Building Niche Virtual Communities

On Monday 21 August Heather Blakey will be presenting at the Victorian Information Technology Association conference ‘New Thinking New Technologies for Student Engagement’.

Heather Blakey will be presenting a workshop about using technology in Education which focuses on blogging at the Billunook Primary and Middle School Resource Centre on Tuesday 15th August, 2006.

Blogging
Presented by Heather Blakey

The challenge for educators is to rethink curriculum and move to relevant technology based curriculum. The blogger revolution is changing not only personal and global communications but thinking, technical, personal and workplace skills.

For all intents and purposes blog is a static piece of software but innovative educators are infusing it with oxygen and are using it to engage their students, provide real audiences and develop interactive clusters of learning. Teachers are using new technology tools such as Blog, WriteBoard, Audio Blog, Pod Casting in their provision of higher thinking skill based curriculum.

Heather Blakey, a teacher with over thirty five years of teaching experience, has been working in this digital communication landscape for over ten years and is currently working with the Victorian Education Channel and Slav to establish a safe virtual blogging cluster for teachers and students from around the world. Learn more about the digital landscape with which your students are already familiar and see for yourself how the blogger revolution is changing the educational environment.

Heather Blakey will share her knowledge of innovative applications for blog, ipods and mobile phones within a school setting. She will also address the security issues, which concern teachers. By the end of the session you will be inspired to create a blog and begin networking with your students and like minded people from all over the world.

At the Soul Food Cafe, within the sanctuary that Lemuria affords, Heather Blakey has quite literally built a target specific, interactive community for people who want to practice the Soul Food Way and make writing and art a daily practice. Soul Food now has artists, writers, journalists, photographers, scientists, archaelogists, storytellers, illustrators, musicians living in residence. The Soul Food Cafe has long ceased to be a static webside and provides very real mechanisms for working collaboratively in a creative, online environment.

In 2005 Heather Blakey wrote an article entitled ‘Zen and the Art of Team Blogging’ for Chris Dunmire and the Creativity Portal. The article explores the creative transformation that can take place within a collaborative, online setting.

Heather now helps organisations and people from all walks of life set up virtual, niche market communities. Global Teacher, for example, is an intricate online network, created by Heather Blakey for the Victorian Education Channel and SLAV to provide a dualistic, interactive, cyber setting, for educators and students to self publish using an especially designed publishing and communication tool.

The Victorian Education Channel is currently establishing a network that has been designed to enable educationalists from all over the world to work collaboratively, share educational materials and publish staff and student work. Staff will use a tailor made blogging program called Global Teacher while students will use a twin program called Global Student. These programs are ‘clones’ of Edublog and WordPress which many educators will be already familiar with.

Heather launched this innovative approach to teaching and learning at a conference entitled ‘Crystallising Your Knowledge – A Fresh Look At ITC In Learning’ run by the Victorian Curriculum Corporation and SLAV.

Can you afford to be left behind? Can you afford to just have a static website? You can contact Heather at heatherblakey at iinet dot net dot au and have her support you, or actively help you build a vibrant virtual community to attach to your website or blogger.