Screenshot from Scrivener, a power writing tool.
I'M TAKING lessons I've learned from 28 days of writing to Ireland's annual CESI.ie conference in Galway this weekend. A warm Irish welcome for anyone who wants to follow the #cesicon conversation. [1]
The educators at this annual event have always impressed me with their enthusiasm and dedication. As a parent of two Irish school children, I like to peek under the tent flaps at CESI to see if I might add anything constructive. I know if I had scraped everything tagged #28DaysOfWriting in February I would have accumulated a gold mine of valuable content.
In Ireland, we use Monday #edchatie sessions for cross-talk but I don't believe there has been anything like a month-long education meme in Ireland that attracted dozens of educators to share and share alike.
If I was allowed to beat the drum for a single concept, I would echo the siren call of Tom Barrett [2] (to "start writing for 28 minutes a day") and then roll that creative effort into a system like Scrivener where you can easily reshape and reproduce your writing on a virtual corkboard, in a shared document or as scratch work distributed as a Kindle Single.
I've started following a dozen people already because I found their interesting writing tagged and shared during the past four weeks. If I knew they had a paid subscription channel, I'd wander over and click to buy. I think all educators need to be empowered with the processes that serve as the foundation of the sharing economy. A hashtag cluster full of interesting ideas will attract a paying audience. I've seen that work many times before and the high quality musings and photos of #28DaysOfWriting is no different.
I'm in Galway with #cesicon to show and dissect this idea. I'll push some audio content out through our youth media team @ymtfm and offer a fee thoughts on my personal audio blog on Audioboom. Those audio snippets will play inline via my @topgold account on Twitter.
[Bernie Goldbach is the senior pilot creative multimedia lecturer at the Limerick School of Art & Design.]
1. The 2015 CESI Conference covers "Beyond the Horizon: Technology in Education".
2. Follow @tombarrett.
