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.