A blog entry in the hand is worth two elephant books online, or some such proverb

It's been a busy week, but I haven't been too motivated to blog (here). I think it's probably because I'm blogged out, spending a chunk of every work day jointly-constructing numerous blog entries with Stage 1 (Years 1 and 2 at primary school) on a blog format with our current book rap: on the picture book, Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge by Mem Fox & Julie Vivas. And helping to moderate other entries. And designing wiki pages to go with them.

The quality of the students' answers has been very exciting! The blog format and the wiki pages, are working out very well, and the ability for the moderators to edit out errors in posts - never possible on a listserv - means that we can model better examples for the students.

Predicting what the next few years will bring for the so-called "Generation Web 2.0" is almost impossible. Tomorrow's school students will have such a different outlook on technology and its possibilities than their teachers, or even their older siblings. I'm guessing all homework will be completed (and marked) online, once every student is assumed to have home Internet access. Heaven help those who never get it...

This week, the Internet, Google, Wikipedia and online shopping all came in handy to help me track down an old classic Australian picture book, "Jessie the Elephant: Her Story" by WM Fleming (New Century Press, 1939), the true tale of one of Taronga Park Zoo's icons, who gave elephant rides from 1883 to 1938.

Actually, I managed to find two copies, in different online stores, on the same day. I had missed the first copy by a matter of days, I was informed, but there was a similarly priced one at another site. I shall explain later why I need it, but I'm rather excited about finding it, especially when I found a few on overseas sites for a lot more!



Sunday's magic number: 90.8 - Well, speaking of elephants, I've mastered the art of staying the same mass for a whole month. Obviously, I will be much happier to see a downward procession of numbers again, but I am going to have to change more things about my weekly routines to make that happen. If I go back to that fateful day when my mass was 104kg a few years ago, then I can grin and say, "Hey, I lost over 13 kg!" (In fact, I've now lost that amount twice in recent years, having let most of my loss creep back on in just a few months early last year.)

On the other hand, I can think back to the very first time I went on the "Fat Free Forever" diet in the mid 90s - when I started at 90.2 and got down to 75kg. Sigh. It was so much easier then.