Just experimenting with posting an image as I have seen this done in other blogs I've been looking at. I clicked on the little blue and green box with the lollypop tree on the toolbar above.



This is a photo of my very first cat, Babbage.

I want to join in NOW
Mood:  celebratory
Hey Patrick,

Just accepted (properly) the invitation to join your community blog. Apparently you have been notified and need to finalize something before I can post.

We're making progress.

I await your acceptance of my acceptance oh relatively successful community blog creator ;)

Patrick's community blog
Mood:  accident prone
I don't believe this. Shades of the UKeU environment in the bad old early days. I just typed in a nice long post for this blog, previewed it, clicked the back button on my browser to return to editing it only to discover that it has vanished. Oh why did I not think to save the text.

Well, here goes again.

I received an invite to join Patrick's community blog. I clicked on the link in the email but reached a very confusing screen where I wasn't exactly sure what to do. Thought I'd successfully joined his community but it didn't seem to work. On this posting page there is a radio button to make this post either public or shared with community. I wonder if you need to do something else to your blog in order to share it. Will investigate.

I sympathise with Patrick's comments about the confusing instructions in this Angelfire system. When I first used it I was a little put off by the hip and youthful "computer speak" used. As I am neither hip nor particularly youthful I felt a little out of place. I wonder if this site is designed by and for a particular generation (say 13 to 15 year olds) who expect a certain style of communication and who are confident enough to just click around until they get what they want out of the interface.

I suspect that this is relevant to our EC topic. Any thoughts?

Windows!!!!!!!
Mood:  don't ask
Grrrrrrrr. Makes my head hurt. My nice Windows 98 system crashed/went down/became unuseable. So we've upgraded to Windows XP.

Is it always so hard to reinstall software......put your internet favourites back......set up your mail client......?

Makes my head hurt - and soaks up valuable study time.

Think I'll give up for the evening and hope things go better tomorrow

When do you work best?
Mood:  cool
Found other members of the tutor group had created blogs. Am still playing around with the blog settings to see if turning it into a "community blog" will enable others to comment on mine. I've even issued invites so we'll see what happens.

Having been away for the weekend and being back at work full time this week has left me no time for reading so I haven't really got anything erudite to add about blogging. I think I'll try to spend time in the evenings researching but I'm finding it more and more difficult to work during the school holidays. I think its the fact that I work best when I'm totally on my own, either alone in the house, or working late at night or early in the morning when everyone else is asleep in bed.

I can see some late evening sessions on the horizon over the next few weeks.

When do others find the best time to study?

To Blog or not to Blog...
Well, here we go. I woke up at 5am this morning worrying about how I was going to fit the next month's Open University activities into the two weeks before my vacation. Perhaps a three week holiday in August was not such a good idea. Then at short notice I need to be in the office all next week instead of my usual leisurely three days and all my study plans just fly out of the window.

The least I can do is get started on the blogging - but what sort of blog? According to James Brunan The Blogging Phenomenon there are two types of blog:

A filter-style blog in which the focus is on providing links to other content.

A free-style blog in which the focus is less on the outside world and more on the internal world of the author.

I am attracted to the idea of filter-style for totally superficial reasons. I like the sound of the term blogrolling (the process of linking, citing and networking in and between blogs) I am also amused by the word linkalist which is apparently a derisive term used by journalists to refer to filter-style blog writers. Realistically, though, I suspect that my blog will evolve into more of a free-style online "diary" of my thoughts and findings as I work through this part of my Open University Course H806 - Learning in the Connected Economy.

I will post links and references so perhaps this blog will act as a useful resource for my final examinable component.

If nothing else, I now feel much less anxious now that I have got it started. As it is only 6:20am, perhaps I can go back to bed and get some sleep.