Catch the Wave

I’ve been busy lately. Mostly job related – although I did hang around at home waiting for tradesmen twice – if that can be described as being busy. I had a heat pump intalled and the hot water element replaced. (You don’t think about hot water until you don’t have any!) Everything else is about professional development and/or professional learning … if someone wants to write a 1 sentence definition of the difference between these, that would be great. So sometimes I feel like just a head walking around. My poor neglected body. I’d go to the gym if they had the Internet.
So lately I’ve either been providing PD for others, getting some myself from real experts, or trying to teach myself something. The latter being very haphazard with varying degrees of success!
It’s good when two of those things combine. At the end of August I presented (I’m uncomfortable with that word, but alternatives I try are worse!) a couple of workshops at the Waimarino Cluster Conference in Tauranga and scored two great keynotes – Mark Treadwell and Trevor Bond. Being back in the Bay of Plenty was great. BOP people make great audiences – a possible research topic for someone is ‘BOP people have more personality than other New Zealanders.’
Then last Thursday I snuck into a Pam Hook and Julie Mills workshop at Coley Street School (I Can We Can Cluster) and learnt so many new things that the pressure on my skill from my expanding brain has further increased. You can check out their inquire2learn wik to learn more. I’m thinking that as a sideline or optional extra, Pam and Julie should market themselves as conference after dinner speakers or even tour as a two woman comedy and motivational show. The full extent of their talents could be wasted in education, not to mention Auckland. (Maybe they should move to the BOP?)
The other things I’m doing – in the largely self taught category – are exploring (often with frustration) Twitter and Facebook. I’m working on finding more friends and the following people around thing. It’s as tiring as it sounds and I’m still working on the ‘why?’ question.
Milestone 11 got slotted into the left over time. Watching tradesmen crash around, install, fix, test and ask me questions I didn’t know the answers to was useful time for that.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 15th, 2007 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Education, Interesting, Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.