small things

I was in my front yard this morning planting up some new garden beds. A number of neighbours walked past. Many of them said hello. A father walked past with his daughter walking next to him and son riding a bike along side. They said hello. I said hello back. The daughter made a comment to her father in their language. She was looking intently at the work i was doing in my garden. About half an hour they returned from their walk to the store. The daughter was carrying a plant.

The stock market explained

Once upon a time in a village, a man appeared and announced to the
villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each.
The villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around, went into
the forest and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10and, as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort.
He further announced that he would now buy monkeys at $20 for each.
This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching
monkeys again. Soon the supply diminished even further and people
started going back to their farms.
The offer increased to $25 each, and
the supply of monkeys became so small that it was an effort to even
find a monkey, let alone catch it! The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on behalf of him.

In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers. 'Look at
all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected.
I will sell them to you at $35, and when the man returns from the
city, you can sell them to him for $50 each.'
The villagers rounded up all their savings and bought all the monkeys.
They never saw the man nor his assistant again, only monkeys everywhere!
Now you have a better understanding of how Wall Street works.

Lawn Sale

I had a lawn sale this morning. For those of you who live elsewhere in Australia, that's a garage sale. For those who live in parts of the world where that is an unknown concept the idea is that you clean out your house and shed, finding items you no longer need or want, place them in your garage or on your lawn on a saturday morning and strangers come around and buy them from you.
It's a strange idea, but one that I love.
There were a few benefits to doing this for me:
I got rid of some stuff that had been hanging around since I moved into my house
I made a bit of extra cash
I got to experience the crazy world of the lawn sale
I have basically decided there are three types of lawn salers:

1. Hard core - these people have week's that revolve around their lawn sales. They read the paper with a fine tooth comb on a Friday to examine exactly how many lawn sales are on offer the following morning and they chart a course between them that will maximise the bargains they desire. They are the ones who turn up before the advertised starting time in the hope that they will beat or undercut all of the other hare core salers. They offer you advice on how a lawn sale really should be run and they spend a maximum of 5 minutes on your lawn before they are off to their next appointment. many of them carry around a tin containing a quantity of coins and small notes specifically ear marked for lawn sale purchases. I got paid $10 for something this morning all in 10c and 20c pieces!

2. The specific purpose lawn salers - these people come in search of a specific item or object. They come in and scan what's on offer. If they see the item they want they grab it, if not they ask directly. Often they will see the item they were seeking with a SOLD sign already written on it and look at you pleadingly, hoping you will go back on your agreement with the previous purchaser and do them a deal instead.The specific items asked for this morning were most furniture - shelves, chests of drawers, wardrobes, beds ad mattresses. But i also had a surprising number of requests for pot plants. I'm thinking of doing some propagating before my next lawn sale!

3. The lazy bones - these are the johnny-come-lately lawn salers who have good intentions about going lawn saling on a Saturday morning and then have a big night on Friday night and decide that a sleep in is more important than bargains. They still go out and do over the lawn sales but not until about 3 hours after everyone else has swept through. When they arrive they ask sheepishly "Is this all that's left?" "Yes" you reply and they smirk and shrug their shoulders. "It's our own fault I suppose. maybe we'll try to get up earlier next Saturday!"

Remarkable women of the desert

I started a new job a few weeks ago. I couldn't be happier (well maybe that's not true, but I'm pretty happy!). In this job my role is to support indigenous teachers in their learning and training. What I really get to do is talk and spend time with a group of remarkable women (and a couple of men). Some of these women have been teaching at the school in their remote community for up to 30 years. This in a system where 'whitefellas' come and go like pieces of rubbish blowing across a dusty football field.

I asked one of them how long she had been teaching for. 28 years she replied. And how many Principals had come and gone in that time? "Oh" she laughed "too many...maybe 15 or 20, I can remember'. But I bet she does. i bet she remembers each and everyone of them. i bet she remembers the ones who gave her hope and the ones who took all her power away. I bet she remembers the ones who treated her with respect and acknowledged her wisdom and knowledge, and the ones who judged her as knowing nothing based on her broken English.

And her story is all to familiar to the rest of the women in our little group. They have seen so many Principals and Teachers come and go, come and go. But they are still there. They are still putting up their hands to do more study, to become even stronger advocates for their children's education. They are still the ones who try their best to 'orient' new whitefellas into their schools. They are the ones who talk to me now with great concern about the next generation of teachers. 'Who is gonna teach in the school when we get too old? We have to mentor those young ones'.

And hey are grateful to me for any small help I can offer them and i feel inadequate sometimes, but they are immanently gracious and i will do my best not to let them down.

Photobus & digital storytelling

I recently discovered digital storytelling. I was introduced to it by a man called Daniel Meadows. He spent quite a lot of his youth driving a bus around England taking photos of people. He has a great website:

www.photobus.co.uk

On it you can also watch some of the digital stories he has created.

Digital stories have a strict format:
1. a script of no more than 250 words
2. no more than 20 images
3. no more than 2 minutes

You'd be amazed how profound a story can be when told within these boundaries.

the BBC got him to do a project in Wales called Capture Wales:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/audiovideo/sites/galleries/pages/capturewales.shtml?page=1

The idea was that everyone has a story and Daniel and his team went around to towns and villages and ran workshops to help people find their story and then tell it using the digital story telling structure. The results are funny, emotional and surprising. Most of all though they are familiar.

daniel finished his presentation to the conference by saying 'By now you will have realised that this in fact is not something new. It is a new way of doing something that we have been doing since the dawn of time.'

Our humanity lies in the stories we choose to tell.

addicted to Facebook

For months I haven't been focusing on my blog and I realise now that it's because I have the IT equivalent of a new man in my life - Facebook. Now, stop rolling your eyes and letting out that disapproving grunt. I've heard them all and I dont care. I love getting peoples status feeds and getting a brief sense of how they are day to day. I love playing scrabble with friends on the other side of the world. I love how quickly things get turned into groups and speed around the globe. I love discovering that a friend who i haven't spoken to for ages is online as the same time as me and having a 5 minute or two hour chat session with them.

I know all of the arguments about not everyone having access to the internet, and it replacing actually spending time with people, and that it is just another thing to create a username and password for. Yes it is all of that, but I still love it. I was at a conference a couple of months ago where I heard someone talk about the things educators feared about the internet - that students would use it to cheat on essays and tests. in fact the vast majority of people use it for social interaction.

My world is global. I have friends, great friends, who i love, who live on the other side of the world. I have family and friends who live in another state. I wish we lived closer and had the opportunity to catch up face to face more easily, more often. But until they develop teleportation, I'm going to stick with Facebook because it means that at least my Facebook friends can be part of my everyday life.