I said I’d keep you all apprised of progress on my shed/office/shoffice project. Happily, this week Northumberland County Council gave the go-ahead:
Our architect, Mark Starford, is now liaising with a structural engineer to ensure the plans (which I’ve posted here) are suitable for the amount of snow we get up here, etc.
Exciting times! 🙂
Yesterday, as I sat in my study finishing off some work, my wife called me into the lounge to look out the window. She and my two young children stood transfixed as black, billowing clouds of smoke drifted over our back garden. It was clear where it was coming from: the nature reserve close to our house.
Tragically, someone (or some group) had decided to set fire to the bird hide on the end of a jetty that goes out into the pond. By the time I’d called the fire brigade and got down there, all that the steadily-increasing group of concerned onlookers could do was watch as fierce flames consumed the wooden structure.
I overheard, but have not had confirmation, that the bird hide was doused in petrol before being set alight. In the end, the firefighters put out the fire and knocked down the hide. All that’s left are some wooden stumps.
My reason for writing about this is merely, at this stage, to document that it happened. I’m not sure who did it, nor why they did so, but feel sad that it happened. All my five year-old son asked yesterday was “Why would they do that, Daddy?” I didn’t know how to answer him but encouraged him to draw the picture at the top of this post to let out some of his emotions.
The nature reserve was opened last year after a community group secured National Lottery funding to transform the space. It’s a beautiful space within which to walk in this usually peaceful village. My children used to enjoy peeking through the windows in the bird hide.
Not any more. 🙁
It’s rare in this fast-paced world of Twitter and synchronous communications to come across high-quality reflections on how we connect online both professionally and personally. The video below, put together by D’Arcy Norman with contributions from the likes of Dean Shareski, Jim Groom and Barbara Ganley, is 15 minutes long. It’s absolutely worth your time – watch it now:
How do you connect to people online? from D’Arcy Norman on Vimeo.
Connecting with people online is, in a sense, a very strange experience. I can know a lot more about someone that I’ve never (and probably will never) meet in person who lives on the other side of the world than I ever will about a work colleague. In fact, as I’ve often commented to people when doing this, I think meeting people online actually leads to better relationships than if the situation is reversed.
For instance, this might sound silly but I’m always very careful never to wear my glasses when meeting people for the first time. Why? I don’t want them to pigeon-hole me. The next time they see me and I’ve got my contact lenses in I’m the guy ‘not wearing his glasses’. It’s a perception thing.
Meet people online, however, and it’s almost a window into their soul. One thing I find fascinating is people’s choice of avatar on Twitter. Some people choose to have an image of themselves to aid recognition when people meet them in person. Others change their avatar often. The people I’m interested in, though, are people like me: people who stick to one avatar and use it everywhere they go online. Presumably that’s because their avatar says something about them. Here’s a few by way of example from people in my Twitter network – what do you think their avatar and bio says about them?
Primary MFL teacher, ADE, eTwinning Ambassador, speaker and blogger, improving techie and generally enthusiastic gal who loves her iPhone
[no bio]
Changing the node set…
In the video embedded above, Dave Cormier talks about the ‘light’ connections we make with people and how these build up over time. I think this is what D’Arcy Norman (author of the video and, as of last month, no longer on Twitter) and Stephen Downes (a one-way user of Twitter) don’t get about social networking. Yes, 140 characters may be all too brief. But if I connect with you 50 times over the course of a few days, having had to craft each message to fit within the 140-character constraint, I bet we know each other a whole lot more than we did previously. And then you can go and look at my Flickr stream, my blog, etc. for more background. It’s not a replacement, it’s complementary.
Knowing an individual’s personal background and beliefs helps you judge when making decisions on whether to follow their advice and/or lead. But that’s not always best done only on the strength of meeting them face-to-face. I, for example, am much better (in terms of being coherent, understandable) when expressing myself using the written, rather than the spoken, word. Most connections online these days inhabit a world that is partly synchronous, partly asynchronous.* People may respond straight away to something you put online, or they may respond hours, days, weeks, months, or even years later. Because online content is an implicit open-ended invitation to give your opinion and make comment, you can do so at your leisure. This promotes thinking and drafting when blogging, and iterating towards your actual opinion when using tools such as Twitter.
People who haven’t seen videos or listened to podcasts in which I feature are often surprised when they meet me in person. For a start, I’m often younger than they thought (one person commented that they assumed, because of my avatar, that I was ‘a fat, balding, forty-something’ – thanks!) People also don’t tend to realise I have an, admittedly diminishing, Northumbrian accent – replete with the rolling R’s. I’m all for personality and individuality, but sometimes these two factors – my age and my accent – have proved to be barriers in the physical world. Not so online. 🙂
So an ode to the internet and the connections it makes. No, scratch that. An ode to the people who give up their time to connect to people. To those who make my life better by contributing, questioning and criticising my work and my thinking. It’s great to have and to be part of an active audience!
* There’s probably a word for this, but I don’t know what it is!
