Lemurian Sanctuary for Writers and Artists
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.
