know of any good conferences coming up?

Hello people
I'm sending this email to a select few people whose opinion I trust.

First up, if you didn't already know, I've finally been given permanency in TAFE. Technically this means I'm in my first year of employment, so I can't accept any secondments to other interesting stuff until 2010, but I'll stik around here for now.

Perhaps by way of consolation prize, I was recently told I've won the TAFE Western Institute's Jonathon Pratt Memorial scholarship, which gives me a few hundred dollar towards the staff development opportunity of my choice in the next 12 months. Most people in the past have taken this to mean 'going to a conference', but it sounds like 'staff development opportunity' hasn't been defined that closely. It's only given to one person each year, and it's only been going a few years.

The reasons I am telling you this are:
1. to show off (did I mention that it's only given to one person each year?)
2. because I have no idea of what is worth going to. Since I've been in Dubbo and not offering direct services, I'm not looking out for opportunities like this, so would really like it if you could tell me of any you think are good value, or are seriously worth avoiding. It seems like anything welfare related or teaching related would fit the criteria. TAFE's on a bit of a greeny kick at the moment, so anything environmentalish could also work if it looks interesting.

If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them.

   oh, and while I'm asking favours- I'm also organising a welfare workers conference in Dubbo in November, so if you know of any worthwhile speakers, let me know.

People can read my stuff. How reassuring.

I've just tested some of my work against an on line program called Writing Tester, at http://www.writingtester.com/. It tells me that my work could be read and understood by a US seventh grader, which is about the level I was aiming for.
Apparently there's an established Readable Score & Grade Level formulae, used for working out how readable text is, by counting the length and type of words and sentences that are used. Ideally, of course, I could (and do) use real live humans to read what I have written, but the software versions can give a quick 'heads up' when the writing deteriorates into technobabble.
The struggle is always to find a way of using simple words and language to explain complex terms. How do you simplify legal requirements to a point where they are understandable to most of the population, while still keeping it accurate and complete enough to explain the concept in full? I think this is why, without having thought about it too much, I have enjoyed using stories with morals and simple analogies as teaching tools in the past. I'd love to, but haven't the time for, converting some of my lessons to comic book form, but perhaps that could be a direction to explore in future.

Trip to Nyngan

Another roadtrip to introduce people to the (draft) toolkit this week- this time to Nyngan. I'm not sure if I was imagining it, but people seemed to be cautious in their elation at the rain that fell while I was there. There is still a drought, but most residents remember the floods of 1990 as well.
Going by the feedback, people found it to be something they will use, as well as finding it to be something they could navigate their way around and find what they needed.
Sadly, there were also a couple of technical glitches. It seems every time I try the CD on a new computer, there is something different that affects the way it opens. I thought I'd covered all bases by testing it on macs as well as Windows 98, XP and Vista. Files were opened in Office 2000, 2003 and 2007. Still, they behaved differently on these machines, because the default settings within these applications were also different. Some open Powerpoints as slideshows (the way I'd like them to), while others open them for editing (which I most definately didn't want them to do).
The solution, I found, was to insert images of navigation buttons ('next slide' and 'previous slide') with hyperlinks to the relevant slides, and then save the whole thing as a pdf file. OpenOffice handled the conversion brilliantly- kept the hyperlinks in place so the whole thing worked, and made it easy for me to tell it to make the pdf a certain size and to behave a certain way. (I like the way this is a setting within the file itself, rather than on the user's computer, so I knew how it would behave on all computers.) Of all the free pdf converters I tried, OpenOffice was the only one that kept the internal hyperlinks by default. Maybe Powerpoint 2007 could do this as well, but it wouldn't do it for me without a whole lot of mucking around, which I could do without.

Here's a look at (sort of) what it looks like- the navigation buttons don't function in this example, but the do give some idea of how it looks.

Induction Slideshow Privacy And Confidentiality

View more Microsoft Word documents from locustplague.

trip to Goodooga

Took a trip to Goodooga to test out the Youth Services Toolkit on behalf of the various NSW departments that asked me to write it. It was a long drive and, as expected, I learnt a whole lot more than I taught. Students at Brewarrina and Goodooga all seemed to get a lot from what I had to offer. That said, there were a few glitches that meant that my time was only effective for about a third of the time I was out there. While I have learnt to expect this, it is still frustrating to drive all that way to have people not show up. Those that I did meet, though, amazed me with their passion for their communities and their eagerness to learn.

(This is my first attempt at blogging via mail2blogger. If I've got it right, there will be a photo somewhere around this entry.)

Allligator lizard

Just completed this drawing of a Thai goanna. couple of years since I was there, but still. Normally, I'd never chase up an animal on the web just so I could include it in my travel diary, but this guy was different. I'd see him some days, foraging around the pond near my room, swimming unlike any lizard I'd ever seen before. I watched him for ages, gracefully swinging his whole body, about 1.2 metres long. He was gliding through the water with his arms and legs by his side. Not like the frantic paddling of the water dragons at home. On days when I sat there with a camera, waiting, he'd keep away. Still, sitting by a pond, hunting dragons was a peaceful way to finish the working day, which was otherwise occupied with post tsunami messiness. Way too great an image not to be recorded in the diary.

Flight of a pelican v2

... so now I know that gifs aren't animated in blogger... these are alternative, static versions, which I kinda like for the way they catch the movement in different ways. The top version taught me a lot- made it by accident, while making the animation. The second is how it appears on my wall- a true life photo of the original pastel. I'm still playing with the best way to get the feeling of movement in place.

Flight of a pelican

Another drawing, of sorts... an animated gif of a photo of a pastel is still classed as a drawing, right?
I love pelicans. Love to watch them fly. Cumbersome bodies which if you looked at them objectively, you'd you say 'no way, that thing can't fly', then they spread their wings and are a graceful as anything you can imagine. Ideally, this image would capture their flight- the way they soar across the water, powered only by momentum and maybe catching the thermals closest to the water's surface, hundreds of metres with barely a twitch of a feather. Cool. I'll try again one day.