Help! I managed to be almost entirely absent from the last week of the EVO session on Social Media. Apologies to all of you for my lack of online presence (multitude of reasons - chiefly related to beginning of semester and actually having to teach!) And a special thanks to the facilitators of the course, Barbara, Patricia, Illya, Jennifer, Nancy and Rudolph - your input and effort was much appreciated.
Over last week I did read some of what was being written and checked my bloglines and came across Konrad’s post on growing blogs which inspired me - both in thinking about my own blogs and also in terms of what I do with students. The metaphor of growth in terms of learning has always sat well with me, and blogging, as Konrad so rightly says, is about the process of engagement. The act of writing has some mysterious affinity with growing. Possibly something to do with photosynthesis and osmosis which were always very mysterious in my high school biology experience : )
Of course, it turns out that this semester I am NOT teaching writing (which has always been my blogging with students context) and have instead a focus on oral skills - speaking and listening. So am looking forward to use Voicethread and hopefully Chinswing too with my students. And am doing a big push for their listening to pdocasts, which is all new for them. If anyone can suggest a quick and easy recording tool for messages that I can put in the sidebar of a blog, it would be great to play with as well.
Anyway, thank you all for your input over the last couple of months and for encouraging/engaging with me, which has indeed supported my own growth.
When we were little, my mother taught us to play mahjong - probably a very inauthentic Chinese version - I don’t know where she learnt to play! But I loved between games when we ‘twittered the sparrows’ - shuffling the tiles together to make a clicking noise. 
