Monday 14 July 2014

Day 1 #BYOD4L Connecting by @suebecks


For the last few days I have been in Brighton. I travelled down for the European Conference for Social Media hosted by the University of Brighton. It was an excellent event and together with my colleagues Dr Alison Purvis and Helen 
Rodger provided an opportunity to present our research on social media as a poster and short paper. More about this later.

Having travelled down from Sheffield to Brighton, I decided to make it a long weekend and visit friends. Blue sky and sunshine was plentiful. It is a beautiful part of the country and I recommend you visit! Alas all good things have to come to an end and a long journey ahead did not fill me with joy. However a potential 5 hours travelling could be utilised to catch up with emails, engage with the various social media channels where #BYOD4L conversations were already developing. 

Today's BYOD4L theme is connecting. I was eager to start making new connections and indeed I did. In between I liaised with Chrissi Nerantzi as we went through our check list for the course using Twitter DMs. This is a process we adopted from the start as we set out to design BYOD4L and collaborative on research. Having my mobile phone handy at all times has meant we can share ideas on the go. We have introduced each other to new connections and individually grown our personal networks. 

Back to my journey home... What I didn't account for:

Connections: once through the M25 car park I started to lose my 4G signal. Without this I could not do what I wanted online
Travel: monitoring a small screen in a car for a prolonged period made me travel sick
Roads: how bad they are 'up North' as in bumpy making it hard to type on a touch screen
Blogging: I could write my draft post via the Blogger app and send when my connection came back! 

I had intended doing a reflective video but will save that for another time. 

I'm very much looking forward to tonight's Tweet Chat - Follow #BYOD4Lchat - and connecting with new friends to learn together more about we can use our devices for learning. 

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