Interested in a different approach to education for the wee ones? Lewes New School (that my Sherry Juniors go to) use a ‘child led’ approach. There’s an article about the approach and them here.
Interested in a different approach to education for the wee ones? Lewes New School (that my Sherry Juniors go to) use a ‘child led’ approach. There’s an article about the approach and them here.
Well, it’s no suprise, is it? Anyone could tell you that we don’t know our neighbours from our ****. At least there’s confirmation of it now.
Question is, what will or can be done about it? Will it get worse? Or better?
I attended an event on reputation management with Julia Chanteray last night where apart from some great tips on how to manage our reputation we were asked to tell the group what we want people to know us for. I thought it would be an ideal opportunity for me to log where I am now and what I want to be.
I want to be known as:
This is because:
This is my statement and I hope the people around me will help make this happen. I know it cannot be done on my own.
A while back, about 18 months or so ago I wrote a blog post on Freelance Software Testing. I shouldn’t have because now every week I get a handful of impersonal and full of spelling mistake requests from so called testers asking me to hand work to them on a plate.
It is very annoying. Especially as I don’t do testing anymore.
It wouldn’t be so annoying if more than two sentences were put together without any errors in them.
So, don’t write about freelance work unless you want an endless stream of email work requests.
Amongst the tiredness, this makes me feel young again. After all, if I’m in the Future 100 Young Entreprenuers, well I must be a wee junior of some sort.
I made it as one of the top 100 Future Entreprenuers for ‘responsible businesses’. My name is on the list to prove it.
StridingOut held an event on Tuesday to celebrate the Future100 and social enterprise which I attended. Of course being Rosie, I got my video/phone out and produced the below.
Future100 from Rosie Sherry on Vimeo.
(Of course I’m sure my lovely fellow co-directors, Ian and James, would have made it too if they weren’t so old).
So apparently January 24th is the most depressing day of the year. That’ll explain why my birthdays are never any good.
My son recently started at Lewes New School where there was a request for a donation for a digital camera for some of the children to use for a school project.
I didn’t have a spare camera, but thought “I bet one of my geek friends does”. So I tweeted the request.
I got a couple of responses. Not huge responses, but enough to (soon) get hold of a camera (from the lovely Jane).
However, it got me thinking, with the amount of geeks (and normal peeps!) within Brighton (this includes companies) then there must be more geek hardware and software that just hangs around and could really put to positive use. Too good to chuck out, not worth enough to try to sell.
Whilst the likes of Freecycle is a success in its own right it isn’t the place to go to find technology goods. Not to mention the dodgy liars who often try to approach freecyclers. You might be able to get hold of something, but quite often it’s not worth the wait or hassle.
In addition to this, I’m interested in keeping it focused and making the process easy. So, for example, getting ‘cameras’ and publicising a list where only ‘primary schools’ can apply for. I definitely don’t want to get into the game of recycling computers.
Is it worth the effort? Is there an equivalent? Or should I just be quietly happy that I have my one donation from Jane?
Being part of The Werks is awesome. It’s a real chance to put some ideas that haven’t really been used in business practice before. Yes, it’s experimental. Experiments are fun!
In a nutshell Whuffie is Social Capital. Which values your reputation within a specific community or context. If you have the time, these slides explain the concept Whuffie pretty well.
So we have The Werks which is a big building in “Hove actually” for small businesses and freelancers of a creative nature. We aim to have no barriers to entry so are trying to be as open as possible about everything.
Having the space is incredibly important, but is only part of the whole mission - to support independent freelancers and small business within the ‘creative’ sector.
When it opened, every Friday was Open Coworking. Meaning anyone could turn up, use the space and wifi, get some work done and perhaps meet a few people in the process.
A couple of months in we found that people wanted to come in openly on other days, but felt they couldn’t because Friday was the designated Open Coworking day. So we opened up Open Coworking to every day, though in the process this caused confusion to what people are supposed to contribute.
So we have a set of ideas in our heads which we communicate to werkers, but as of yet have not been written down. It kind of feels like a secret club at the moment - people hear positive things about us, but are not quite sure how it works.
The following is what is in my head:
(I’m sure I’ve missed stuff off the list…help me fill in the gaps)
Whuffie is core to every werker:
Money couldn’t buy you any of the above, though we probably couldn’t survive on the above alone. That’s what Whuffie has to do with it!
I would like to think so. The Werks is a busy buzzing place at the moment and is keeping its head above water, though there is still so much to do.
The key thing is that we have a balance of paid members and projects which help support all the Whuffie stuff that is essential to help our local community grow. We wouldn’t be here without the whuffie and wouldn’t be here if it was a project funded entirely on whuffie.
Here’s a bit of whuffie love.
Those of you with kids will know that choosing any kind of care for them is difficult. Some places are really “not very good” and it often takes parents a while to realise this. I look back to when I was choosing a nursery and think that a positive/negative recommendation from anyone would have helped me through the process.
In this scenario, it’s a positive personal recommendation for Rottingdean Montessori (don’t judge a nursery by their website!) who take children from the age of 2.5. It’s a hidden li’l gem ideal for those in the Newhaven/Peacehaven/Saltdean/Rottingdean/Ovingdean/East Brighton area. Both my boys have spent a lot of time there. The teachers are lovely, dedicated and committed - over the past 2 years the two main teachers have always been there, this is so important for young children. This is reflected in how much the kids like their teachers!
The Montessori approach also maintains structure whilst still giving the children freedom to learn and express themselves at their own pace.
Check them out (if you have kids and are in the area!)
I do love Twitter, have always forgiven it in the past for being buggy and unreliable, but it seems now it’s reached a point where I say WTF?!? Why should I waste my time with this?
No seriously. I can’t use it reliably anymore. I want to communicate with people. I want to use it to update *stuff*, from IM, phone or web. I want to know that it will do what I expect it to. I could before, but not anymore.
It’s so full of bugs, that it has lost (almost) all value to me. All my confidence has been lost.
Of course the dilema is that there is value in the connections made and that’s the only thing that seems to be bringing me back to Twitter, but even that seems to be losing value as less people seem to be paying attention to it.
The natural thought would be to find something that would replace the Twitter fix. FriendFeed or Jaiku are the closest replacements I can think of. Plurk seems over complicated. Ideally we could get something that will easily export my Friends and Followers and import it into a Twitter clone, but perhaps this is an opportunity to think of other ways to communicate, go back to just blogging more regularly or perhaps to cut back on the noise entirely.
Ah, of course the funny thing is that this blog post will automatically get fed into my Twitter account.
Guess I’ll be blogging more often…