(LOCUS members are invited to add to this list by leaving comments here)
(LOCUS members are invited to add to this list by leaving comments here)
Invitation | Mailing List | Meeting Group | Discussion Resources
Calling parents, teachers, and other interested people
…to be part of a reading, research, discussion and ultimately development and planning group working towards creating a wonderful new learner-oriented ‘school’, primarily/initially for kids, in JHB, Gauteng, South Africa!
LOCUS is an acronym for Learner Oriented CampUS. In order to be truly learner-oriented and to foster a healthy internal locus of control for the children who attend, the LOCUS will be designed in harmony with most complete understanding of children’s rights, desires and needs we can possibly come to.
Some of you may be more interested in using the group to inform yourselves in order to improve or interact with existing schools, others, like myself, more interested in starting something new from scratch. All that is great: but if you are really very happy with the schooling options currently available in Gauteng then this group is not for you. If you are not sure, want to get some idea of what we may head for, or just want to get inspired, check out www.LivingSchool.org ; www.summerhillschool.co.uk ; www.CircleSchool.org You may also want to read Steven Harrison’s ‘The Happy Child’; Carl Roger’s chapters on education in ‘Becoming a Person’; A.S. Neill’s ‘Summerhill, etc. The idea is to do our own thing, but to draw on lessons and ideas from sources such as these.
To join the mailing list in order to stay informed without coming to meetings at this point, please send an email to: locus-subscribe@pixelplexus.co.za We PROMISE we will not give this info out to others or use it for any other purpose ourselves.
If you live in Gauteng you may choose to join the once-a-month in-person meeting group (view schedule). In between meetings we each go off to do reading or checking out or thinking on our own, in the line of each individual’s interest, to bring back to the next monthly meeting. Each meeting comprises some feedback and/or presentations to the whole group on what some members have discovered, followed by discussion. It is envisioned that this initial research/reading/discussion group will meet until June 2006, at which point it will become a design and planning (including fund-sourcing) group. The aim is to have some experimental pilot ‘classes’ running by June 2007, and ASAP thereafter to get underway with the creation of the full LOCUS – which may have another name by then!
To join the meeting group please email your contact details as well as the area where you live to: locus-meet@pixelplexus.co.za We PROMISE we will not give this info out to others or use it for any other purpose ourselves.
Please view the LOCUS Category, the Discussion sub-category (as also found in the buttons on the left hand side of pages). Clicking on an entry’s title will open that entry in full including a form allowing you to leave comments. Alternatively clicking on the link that says how many – if any – comments an entry has will take you straight to a form where you can comment on that entry.
The new SA Top Sites site, is allegedly growing at a rate of about a new member every hour (I did have trouble opening it this am though). After my membership being solicited via a friendly email I asked Justin Hartman for something to post about his site. His response in full below. Now I’ve always had a thing against popularity for the sake of it, and mindless pursuit of popularity is a significant part of what is wrong with this world, mynsinsiens. But I like Justin’s approach. I think this his site is worth keeping an eye on and for some behind the scenes intrigue see his public apology to 2Large, the ISP of the previous SA Top Sites site.
SA Top Sites (http://www.satopsites.com) officially launched on Sunday 15 January solely out of a selfish need that I had… It’s not quite as sinister as that but I think a little history is required to shed some light on the subject.
About 16 months ago I started a website for Arsenal (www.arsenalsa.co.za) football fans in South Africa. The site grew to astronomical lengths and before I knew it we were generating around 45,000 page impressions each month.
Then one fine day about six months ago I managed to stumble across a website that had a little button with a ranking value on it and the button said “SA Top Sites”. Naturally I clicked on this button and very soon I had my own button to display on the Arsenal website and within no time we had climbed the ladder into the top 5 rankings.
The fascination with competing against other websites for the #1 spot was not only shared by myself. I found that members of the Arsenal club grew to love the Top Sites and it became a daily visit to see what the other websites were doing.
Three weeks ago however, the SA Top Sites website went down. Our buttons stopped working and access to the website itself brought up a 404 error page. This had happened before so I, along with all the other members, thought it was a temporary problem but after two weeks I realised this website was most likely never going to come back online.
All I really wanted was to see the Arsenal website back up on the rankings and it was freaking me out to no end that nothing was happening. In my spare time (like I have any) I own and run a successful web development and hosting company, Hartman Productions (www.hartpro.com), and because of this I decided to take the initiative and start my own SA Top Sites website and alas a new version of SA Top Sites was born.
I really wasn’t expecting much. I emailed a few people I knew who were previously on SA Top Sites and told them about what I was doing and that first day 39 members signed up. The next day a further 11 signed up and the day after that 12 signed up. This hasn’t stopped however and as I write this now an additional 24 new members signed up today bringing the total membership to a staggering 86 websites which I think is not bad for 96 hours.
The feedback from members has been amazing. Popular bloggers like Tertia from So Close (http://tertia.typepad.com/so_close/), Bee from Accidental Mother (http://beeslife.blogdrive.com/) and Wezzo from ChumpStyle (http://chump-style.blogspot.com/) have all emailed me personally to tell me what a fantastic site this has become and how much they love the competition.
In fact it was Tertia who asked me privately “what’s in it for you?” and while there is no financial reward I have to admit it gives me a personal lift to see the effect this new site has had on the community. So much so that tonight I launched a dedicated Forum (http://www.satopsites.com/forum/index.php) for the website where I truly hope to get members alike to share their experiences, strengths and hopes with each other.
The friends made the last few days are unbelievable. It has truly been a fulfilling experience and I aint gonna stop here!
What’s next on the agenda for SA Top Sites? You’ll just have to subscribe to find out :)
There seems to be a minor proliferation of South African, oops, I mean Safrican, search engine type websites going on, interesting in the face of Great Google Almighty and the rush to capitalise on this whole Web 2.0 storm in a teaspoon. Why the hell not!?
Purely for the sake of discourse (about bloggers explaining blogging)…
(For an intelligent take on the cause of this discussion see Sean Coon’s retort post Bloggers Are More Than Writers: We’re Social Connectors to the original A BLOGGER IS JUST A WRITER WITH A COOLER NAME Why Blogging vs. Traditional Media Has Been Oversold article by by Simon Dumenco )
Do you have to understand the technology that gives us antibiotics, or insulin to get value out of it if or when you need it? At the end of the day Language and Typography are also technologies, indeed arguably blogging is the same technology in a newer guise of evolution, if anything the difference lies in the receding barrier to participation and one could argue that it is actually a new tendril of the organic growth of the socio-cultural phenomena(/meta-meme?) of democracy. Human computer interaction teaches that the more efficient technology is, the more invisible it is, simply allowing the user to do whatever they choose to do as quickly and easily as possible.
With more and more blog entries appearing in online search results and other media channels familiarity will increase and eventually, many will become proficient in blog technologies without ever really noticing or having it explained to them, purely because as a specie we excel in creating mental models from experience through pattern recognition (and many of us suck at anything that feels like reading a help-file). Which is not necessarily a good thing. The downside is that this often means we accept and take to ridiculous extremes new technologies to discover the cost much too late. (But that’s another topic)
If anything, I would argue we need better terminology for things like ‘trackbacs’ and ‘pingbacks’ –and while we are at – it might be a good idea to resolve the semantic quagmire brewing in the mix between ‘tags’ meaning ‘keywords’ and ‘tags’ meaning mark-up code-elements.
just 20c worth.. :- )
besides ‘should’ seems a bit facist don’t you think?
Just upgraded the backend of this blog to WordPress 2.0 and am experimenting with some themes, unexpected results and various inconsistencies highly probablepossible for the next day or two.
(Yes, yes I know one is supposed to do design modifications off-line, but its just a little more exciting this way. About to reorganise the categories etc. What do you think of this ‘dark’ look?)
Implemented ‘Ultimate Tag Warrior’, still sorting out keyword tags etc. will create a Help page to explain its functionality to those not familiar with such things.
Will be uploading images into the porty category over the next day or two.
Design is procedural formulation and management of elements in the flow between how things are, how they might be – and as far as it is possible to achieve – how they should be. (In other words trying to make the most of whatever the hell you have to work with)
My response to concerns raised about eyespy being used for sinister purposes by unscroupulous types like stalkers etc. in threads on the Mail and Guardian Online and 419legal.org forums.
“… concerned about what is released to the public. … things like Stalkers and other loonies…
… Big Brother information could be quite dangerous… :bugeyes: ”Yes, you suggest a very scary scenario, (which has also been mentioned on the ,419legal.org of SAPS forum) but on the other hand, what if your kids have stayed out much later than they promised to be back and are not answering their mobile phone – in fact – even more worrying, you can’t trace their location via the cell phone company because their phone is off. Perhaps its battery has run down, perhaps they have turned it off not to be disturbed or… perhaps something more sinister is going on. I don’t think the eyespy service is that comprehensive or pervasive, yet. Imagine though, if you could at least find out where the vehicle they are travelling in is, or was last visible.
The necessary technology is available e.g. Continue reading
Design
|
Facilitation
|
and more… But my time and availability has become limited, for a more comprehensive offering see ForgeCorporation where I do most of my work these days.
With regards to the invitation to responses included on the document Morton Wagenfeld, Ph.D. on The Salutogenic Challenge (Walden University) Continue reading