an hour or two after my little boy was born, I went out to find a late night pizza for the drained parents. (Ok, I wasn't that drained). Anyway, i had a sense that this little trip down Centre Rd in Melbourne was now an inner story, a hidden detail - just like 33 years earlier my father must have done something - gone home to a silent house, poured a whisky, sat in the park, called a friend - but thats another story; inner to another life
I say this to illustrate that events have an inner story thats different to the public record, different to the newspaper version. Well, of course they do. But since this is the second post to this blog, i'm wondering how much i'll use the useful official newsletter voice, at the risk of being boring, and how will much be a personal voice. My gut feeling is newsletters have limited appeal, even to those they're immediately targeting, and practically none beyond. Where a personal story, on the other hand, is more universal.
So back to this PD day, the newspaper version below is the factual record. The possibly boring "this is what we did" version. No pizza story.
A little pizza story for me, though, is two days before, talking with the neighbours. I'd driven around the top of our court on the way home and they were in the front yard, so we got chatting and then drinking a beer - friendly neighbours. They have a two year old and the mother telecommutes from regional Victoria into her work at an oil company, via an internet connection that logs her in to the main office system in Houston Texas. Pretty handy, because she can limit the days she travels to Melb (160 km), by "telecommuting" from home to the multinational office, and spend more time accessible to family.
We got talking about that, since the next day i would need to use the same technology to be trained in the new reporting software that our schools will be using; we'd managed to get a prerelease version for training. There would be less than 24 hours between seeing the software for the first time in the training, and demonstrating it myself the next day. But i had a feeling it would be ok. I've used this sort of remote access before, and administered other reporting packages, so it looked ok.
Interesting thing was that oen of them commented that i was probably relaxed about it because i'd been "learning how to learn" computer software for a long time. Thats pretty true, but it was the "learning how to learn" phrase that got my attention; its sort of thing you expect teachers say, but when you hear it from your (non teacher) neighbour over a beer, it cements something about it being a reality, and not just educational jargon.
So ... the overlap of virtual technologies and learning theory with the neighbours, was one slice of my pizza story for this event