This weekend I've been doing some "distance teaching" to two potential Dadamac bloggers. Fortunately both of them are in the UK, so I didn't have to rely on text for the teaching - we were able to use good old fashioned phone calls.
Nikki's successor
Blogging regularly is a great way to share stories from the people in Dadmacs's network. For over three years Nikki blogged about the UK-Nigeria meetings, with all its news from in and around Fantsuam, and we are missing her. Last week her successor emerged. During our regular skype (text only) UK-Nigeria meeting I asked for clarificaion on something that John had written. Frances wrote a reply before John did. Without thinking I found myself thanking Frances, and then asking her if she felt like writing up the whole meeting, and then I suggestied she might take on the weekly blog. To my delight she agreed.
Frances' blog
Andy set up the necessary permissions, and today it only remained for me to introduce Frances to the practicalities of getting the words published the way that Drupal likes it to be done. Hence the distance teaching as she logged into her new blog space and I talked her through the practicalities over the phone. Now she'll go back to the archives of the meeting and set about her first blog post.
Julliet's blog
Julliet's blog is at an earlier stage as she doesn't have the archives of a weekly meeting to call on. We've been struggling for months to find the right entry point for her to tell the story of her work in Kenya. Last Wednesday we finally hit on what may well be the solution.
Preparing for First Thursday
Julliet had arrived back in London from her latest trip home to see her family and to progress her project. She phoned to tell me all about it. I was glad she was home in time for First Thursday as l thought the people there would be interested in her project.
Julliet uses email a lot, but other uses of the Internet tend to be our of her comfort zone. I suggested that if we went to the First Thursday meeting space while we were on the phone I could "show her around" at leisure. Her induction included learning what kind of information we put where. She hadn't used a chat box before so I got her to practice. I kept challenging her to type some of the things that was telling me on the phone.
An idea
Jullliet got into the swing of typing to me instead of talking, and I suddenly had a idea. Why not cut and paste all our chat, put it in a new space and then edit it down. That could be the starting point for her blog. We don't know how it will work out yet, but Julliet's made a start at editing it and it looks as if this could suit Julliet's style. It's certainly the best approach we've hit on so far, and I'm looking forward to discovering how our chat will shape up as a blog post, and if it will be the start of a series.
More bloggers to follow?
The Dadamac.net webspace isn't a traditional web-site. It's an experiment and a work-in- progress. I hope that the structures Nikki FIshman, Andy Broomfield and I have been developing here to raise John's visibility will also prove useful to others. Please contact me if you want to explore that idea further.
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