Paces

Blogger's Block. Or just busy?

Blogger's Block. Is there such a thing? Like Writer's Block?

I was happily writing a post about 10 days ago and couldn't come up with an ending for it. Still can't. Since then I've had several subjects for posts pass through my head - but not found the words to get them out and down.

Actually, I've been rather busy. We all have. It feels excitingly like there's a renewal of the whole Paces' Project taking place. At the same time, we are preparing for the greatly looked-forward to the imminent visits of Angela Webdale from the Department for Education and Rachel Wolf of the New Schools Network - both hopefully furthering our Free School aspirations.

So there's a lot going on. Maybe that's why've I've got Blogger's Block?

2 blogs and a blogswarm - new to me anyway

Thanks to Glenda Watson Hyatt (@GlendaWH) for the ReTweet which led me to two blogs not previously known to me and to a "blogswarm" (also a word not previously known to me) campaign around the withdrawal of the mobility component of Disability Living Allowance from those living in care homes.

I've not explored either blog thoroughly enough yet to recommend them but here they are:

The Broken of Britain - the disabled people's campaign. On Facebook and twitter too. Their DLA campaign is called "One Month Before Heartbreak" and the original link from Glenda was this here.

Carer Watch's Blog - of the non-party-political group Carer Watch - a campaign group for carers across the UK run by independent unpaid carers.

Why blog? Why twitter? Why Facebook? What's it all to do with me? #CondEd

Dorothea De Courcey is, she says at the top of her new blog "A senior lady on an internet journey ...."

If you've ever been tempted to start a blog or join Facebook and held back,Dorothea's blog might be just the encouragement you need.

Dorothea has only just started writing, so you can still read her very first post and catch up.

Do take a look - and do let me know if you set up your own conductive education blog.

By the way, she's on twitter too - @DorotheaDeC

Living with Cerebral Palsy in the Web2.0 Era

I've only just caught up with this great post back in mid-August from Glenda Watson Hyatt (@GlendaWH on twitter) Living with Cerebral Palsy in the Web2.0 Era.

She begins her post: Three weeks ago today I had the pleasure of presenting with web accessibility consultant and speaker Tom Babinszki on the panel “Living with a Disability in the Web 2.0 Era” at the Plain Talk Conference held in Alexandria, Virginia."

Glenda types at 10 words per minute with her left thumb. That's a simple fact of her life. It's a simple fact of our lives who know her that she's a great blogger.

Take a look for yourselves and, as they say in the coffee shops, "enjoy".

Oh - and why aren't you blogging?

Top tips for reporting our impact #CondEd

With thanks to @NCVO on twitter:  "Reading: Top tips for reporting your charity’s impact"

"... a recent report from New Philanthropy Capital, Talking About Results, says that charities are much better at talking about what they do than why they do it and what it achieves ..."

I've been trying recently to work out how Paces can make better coordinated use of social networking on the internet to reach out to parents and friends.

I've also been pondering lately how Paces and, more generally, CE can report better what we do.

The 4 'top tips' for talking about results are:

• Bring it back to Why
• Use the voices of the people you support
• Think about how you measure success
• Be honest

I shall now go in search of the New Philanthropy Capital report. You can follow their top tips to the Ask Charity website - one I'd not previously come across and will explore after lunch.

Dynamic conversations

Continuing to experiment with this blog ...

I've added a TypePad feature called "threaded comments". According to TypePad, "threaded comments allow readers to reply directly to each other’s comments, creating a more dynamic conversation". You can also get an email when someone adds a comment to you yours. The layout should look a bit different too. It'll be interesting to see how it works out. 

Apparently "TypePad Connect" works with Blogger, too, so Blogger users might like to try it out.

Changes afoot (2) - thinking it all afresh

As I continue experimenting with changes to this blog, I see that I first posted on May 30th 2007 -  "For Starters". At lunch-time that day I was attended a meeting of OFFER (Sheffield's voluntary sector network) on the subject of child Poverty. There is no link to OFFER here as it ceased to exist through lack of funding from April this year. Things change.

I wrote in that post that the new blog was to be a fresh start in sharing news with "Paces' People first and our many friends too. So you can keep up with what's going on". If you read that sentence again, you will notice how old-fashioned it seems as a way to use the internet, in a world of Facebook, Twitter and a host of other social networking applications. No longer is the internet just another tool for "telling" people what some-one thinks it is good for them to know. 

Since then, as well as Facebook and Twitter, I have experimented with many new tools, learning (albeit slowly), such as Ning to set up discussion forums, Mindmeister for visually mapping strategy, Wikispaces for collaboratively writing & collecting documents, Netvibes for aggregating blogs about CE ; all the while trying to find out how these new tools could engage more people with Paces and with conductive education. (I was truly honoured that an idea of mine was taken up by the organising Committee of the 7th World Congress).

One consequence of course was that all these experiments happened in different places, with no real links or easy inter-connectivity.  I still do not yet know how to resolve that but recently I have been asked twice how we know that there is a demand for Paces' services among parents of children with cerebral palsy. (An easy, but not entirely whimsical response, is to ask how many people knew they wanted an iPhone before Apple invented it. I had an iPad in my hands yesterday for the first time. The day before yesterday I had no desire for one. Now I want one!) Whimsy aside, it's a solidly good question.

I also had put to me a thought which became the subject of a post: "What does Paces need to be like for parents to invite us in to their lives?" and this led on to pondering what Paces' internet presence should be like if it were built on the basis of that thought.

It's much too early to know that answer yet, but the thought has led me to explore first what I might do with this blog. In short, I am where I began in 2007 - trying to "make a fresh start".

Also, it's much too early to know the full consequences and benefits to Paces and CE in the UK of our "Proposal" to DfE to be invited to submit an application for Free School ("Academy") status. However, tomorrow we have a meeting of Trustees, Governors and staff with Tom Legge of the Place Group which supports schools seeking to become Academies. I will come back to this in a later post.

Things change. And we must - between us - constantly think it all afresh.

Changes afoot

Change is in the air .... more when we know more.

For now, over the next week or so, I'll be experimenting with changes to the layout of this blog. 

Please bear with me if things work and then don't work.

And your feedback will be most welcome.  :-)

Next morning

I have discovered how to make a couple of changes: I can add a Navigation Bar near the top of the blog with links to other content. So you might be able to see some sample content. One of these links is 'Archives' and I have moved the list of past posts from the sidebar, where I have always had it, into this link. I can also add what Typepad calls 'Pages'. Test pages, again with sample content, appear in the sidebar.

What is your blog telling you?

A quickie for those interested in blogging. "What is your blog telling you?" A reflection on what the stats can tell you about the impact of your blog by 'Left-Thumb Blogger' Glenda Watson Hyatt (@glendawh on twitter).

Easy read for non-geeks like me. Take a look. That's all.

CE2.0, 7WC10 & Social Reporting*

* Conductive education, Web2.0 or social networking, the 7th World Congress in 2010 and social reporting.

Having expanded the title of this post, I would like to introduce you to David Wilcox who blogs under the name 'SocialReporter'. In February this year he posted "How social reporters can help turn old-style conferences into the new convening spaces". The title just about says it all, though with a series of links to the work of Bev Trayner, Clare White, Dave Briggs and Clay Shirky the posting is actually a mine of useful and practical information.

There's no such thing as a perfect example, but for a taste of one way in which a conference can be opened up, both in real time and afterwards, enriching the experience of those who were there as well as sharing it with those unable to attend, take a look on YouTube.

If you there do a search for "TAL09", you will be offered all manner of responses to the "Talk About Local" event in Stoke-on-Trent a couple of weekends ago.  Or you could begin with Will Perrin's (no relation) introduction:

If you have looked at this clip on YouTube, you should have seen to the right of the frame a link: "More from Social Reporter". Click on that and you will see more of David Wilcox social reporting from conferences.

At the 6th World Congress in Goteburg, Sweden, there was a film-maker recording the event. His name was Lars Mullback. I remember I was asked to do an interview. I do not know what happened to the finished film. I never had the chance to see it. If Lars had used a now ordinary digital camera or mobile phone, he could have recorded a clip and posted it on YouTube for all of us to see and comment on.

Annoyingly, I lost his business card and was never able to contact him again. In fact, I lost all the business cards I was given at the 6th Congress.  As an aside to this posting, had CrowdVine been hosting a social network for the event, I could easily have recovered profiles and contact details of all the wonderful CE people I met there.

Before I leave you to your own journey of exploration in CE2.0, here's one more David Wilcox blog posting: "Social reporting made simple".

Andrew Sutton asked for practical ideas (see his last paragraph. How about social reporting from the 7th World Congress?