http://www.pageflakes.com/dfee/27773528.

OK a quick reflection on the Connectivism course. I think I can only do this through intutive narratives and reflections invovling my personal history with the process and connecting stuff up with technology I guess.

I first got onto the web because I was editing a poetry magazine back in the late 80's. Here's an archive page. Now what was interesting about this process was that it wasn't an ordinary Poetry Magazine. It was also a listings magazine of all the community poetry events in the London UK area.

Together with my partner at the time we had to collate and reference all the local poetry venues that were current in the London area - all 33 London boroughs, the events taking place in the next three months, the libraries, listings, telephone numbers, addresses and all the venues where readings were taking place. The latest incarnation, which keeps that format is here.

Now back in those days -  it was pre web - I grew fascinated by the connections between the different people and communities - I used an early ZX Spectrum computer to keep a database of postcodes - that's how we referenced them - and used a mailmerge program and a printer to mailout to the various poetry organisers. The response was amazing - I sold 1000 mimeographed magazines int he first month and a whole new network was born where there wasn't one before...

So when the web did come online in 1993-4 commercially in the UK, I was first in the queue for the first internet cafe provider then called Cyberia in Fitzrovia London. The first thing we did was get Poetry London online and then I began to see the added power of connecting events and people in the online space. It was fascinating to watch, and although very few people had a connection in those days and most people thought I was talking gobbledegook (so what's new) we could see the power of this new communication system.

At the same time I was teaching in a small primary school in Fitzrovia near to British Museum. At the time I was working on a project to do with the Ancient Greeks. I went into the museum to see what resources they had - a few manky slides was the answer. So I got a good SLR camera and went into the museum and got their permission to photograph the Ancient Greek gallery and created one of the world's first museum tours. Sadly it doesn't exist any more just references and fragments (much like the civilisation itself) ;) due to school board vandalism when I left teaching to become a consultant,

Immediately I began communicating with other educators around the world and we got an early black and white webcam and got into CU-SeeMe video conferencing but there wasn't any sound in those days so we held up giant cardboard speech bubbles and filled the words in with marker pens. All great fun. We regularly took part in the then Global School Network Santa Claus project which consisted of our kids (5 year olds) being facilitated writing e-mails to Santa Claus which would be replied to by Hight School kids in the States. It was an amazing time - no-one had a clue what I was doing in the school but they looked on with bemised interest. I, in the meantime, was building up a worldwide network of global educator friends.

But the most interesting thing of all was when I got hold of a school network for the first time. I enabled a chat facility for the kids to see what would happen and they went crazy - I had never seen so much writing and engagement happen in 20 minutes in my entire teaching career. From never having seen the technology before they just took to it naturally and I realised something was happening here. Peer to peer communciation that was so far more engaging than me just standing at the front trying to direct things. From there we went onto interschool forums and found as many likeminded groups around the world to communicate with as possible. No-one knew what I was doing in the classroom and even if they did they didn't care or understand...but I could see the power of it all and it felt as if my brain had expanded to adapt to this whole new global phenomenon.

I immediately began to see the power of connecting people up in this case to create and build things not possible locally and I ran with it.

Now scroll on to a few years back when teachers began using Twitter. I saw the saw thing happening but it was one interation beyond what I had experienced. What was evident to me were two pieces of technology that started to make the difference in schools education in this country. The combination of Twitter and smart phones, in particular the iPhone.

For the first time people had a device that matched and facilitated communication between each other's personal learning network not bound by or locked in to their institution. At the same time the TeachMeet phenomenon was growing in the UK. I was on Twitter a couple of years back and I witnessed one teacher Twitter out asking for help in designing a table of contents for a lesson he was about to teach. Within ten minutes another teacher had sent back a Tweet with a link to a ScreenCast showing how to do it he had created there and then in class with his pupils. Something I could only dream about years ago.

So I kind of remembered those days when I was struggling with a way to connect poets in the London area and I decided it would be great to document that process with video. At the same time the report by Ken Robinson came out - in fact it was that report's 10th anniversary this year and I filmed Ken giving an anniversary speech. And that set the tone for even more insights. So thinking about how to connect up people I now have a repository of about 50 films - which I am still encoding and putting up on this site TeachMeet Talks. But that's not sufficient - what I intend to do is have those available on demand - so that if a teacher wants to search geographically for a colleague nearby they can search Google maps and up will pop someone near to them with their Twitter and a few films of practice so they can hook up.

Yet another thing thast struck me around that time too was the power of Open Source applications and how they were enabling communities to do stuff at home when they had never got access before. Recently I made a series of films for the Open Source Schools site where I documented this process - modelling it for other educators. What is so great about this job is that I can find and source practitioners doing great things and then disseminate that with a wider scope - so this film about an artist working with Blender and the kids' responses is a joy to see after all these years - it's like coming home...

That added factor of open source, open deployment and the mix with community engagement and widening the scope by connecting up people and ideas is what I do and probably why I'm here on this course.