11 Rays of Sunshine: #SunShineAward Homework

Keep your face always toward the sunshine – and shadows will fall behind you.

Walt Whitman

Remember chain letters? Well, this is like chain blogging only better 🙂 Just before the holidays I started seeing #SunShineAward on Twitter (maybe you have seen it too and wondered?). Well it is a fun interactive way to share a bit of sunshine and a bit about yourself with your PLN. When the first nomination rolled in it was the start of the holis and I was too busy with holiday prep. Now that holis are half way in I am feeling relaxed and ready to spread some sunshine around!

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So here is how it works:

Step 1. Acknowledge the nominating blogger (s).

Step 2. Share 11 random facts about yourself.

Step 3. Answer the 11 questions the nominating blogger has created for you.

Step 4. List 11 bloggers you think deserve some recognition and a little blogging love! (These people can’t include the blogger who nominated you.)

Step 5. Post 11 questions for the bloggers you nominate.

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Step 1 – Acknowledge the nominating blogger (s):

Lots of sunshine and blogging love to Ross LeBrun (@MrLeBrun), Karl Lindgren-Streicher (@LS_Karl), Aaron Akune (@aakune) and Naryn Searcy (@nsearcy17) for sending sunshine my way and including me.

Here… after a wee bit of holiday procrastination is my homework….

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Step 2 – 11 random facts about me:

1. I have been a vegetarian for over 25 years…but my husband is a hunter (#gofigure).

2. I “lived” in a cave for 4 weeks in the Sinai Desert.

3.  I traveled by camel across the desert in Rajasthan, India.

4. I went spelunking in bat caves in Belize and contracted Histoplasmosis from inhaling bat guano.

5.  I have a morbid fear of bats (and this did not come after #4!).

6. I worked on a kibbutz in Israel for 10 months.

7. I tree planted my way through university in Northern Ontario.

8. I was a waitress at the Banff Springs Hotel for 2 summers.

9.  I ran an outdoor education program before I had my daughter and got to travel to Belize, Costa Rica, the Broken Islands. Clayoquot Sound, Cathedral Lakes, Banff, Jasper, and Kananaskis, all with students.

10. I went to a High School run by nuns and we called our principal Mother.

11. I grew up in Montreal and speak French (but my mother tongue is English).

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Step 3 – Answers to questions asked of me (I divided these up in chronological order):

Ross’

1. What would you do with a lottery win of $50,000?

Take my daughter to India.

2. What was the first thing you read that you remember loving?

Narnia series by C.S. Lewis.

3. Diving – Sky or Scuba?

Definitely scuba, love the ocean but heights…not so much.

Karl’s

4. What is the most important characteristic you look for in your friends? 

Non judgement. When the chips are down friends who listen with open hearts and hear you, without comparing, judging or making the story about them. These people make you feel it is 100% OK to be yourself!!

5. What is your proudest moment as an educator?
Very hard to choose just one!! I feel lucky to have many. But I think my proudest moments have all come from meeting former students as adults and seeing the wonderful people they have become.

 6. Who is your hero? Why?

My grandmother Gang, who always put others first, always saw the good in everyone she meet, and found fun in every situation.

Aaron’s

7. What do you do most often? Phone, text or tweet?

Hands down Tweet. If a person is on Twitter I will DM them over texting them. It just feels handy to have all communication in one place.

8. What excites you the most about the work you do?

That it is never the same, there is always something new to learn and no day is like the last.

9. One area we need to pay attention to in education that wasn’t as important 10 years ago is _________________.

Hmmm, I can think of several, but I guess the whole area of being digitally fluent is an area that was not relevant 10 years ago and now is vital for our students as they exit school.

Naryn’s

10. If your son/daughter wanted to enter the field of education right now, would you encourage them?
Knowing my daughter as I do, I would not encourage her as I don’t think the field suits her talents.

11. What is a good moment from 2013?

2013 was an amazing year! Many of the best moments came from meeting f2f with peeps I had only meet virtually via Twitter. What made these moments so good  was to discover people were 100% the same f2f as they were online. This was a good discovery!

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Step 4 – My Questions for you:

1. Favorite quote or saying?

2. If you could do your post secondary education over again what (if anything) would you do differently?

3. What inspired you to go into education?

4. What is your favorite educational related book you have read and why?

5. If you did not have to work what would you do instead (or would you continue to work)?

6. What is your favorite characteristic about yourself?

7. What new goals or aspirations do you have for 2014 (professional or personal)?

8. What one country that you have not visited, would you like to and why?

9. What is your favorite way to unplug and unwind?

10. Strangest food you have consumed?

11. What is the scariest thing you have ever done?

Step 5 – Now it’s over to you:

1. Graham Johnson (@math_johnson)

2. Scott Harkness (@hark07)

3. Crystal Kirch (@crystalkirch)

4. Audrey McLaren (@a_mcsquared)

5. Paul Kelly (@paulkellybc)

6. Darcy Mullins (@darcymullin)

7. Brian Bennett (@bennettscience)

8. Mark Peterson (@dassel)

9. Sheila Morissette (@sheilamoris)

10. Kaelyn Bullock  (@KaelynBullock)

11. Stacey Roshan (@buddyxo)

Have Fun and Happy new year to you all!

P.S. Apologies if you have already been nominated or hate things like this, feel free to ignore! #nopressure

Where does your private lie?

Shared on Flickr by Richard Holt

It’s summer. You’re out in the backyard with your best friend, unloading about a stressful incident at work. Unbeknownst to you, your neighbor is listening quietly on the other side of your tall fence.

Ethically does your neighbor have the right to make public what he heard…just because he heard it?  Does the blame fall on you for having the conversation in the first place? And now are you accountable for the conversation…even though it was a private one?

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Last week I read with a mother’s curiosity the top my daughter’s open Twitter feed. One tweet puzzled me, it was intentionally cryptic and this bothered me! Later that day I asked her about it. Her reaction was swift and certain: “Don’t creep me Mom!”
I did not respond at the time but went away to think about it. At first I thought I should absolutely read all her Tweets as a precaution to be cretain she is being appropriate out there. Later I began to consider if something is available to read (i.e. open) does it mean I should read it? I started to think that her Tweets are her private space, in the sense that I should not search them out just to read and just to gain information about her (if I was concerned about her I might go and read). She deserves her own space and the opportunity to develop an identity. She tweets with the assumption of some privacy.

It seems counter intuitive…open but private?

As we share and divulge more personal information with the world in digital spaces what can we assume is private? Are my DMs to peeps private, when I know how easy it is to leave Tweetdeck open and forget to close the DM column?  Similarly, when I talk privately to someone on Facebook is it ever really “private”…when often people stay logged into to their Facebook accounts on computers with multiple users.

Does easy access to personal conversations (I am not talking about banking, SIN, etc.) mean we should we live in a state of perpetual fear that someone might assess these, just as our neighbor might overhear a private conversation? Or do we begin to recognize that while information about someone might be accessible, it does not mean we must access it. Is this any different from the journals that I have written over the years?  I did not write them for a public audience and so I assume privacy.  These journals are private reflections, thoughts and conversations…yet the possibility exists that someone could access them.

Is private really more of a function of where the world decides to stop…being interested and stops looking? Is privacy more of a stance of respect and trust? How do we encourage private spaces that are open? Just as I might see someone praying or doing Tai Chi in the park, I recognize these as a private activity…even though they are out in the open. Or when people argue or discuss out on Twitter, these discussions are open but often times are private.

Just because we can access private information about a person does it mean we should?
Do we need to develop new understandings around degrees of privacy and the intention of privacy?

How do we grow spaces for ourselves where privacy is understood but openness and vulnerability are seen as healthy and are encouraged?

 “There’s nothing more daring than showing up, putting ourselves out there and letting ourselves be seen.” 
― Brené Brown