Vegan one year on - successes and lessons learnt.

Last March I started a six week experiment to see if going vegan would improve my rapidly deteriorating fingernails.  The fact that I'm vegan one year on is testimony to the fact it did work.  In the process I uncovered a dairy allergy. Gee its great to have a full sense of smell now I haven't got blocked sinuses. A December visit to the optometrist left both me and the optometrist surprised as my vision had improved and he wanted to know what I had done - the only think I could think of was the change in diet.

What I've learnt along the way.
While I had supreme health for nine months a bout of stress just before year's end and too much summer fruit made my chronic problem with candida flare up.  It didn't seem to want to respond to my normal strategies so I consulted my general practitioner who referred me on for advice.  It turned out too much fruit (including goji berries), sweeteners such as agave syrup and too much spice in the curries I'd been having had unbalanced my system and surprisingly olive oil and chamomile turned out to be a problem for me as well.

This lead to a serious rethink on the recipe front. My beloved sprouts are still a big part of my diet.  Especially mung beans, broccoli, alfalfa, germinated brown rice and quinoa. As I needed probiotics to rebalance the system  I've come up with a barley sprout powder, probiotic powder and fibre (inulin) drink that I have twice a day and as I rather like the drink its a bright part of the day.  Green leafy vegetables are another big part of the diet, especially for the work's lunch box and I'm worried about the increased pesticide intake. I did a first aid course once with a lady who worked on one of those farms that grows greens for supermarkets and she told me about all the chemicals they use.  As the local organic shops don't keep a big range of greens I've been busy expanding the current veggie patch and my partner is going to build me a bigger purpose made area attached to the house - to grow things like margoram, oregano, sorrel, rocket, perilla, chicories and japanese parsley - so I can just walk out the kitchen door and pick what I want.  Now root vegetables, not being fruit, have attracted my renewed interest of late.  I highly recommend getting a julienne peeler - these allow you to thinly shred root vegetables - great for quick stir fries or eating raw and much easier to clean than graters, especiallly if your only preparing food for yourself.  Parsnips, turnips, swedes and radishes all get chucked into my meals.  At the moment I go easy on the the carrots, beets and sweet potatoes due to their high sugar content . While tomatoes and cucumbers are technically fruit they seem to be ok so I'm having a few.  I've replaced my favourite spicy tofu with plain organic. For nuts my favourites are macadamia's, walnuts and hazelnuts but I use quite a few other nuts and seeds as well, especially as added texture and flavour in salads. For drinks I'm sticking to white tea (a type of green tea), nettle tea and our gorgeous water that comes straight out of the ground in the hills above our property. While some say you don't need to, and my blood levels are good, I'm nonetheless choosing to supplement with B12, kelp, organic derived iron and vitamin D. I'm also having bitters before meals and trying to incorporate a few bitter greens in my meals.  This is just what seems to suit me and wouldn't necessarily work for everyone - although it should me noted that on the whole the western diet is too sweet and doesn't incorporate all the diverse flavours you'd normally find in more asian cuisines. I was tired for a couple of weeks while I cut the sugar down but now I'm well again and feeling great.

I got a magazine on Friday with a write up of an interview with a David Wolfe and it was interesting to hear that he favours a raw diet but not too many of the very sweet fruits and said to go easy on the nuts. He likes to browse the wild foods in what ever area he's visiting.  Another useful thing he said was if you are travelling try to find where the farmers markets and organic shops are.  Cucumbers also keep quite well if you are travelling around and need something to snack on.  He recommends putting together a bit of a snack pack.

Taseday2010 - key message: Design for the Learner

Julian Ridden's key message that I connected with was "design for the learners".  Learners want engaging material.  E-learning needs to be more than a series of PDFs and a quiz.  Use videos, images and interaction to liven elearning up - not as bell and whistles but purposefully.  For example instead of converting an existing classroom quiz into a multichoice online version use some of the Moodle plugins and learning objects that are out there (on LORN or made yourself using ARED) to enrich the quiz experience.

As a trainer I like Moodle because its a great container to put all your learning material into at the same time as tracking a student's progress through it.  But as a learner I hate it because its a closed space that is separated/disconnected from the rest of my personal learning environment.  But apparently it doesn't have to be that way.  Using plugins like BIM you can allow students to link to their own blogs and there are ways to give the student some control over the look and feel - changing themes and colours.  Its a step in the right direction at least.

Other Moodle plugins that Julian mentioned were:

• Sloodle - Secondlife integration (not a fan of Second Life myself but I can see that it would have its applications)
• Lightbox - a way to provide a gallery of photos
• Certificate - which allows you to produce a unique certificate when requirements have been met
• Book - which is looking quite sophisticated in its latest form
• Mahara Assignment - which gives Mahara some capacity to be used with assignments
• as well as a number of quiz plugins and others that allow iPhone and Android integration.

A must have Moodle "block" for teachers in larger institutions is "ungraded assignments" which takes you directly to all the unmarked assignments that you are responsible for grading.

I would have liked to have heard a longer presentation from Stephen Downes as the time given only allowed a  quick skim look at the all the roles an "educator" can play these days. I hope if there is a fuller version of the presentation available in the future that it gets posted to emania.org.

Always good to hear Leigh Blackall present.  The concept of Networked Learning (as distinct from Networked Teaching) needs more time spent on it a future workshop, maybe with a forum of actual learners talking about how it has worked for them. Someone in the Networked Learning session made the good point that learners need to know how best to learn this way and the assertiveness to demand it as a delivery method .

PLENK2010: Transferring the connectivist model of a PLE to the workplace - towards a Personal Working Environment

The issues faced in helping learners to build more effective learning environments maybe is not so different to the issues faced in other areas of our lives.  For instance: are there or should there be equivalent models of learning management systems and personal learning environments in how we do our work.

Over the last decade or so we have seen the rise of the office intranet, initially as a place to share a bit of basic information about processes, the discussion forums, news, and event calendar and so on. Slowly other key systems became meshed with it and soon we could access it when we were out of the office using the same logon access we used in the office. Eventually we could access some of its features from the mobile phone browser, staying connected to the office when we were on the road or for the lucky ones; working from home.

Often Microsoft software dominates in the office, often times it is manadated and the ability to install anything else restricted as security and usage concerns rise.

For savvy users USB based portable software, cloud computing, news feeds, online social networks and access to what we want through our personal phones has given us a way to create a much richer personal working environment.

Enlightened workplaces of the future may awaken to the worth of employees that have the richer set of connections that an integrated online and off-line network brings to their work.

PLENK2010: Learning Management Systems versus Personal Learning Environments from a learner's perspective

As a learner the worth of a learning management system for me is that it is a single bucket of information about my course, essential readings, how I'm progressing, a place to upload my assignments and interact with my tutor and maybe some of my fellow students.  Possibly it also allows me to access or order materials from my learning provider's library and gives me a place to reflect and share ideas and give feedback. My personal learning environment includes the LMS but also gives me better ways to interact with others, reflect and share, source information on topics more broadly and basically tap into a much bigger network or connection both on line and with the off-line people and environment in my life.

isolating concepts

As a child I was taught to "love others as yourself" but doesn't the whole concept of "other" immediately create a mental boundary between yourself and the "other".  Maybe it should be "love ourselves as ourself".

In his 1981 book called No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth, Ken Wilber did much to explore how we can progress beyond the artificially constructed boundaries that we are taught through our education and culture to conceive.

Perhaps what we need is a transition from Us & Them thinking to Us & Ourselves thinking. We need to extend this concept of "ourself" to include our whole environment and everything in it.  When trees are no longer something that grow "outside", somewhere in the country which is "outside" the city etc would we take more care with them.  When our "enemies" are part of "ourself" do we extend compassion to them, reflect on our behaviours and try to root-out the injustices in society? While we continue to treat things, people, plants and animals as separate to ourselves will we unconsciously undermine our good intent towards "others"

just musing...

PLENK2010: There is nothing that is outside of my PLE

Having had one of my early morning ah-ha moments it came to me that there is nothing that is not part of my personal learning environment.  Whatever is my current topic of interest I will often find something relevant to my learning about it in such obscure places as romance novels, something in a tv show, a seemly unrelated comment by a friend or the ideas I am considering go into that void called my subconscious where something happens to that learning and a day or so later or 3am in the morning it will all come together - perhaps the neurons have had time to run a few programs and reconnect in different ways.

Learning starts when there is something on your mind.  I've called it in my diagram a topic or interest but it can be anything, positive or negative that requires new thinking, problem solving, new skills or just a new approach.

The most obvious place to find learning is those things that directly relate to the topic but we do not exist in isolation from everything else going on around us.

For me, I learn something quickest once I can bring it into the mainstream of my life and start making wider connections.

peer supported and networked learning

My interest in e-learning has been on the back burner since the start of the year. I think that's actually been for the best as its given me time not only to finish a Diploma in Library and Information Services that I've been doing but also I can now look at e-learning afresh.  I've been getting back into reading my favourite e-learning rss feeds as well as news about the latest technologies from Google and others. I've reinspired myself by re-reading some of the works of Ivan Illich which seem as relevant today as ever.  This time what I got out of his stuff was his emphasis on mentored and peer learning. For me this means finding people, either on-line or in person, who can help you learn what you are interested in.  Sure you can learn in isolation, to an extent, using the resources of your own brain, experiences and surroundings but when you want to take an interest to a whole new level, to go beyond old ways of doing things you need fresh stimulus and the input, encouragement, different perspectives of peers can be a way to progress your learning interest to a whole new level.

At the same time that I have been re-inspiring myself I've also been looking at the new light-weight compact digital cameras that can record HD Video in a format I can easily upload to Youtube. I have dabbled with some extremely basic videos about worm farming but I want to do more with this medium.