__ LIPS – Leading in Public Schools

I’ve been fascinated by Twitter in the last few weeks.  You know, the micro-blogging platform which allows anybody who wants to to post up to 140 characters in response to the universal question: “What are you doing now?”

Very quickly, as a person largely uninterested in celebrities, the interest value in somebody ‘tweeting’ about the nice coffee they just enjoyed has waned.  What has risen, however, is an apprecation of the ways in which Twitter can connect people with similiar interests and connect places and events, enabling collaboration and creation of new knowledge and understandings.

I was able to tell a conference the other day about a Twitter interaction with an academic at Charles Sturt about research on the value of Video Conferencing for students in rural and remote locations.  In the same few days it was possible to be directly connected to the Laptops for Learning forum being held in Sydney and the Microsoft Innovative Schools’ Conference being held on the Gold Coast, and to exchange messages and ideas with people who had been part of Education au’s strategic think tank in Sydney last weekend.

And, along the way it’s beein possible to make positive links with members of the Hunter business community with the potential fo synergies which will assist our schools and communities.

Seeing the ability of Twitter to contribute to student learning has also been a highlight.

Last night, late, one of the people I am following asked for input for his history class in Western Australia who are studying the Vietnam War and were seeking commentary from people who could recall the tine of the Vietnam war.

I was only a primary school child at the time, but it was interesting to reflect and offer the following.  Through Twitter we have been all able to connect and collaborate to create greater knowledge and shared understanding:  and that is a good thing.

Here are my memories from the Vietnam war period.  If you have others, click the Comment button and add yours.  I can pass them on to a group of students who are helping us to all see the positive uses for tools like this.

Hi to Mr Lasic’s class !!

The online form didn’t really fit what I wanted to say, so ..here it is.

Some memories from the time of the Vietnam war

I was a kid at a one teacher school in Northern NSW in the early sixties as we went ‘All the Way with LBJ’  Children of small mixed farmers, on lands of drought and flooding rains, and varying degrees of love for this sunburnt country on the rim of Dorothea’s time in Gunnedah.

One of the boys of a local farm family was a real character, often appearing shoeless, bright Hawaiian shirt and smile hanging loosely from a personality which was as expansive as the plains just to the west of us.  As was the custom in small rural communities, we all celebrated landmark birthdays.  I can’t recall whether we’d had Phil’s 21^st.

Phil went away to Vietnam: as every young guy did.  How could this generation of young men shirk the same sense of duty as shown by their fathers and grandfathers?  Flowers in the spouts of guns may have been nice to imagine as the heralds of a new beginning, but the reality was a headlong rush to muster to the same clarion calls which had brought the men marching from the mid west to join up: ‘for King and country.’

Phil came home with no sight and no ability to walk.

A number of years ago his Vietnam legacy claimed his life.

All of us, farmers kids, spread to other places.  All of us would have reflected on the need for that loosely hanging smile to fall, collapsing at our feet.

To what extent has Australia’s development since Federation been periodically handicapped by losses to other causes?  Imagine if we had seen, instead, the sustained and innovative growth of a young nation?