As I continue experimenting with changes to this blog, I see that I first posted on May 30th 2007 - "For Starters". At lunch-time that day I was attended a meeting of OFFER (Sheffield's voluntary sector network) on the subject of child Poverty. There is no link to OFFER here as it ceased to exist through lack of funding from April this year. Things change.
I wrote in that post that the new blog was to be a fresh start in sharing news with "Paces' People first and our many friends too. So you can keep up with what's going on". If you read that sentence again, you will notice how old-fashioned it seems as a way to use the internet, in a world of Facebook, Twitter and a host of other social networking applications. No longer is the internet just another tool for "telling" people what some-one thinks it is good for them to know.
Since then, as well as Facebook and Twitter, I have experimented with many new tools, learning (albeit slowly), such as Ning to set up discussion forums, Mindmeister for visually mapping strategy, Wikispaces for collaboratively writing & collecting documents, Netvibes for aggregating blogs about CE ; all the while trying to find out how these new tools could engage more people with Paces and with conductive education. (I was truly honoured that an idea of mine was taken up by the organising Committee of the 7th World Congress).
One consequence of course was that all these experiments happened in different places, with no real links or easy inter-connectivity. I still do not yet know how to resolve that but recently I have been asked twice how we know that there is a demand for Paces' services among parents of children with cerebral palsy. (An easy, but not entirely whimsical response, is to ask how many people knew they wanted an iPhone before Apple invented it. I had an iPad in my hands yesterday for the first time. The day before yesterday I had no desire for one. Now I want one!) Whimsy aside, it's a solidly good question.
I also had put to me a thought which became the subject of a post: "What does Paces need to be like for parents to invite us in to their lives?" and this led on to pondering what Paces' internet presence should be like if it were built on the basis of that thought.
It's much too early to know that answer yet, but the thought has led me to explore first what I might do with this blog. In short, I am where I began in 2007 - trying to "make a fresh start".
Also, it's much too early to know the full consequences and benefits to Paces and CE in the UK of our "Proposal" to DfE to be invited to submit an application for Free School ("Academy") status. However, tomorrow we have a meeting of Trustees, Governors and staff with Tom Legge of the Place Group which supports schools seeking to become Academies. I will come back to this in a later post.
Things change. And we must - between us - constantly think it all afresh.