Lifelong Learning ...

If you have contributed to the tlspecial wiki, you will have recently noticed a spate of emails, for example, the ones from our dear Mary asking to be let in! Well, pbwiki underwent an upgrade and it seems to have upgraded every previous contributor to the status of administrator and reduced me to helpless bystander! So I have reduced you all to writers again and seem unable to put myself into the elevated administrative position again. I probably should have left one of you as an administrator so this could be fixed. Oh well. For any of the rest of you, including Fred at Byng who has since graduated from wikis to Moodle, check out the wiki to see what's new ... and please contact me if you need to get in to post some new stuff. Mary, any luck yet?

Old Crock

Adapted from Ted Covington.
Pics4Learning. 5 Apr 2009

The really annoying thing about Web 2.0 is that it rarely stays the same -- it is in a continual state of beta (that's a relatively new term for me -- it means "test" or pilot version). Did you ever think you'd have to know so much and then have to learn more ... at exactly the same time as your mind is so overloaded that stuff is going missing all the time! In fact, I am thinking my mind has entered a continual state of beta as nothing seems to be working the way it used to. I chose the photo above as it seems sometimes to make more sense to have technology that doesn't change. It's an old crock of a machine, like me.

Here's an example of what I mean: On or about the time of this my most significant birthday, I began bravely loading the OS on my new netbook. User-friendly stuff, unquestionably, or why would they let me do it? What, you ask, was I thinking?

Windows is the operating system (OS), now located behind a partition in your computer which I learned this weekend while trying to fix an unfixable problem; partition, you ask? Well, it's all different now and you don't get the recovery disks. Netbook? Very small computer. Reading my regular computer screen and loading the OS, I didn't read carefully and thought "Canadian French" meant the Canadian version of Windows with some French options (as, for example, l'accent circonflexe) which is exactly what it means on my regular laptop. Thereafter, I spent the entire weekend trying to reverse this irreversible decision and now hate the netbook and the company that made it that I am packing it up and sending it back, fingers crossed that all will go well and I will get my money back promptly.

But that's not all -- I accidentally paid the wrong VISA bill and now have to wait to get the money back after an "investigation" because I didn't take the time to read what I was doing and paid a card I never use. This does not bode well. I am awaiting my RogersRocket, annoyed by On-Star which gets in the way of my beloved Bluetooth, confused by Twitter and overwhelmed by Tweetdeck and astounded that anyone would want these, blogging furiously because everything -- in particular my timeline -- is going to the hand-basket, and mentoring JO's Gloria for technology integration with teaching and learning (she's building wikis over there). How ironic! I may have to go back and re-think my position that all the so-called digital immigrants need to become natives is more time!

What's Val up to? Read this.

What's Mary up to? If you are reading this Monday morning, she will be back behind the circ desk at General Gordon relaxing into her work after a very busy few months of not working. Right! We are so so happy to be back on Mary's priority list! Thanks, Mary, for all the work you've been doing behind the scenes to ensure you are back in a system with the strength it takes to thrive.

What else is new? A Vancouver TL has won the CASL/Follett National Teacher-Librarian Award and will be off to Montreal in late May to collect her prize! You have to guess who. Suffice it to say that referee Ken Haycock wondered why it had taken so long!

We are loving Inquiry! And here's what we are reading. We looked at the Ontario Exemplary School Libraries (2009) and the Saskatchewan Teachers' Association Teacher Librarians Supporting Student Learning (2006) documents. You can follow along with us on our Inquiry wiki.

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Have you registered for your May Update session? If you are a new TL, have you also registered for April 28?