It's a "clumpy universe"

One of the triggers for my return to the blogosphere  was attending the Shifting Thinking conference organised by NZCER last week. It was a really stimulating event - which I intend to reflect on in future posts - and turned out to be one of a series of events that have brought me to this point. Participants at the conference were actively encouraged to respond to the conference procedings via tweets and /or blogs. Not having an active blog to post to became a problem. Twitter is great, but there are some things you just can't cover in 140 characters.

To cut a long and twisty story short, a number of factors have converged (as they do) to motivate me to make the change and get blogging again. Hence the refernce to the clumpy universe. Just as matter (stuff) is not evenly distributed throughout the universe but forms clumps within the larger emptiness, so things are not regularly distributed throughout my life. When enough things converge, it forms a node that changes the surrounding environment. Feral learning (life!) is like that too, uneven and clumpy. In this case, the clumpy universe drives me back to blogging.

So - here we go: housework done (sort of); groceries bought and put away (mostly); brain engaged (more or less); and a bit of spare time to blog in (not really). Why do I bother to mention those things? Because my life is multi-dimensional. Things that happen in one arena carry over to influence what happens (or doesn't happen) in another. And now that I've got everything ready, I'm out of time and going to bed.

New beginnings

Well, it's almost exactly three years since my last post over at Mary's M.Ed Journal . In the mean time a lot of things have changed, one of them being my primary email address - and another being my ability to recall my password.  One of the advantages of a linear thought process is presumably that it makes it easier to backtrack when you forget things or need to revisit them. In my non-linear, visual-spatial world, it's not that easy. (Conversely it's always interesting.) Somewhere over the past 3 years of trying out various social networking sites, web applications and the like I've lost all track of how to access my earlier blog. So, now that I've conceded that I can't go back I'm ready to move on.

One thing that hasn't changed though is my interest in education - feral learning - and my own learning journey. So here I am again.

Like last time, this blog will be intermittent, reflective and personal. I hope it will also be of interest to others, but its primary purpose is to provide a vehicle for me to work through and to express my response to some of the ideas and experiences that shape my understanding, my world and myself.

If there's anyone else out there reading this, welcome along - and please leave me a comment.