We are in week 2 now. This is the time to use and get familiar with some of the tools we have seen in week 1 and get used to new ones. The multitasking goes and we continue chatting and chatting. The chatting fever started with the Tapped In tour on Sunday. We move on to the uses of Skype and Worlbridges. The Skype/Worldbridges session was good for what we learned about the tool and about e-learning in general. Learning, at least for me and for some webheads, has a chaotic ingredient. Learning is messy, not linear. It is informal not formal. I think in the beginning it is difficult to get used to this non-linear way of learning. Learning using web 2.0 applications requires surfing through a plethora of links and task switching. Our identities are scattered in the web through our posts in blogs, wikis, discussion forums and we start asking ourselves: “Will I be able to cope with it?” “How can I be in so many places, have so many web pages, understand and use so many applications and  tools?” I guess the answer to these questions only time will tell. For myself, I am in many places and many times at the same time. I have managed to learn about lots of tools not all of them. I just pick the ones that are most appealing to me and use them to create things that are meaningful to me and to my students. That is the way I continue learning and enjoying the learning ride.

Week one is almost gone and we already miss it. It was wonderful to say hello to so many people. Of course, many times we got lost and lost track of countries and had trouble spelling names. I blush thinking about my typos in the yahoo messenger and not mentioning the other kinds of mistakes (multitasking is our sin and our salvation). It does not really matter. Above all in the cyber world of webheads we make our best to be kind and helpful (actually, it is pretty easy because everyone is so kind). Many participants (through yahoo group postings, skype and yahoo private chat) expressed their willingness to learn and share, their natural insecurity facing a new way of learning and teaching, their desire to continue learning. If I had to define webheads my definition would “people who are fond of online learning and teaching.” A very personal definition, of course, but one that summarizes what we have been doing here and represents the kind of people we are.

EVO Sessions are around the corner. My first experience with this event was back in 2006. I took a session called ICT in ELT. I remember I registered to the course when I was in Sorocaba as a participant of the 2006 Hornby Summer School (this was the first edtion of this event in Brazil). Babara Dieu (Bee) on her workshop on Blogs and online learning introduced EVO to us. So, she suggested we signed up for a course and I signed up for this.

Back home when the course started, the e-mails with introductions started coming and it all began. Of course, all that was a bit overwhelming to me, and I learned what lurking was, and was what I did most of the time. Nonetheless, I learned quite and bit and discovered a new world and a new way of learning.  In 2007 I took BaW07  (Becoming a Webhead 2007) and B4B (Blogging for Beginners) and was a bit more able to take in the things people were discussing and sharing. Now I am on the third year of my learning adventure and just can´t wait for the beginning.  

Technology in general, just like many things in life, is about trial and errors. I have been blogging for sometime. However, knowledge is a chaotic, non-linear process. I have been struggling with posting videos to my wordpress blog. After almost two weeks of receiving help from my BaW07  and B4B  friends I finally managed to post this video on how to blog. I am a big fan of wordpress and thought the placing this video on how to blog on wordpress would be a form of paying a tribute to this wonderful blog host. My preference for wordpress has a lot to do with the fact of being the one I first used as a part of my experience in the Hornby Summer in
Sorocaba in January 2006. In addition to that, I would like to share with you what I have learned about how to post a video to wordpress or edublogs . If you want to post a  youtube, daily motion or any other video, these blog hosts will ask for the video id. The video id is what comes after value, so you will have to look for the code to embed the video. You can now copy and paste the code to your editing box. Once you have done that, you have to look for the value (generally a bunch of letters like MMYi4_COZMO not immediately after the word value) this is the only thing you will have to keep plus the video site name. In your editing box you will have to leave youtube id=MMM.. enclosed by brackets [ ]. The video I posted above is a very comprehensive one.  Mr Abraham does give clear instructions on posting and managing your wordpress blog. However, posting a video seems to be the trickiest part. I hope these guidelines help you out in posting a video.

This week’s BaW07 task involved designing a web page. First I had a chat with our colleague Ibrahim and he gave me some good hints on how to start. He gave the NVU link and also sent some samples of templates of his own. He also referred me to a site to look for web templates. I went to the NVU download site and downloaded the application. I did the same with the templates, but I could not see them like I expected on my computer. The NVU is an open source and seems to work pretty well for designing. The problem I am still having is getting the templates I need and to follow the steps for designing the website. The NVU site has a Video Tutorial, but watching it I have felt like you might have felt watching the youtube video I have finally managed to embed in this post. Finally I have found a written version of the NVU application. Hopefully in two days I will be able to finish my web page.

The BaW07 (Becoming a Webhead) experience has been a great opportunity to learn about new tools for using in the language classroom. This morning, as part of the presentations in BaW07, we had a conference with Michael Coghlan. The subject was voice tools and its applications in education. It was a really interesting event. For more an hour Mr. Coghlan spoke to an enthusistic audience. While he spoke, he also carried out a very instructive powerpoint presentation on the topic. Participants were also istening to Mr. Coghlan and exchanging text messages about relevant issues concerning the topics being presented. He reviewed some voice tools that can be useful in a language classroom. One them was hipcast, which he used to record a message in his blog. He also gave us participants very sound advice in dealing with technology. One that is worth mentioning is the one of trying to use/understand just some of the tools reviewed, due to time consuming nature of this enterprise. He is absolutely right on this because it does take a great deal of effort to get familiar with a new tool. To give an example, this is my first posting on the Yahoo 360 blog host and it took me some time to decide trying it and some time figuring out how to use it and I know that I still have a long way to go. However, to quote so many moderators and interesting people I have been learning with “learning is a lifelong process” and I am up for grabs.