conclusion is that they concept is to be part of my blog, and why?

I have read Sue Walter's blog and her PLN site, there are some excellent visuals to promote thinking. For me from a personal and professional perspective I see networks such as professional Ning or Facebook site as circles, as well as social circles and learning circles; there are points of sharing common knowledge and skill and points where sharing or commonality takes place in new ways, I visualise these circles as in constant motion connecting at the similarities.

How can social networking and facilitation be used for on-line facilitation?

To answer this I return to how we as humans network and facilitate, it is worth pausing a moment to remember that not all humans value doing this, or have the confidence and skills. Attempting to take this on-line therefore presents a range of challenges if one of the outcomes is to include these groups.

For those who seek to network and facilitate taking the activity to an on-line forum means basic pool rules are known and even part of personal practice. An interest in people and their activities is commonly held. For those with more dominant characteristics I suspect the on-line forum provides clear indicators of people voting with their feet!

Advantages and disadvantages of social networking on-line are oft-documented and debated, as I am personally during planning for my new business; ie which networks do I wish to use and why, who do I want to reach on-line? these need to be clear business objectives as part of the overall plan. I am also clearly aware that my personal and business networks are like the Venn diagram discussed above, there are points of commonality and points of distance where other links occur. Coming to mind pretty immediately are that some of the postings of my young friends 13 to 23 are not appropriate for other generations to be exposed to.

Once I have decided from this candy shop of platforms which ones I am committing to, I will plan the part of my business I will operate on-line and prepare the first few weeks of work, to ensure the viewing networkers wish to return and recommend the site to others. I would use it to post resources and invite participants to discussions, facilitating further networking. I was interested to hear from an ex-business person that this mode of operation was considered foolhardy, as it could only lead to other people in the same business swiping ideas and comments, competitiveness run deep ofcourse, I am interested in hearing how other on-line facilitation business have fared in this regard.

I intend using my on-line site as a continuation of face to face facilitation and skype mentoring/coaching sessions, in much the same way as many people on this course already do. I am sure there is little to invent, there may just be adaptations.

Now I am away to socially network with adult community educators who have jointly won the 2010 Dynamic Community Leadership award, they are Circus Kumarani and Flax Roots Whanau, we are to congregate and celebrate.

Microwave Ovens and patience

Hello all, I hope I have your attention, as I have a question I would like an answer to.

I am trying a series of font, letter sizes and colours I seek your comments on preference.

First up I have just discovered that the blog I thought I had saved..........................I hadn't; so here goes with patience and a 2nd shot.

Before I get into the microwave oven I will share our tough experience last week when Willie, Karen and I co-facilitated a session, and Karen who did so much preparation was left unable to contribute for much of the allocated time due to ICT issues. It was a challenging session for us all. I was quite apprehensive as I am very much a performer who works with a group, and I use all my senses to 'read' the class or group I am with, of course there are very limited reading points in this new world I am learning about so I wondered how I would find my hooks to move into the group, it felt as if and of course it was that I was blind to the break out room participants.

Microwave ovens, now an accepted tool in many kitchens, in fact the only cooking point in some very recently apartments based on the premise the occupants will eat out or reheat TV diners. The microwave, a result of man walking on the moon, as a cooking medium swept into common usage about 30 years ago. At that time they were large, cumbersome, noisy and quite demanding. Adept marketing had prepared consumers to believe the microwave oven was the next best thing to sliced bread. A raft of tools, recipe books and champion cooks were used to move the conventional cook to adopting a virtual interloper to the kitchen domain. We discovered the distinct advantages of integrating microwave cookery into our conventional preparation so that it became an accompaniment to food preparation. In some kitchens it became the only style of cooking as can be witnessed by the inside of the cooking cavity

Moving this analogy into our web world there are many parallels; we know how to facilitate, and now here is a new way of doing it, but wait can I cross use the same knowledge, tools and experiences? as it turns out, no; not really, I can use some of the basis but I must cross-reference immediately to what the demands are of this new way of communicating. I find there is an oversupply of support tools and information, I may utilize this and I may just ignore it, depending on the type of learner I am. For those people for whom this works and are able to change and grow with the opportunities offered they will spend quite some time with their microwave oven, and for others after a try it will languish with other 'toys' until it can be gifted on.