Make more friends, keep the ones you have - Social Networking Spaces and Twitter.

I love this statement and the feeling of so many positive possibilities from Jacinta Gascoigne made after her thorough exploration of social networking environments

“Do you have any idea how refreshing it has been to read some of the material and read posts, reflecting how positive and excited others are about their own ventures and the value they place in the networks and connections made along the way, allowing for greater learning, collaboration, and on it goes.

People are excited, curious, engaged, sharing, caring, love the sense of adventure despite so many unknowns.”

Here is one of Jacinta’s spaces where she talks about cyberbullying and social networking

Twitter offers a very finely grained networking, 140 characters at a time, ideal if you are trying to work with someone, or want the feel of having people around you as you learn and work. I have seen my teenagers hang around online with friends as they do their homework together using MSN, and I use gmail and skype to keep open dialogues running with some colleagues. Twitter seems to take this even further as you connect to the minutiae of another persons day.

As a mother I can see the good and bad of this – staying in close communication with children from work is good, having even more opportunity to be interrupted at work with “what is for dinner” and “where are all my socks” not so good.

Knowing of the Ages

Well, this is my own space for learning, so I can put my own brand new poem here if I want too!
The poem has a theme of collective humanity, and how we all know what has always been known. Three stanzas with four lines each, every first and third line rhyming!! It was fun to write. People out there who have inspired this, you know who you are!

Knowing of the Ages

Ages of knowing clouded by arrogance
Ancient and holy ways disregarded
Everyday living provides only dissonance
Alienated from truth and beauty

Slice and dice time and space
Energy and humanity weave us together
Emerging from the same trace
Humanity is a rough and jagged diamond

Insight of a million eyes from long days lived,
Human fretting ebbs away
The jagged rough diamond yields to give
Past, present and future meshed.

Was Peter Rabbit just a nice bunny?

We all know that things are not always as they seem.

Bedposts resemble phallic symbols, the wood in the spiral of the goats horns of the tarot. Peter Rabbit was a villian, I will explain why later.

Is adolescence what it seems? This extension of childhood is a state that has been named and constructed only in the last 60 years or so.

When I think of adolescence I think of the variety of subcultures through which young people express themselves and identify rather than the greater historical truth of, young people working side by side with older people, learning, earning and contributing to the community. The progression of child to adult in the past didnt include the experience of the peculiar phase of restriction and opppression that young people are subject to now and which we call adolescence.

It is obvious that a repressed group is going to identify with subcultures which set them apart from their adult oppressors and through which they release the dam of their repressed energy.

We need educational approaches that liberate rather than oppress our young people. The industrial model of education is not appropriate in the era of the knowledge worker and neither is the construct and status of adolescence and its related restrictions.

In whose interest is it to maintain the status of adolescence? Not the adolescent.

Back to Peter Rabbit - to all appearances he was a nice little bunny. The truth is that he represents persecution by the Church, and he is the villain, rather than Mr. McGregor who is the hero. Ask any Scot and read the Da Vinci code!

Honey Kisses

Sweet with warmth
Pulsing life and humour
Full lips and tongues
Tactile and merged
Sweet with love

Where are Cara and Libre?

These words appeared in black type like a newspaper front page headline as a dream last night. I used the babel fish translator to check that my own translation of cara and libre to mean love and freedom was correct. Close enough – cara/beloved. and libre/freedom.

Where are love and freedom Have you seen them, do you desire them? A writer and very good friend of mine Michael Buhagiar has shown me they are in my heart. Its true, love and freedom are in the way we live, the choices we make, and how we relate to others.

When we work in networks, or in Communities of Practice we are offering freedom and love in the way knowledge is exchanged and valued. Free and open source software and collaborative software , social networking sites all offer freedom and love in the sense that we give and get the best of each other.

So it is up to us to choose our words and tools carefully as they are what connect us to each other, and how we express our love and freedom in communicating with each other.

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

William Hazlitt (1778 - 1830)