I took about an hour this morning to set up a new Classroom Displays Blog Bookstore and I’m very pleased and impressed with the results. I’ve had a link with Amazon on the blog’s books page for a while now and I have sold some books through it. The new store is a much more sophisticated matter and I think works really well. Finding good display books can be really tricky and the bookstore should make it easier for people.
It was easy to add a few key words which brought up some really good books about displays. I then added another couple of categories one about teaching in primary and the other for children’s picture books. The site was easily customised to fit in with the blog. All those lovely books… mmm. It’s quite inspiring but I have far too many already!!

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Here’s my take as an ex-quilter on my experience of the way Winter’s concept of patchwork text was used in my degree.
Quilting and patchwork are two different and sometimes separate processes.
To peice a quilt (ie to make a patchwork of different fabrics, all of which must be the same weight) is the first part of the making up. This is usually done by making ‘blocks’ of pieced fabric.

A traditional and simple form would be a nine patch quilt block where 9 small squares are made up to form a pattern. Each square may be formed of 2 or more triangles or other shapes.
A nine patch block of JellyArt looks more complex but is in fact made up of 9 squares arranged 3×3

When many of these squares are used together to make a jellyquilt:

a very complex pattern can emerge. In this more complex pattern the original 9 patch blocks are hard to identify and other underlying patterns take over. Could it be that the double loop is revealing itself?
Sometimes the blocks remain as single patterns and that can be because of the choices made in piecing the quilt:

Here the blocks have been kept discreet by deliberately framing them. This is still a 9 patch quilt block but here the focus is on the original pattern with no deeper connections forged. Here the grid was clearly seen from the start and the outcome at once visable. It’s a pleasing design but there are no surprises.
For me the degree has been more like the first pattern and in many ways more like the Victoian ‘crazy quilts’ where blocks of differnt shapes and weights were pieced to make a pleasing (although often not very servicable!) whole. My blocks have been very varied and I’ve often struggled to piece a pleasing pattern from them

Each block is first peiced then the blocks are joined to make the patchwork . Here I can see a clear metaphor and one I’ve been banging on about ever since I first read Winter in Year 1. The blocks are for me the modules each pieced together to fit the 9 patch square, the overall degree the way the blocks are peiced together to make the quilt.
Sometimes I felt as if the module strucutre demanded that I disgard the pieced block (the learning activities, mixed media pieces etc) and weave a whole new fabric based on shadows of what I’d learned (reflections) through assembling the block (a 4 or 6 thousand word report).
I fought and struggled to make my quilt, to piece it together but like many begining quilters I found some of my blocks were distorted and edges hard to align. Eventually I managed to pull it into shape. The best blocks are in the middle of the quilt (year 2) the more distorted ones at the edges (year 1 and 3). There are patterns that have connected up right across the quilt and this is what has pulled it together into a whole quilt.
The concept of the stitching of the modules has been sugested as the quilting but that makes no sense to me. The final joining together of the three layers and the actual ‘quilt stitching’ is a process that takes place at the very end of the quilt making. It can as simple as using a darning thread and needle to make a tied quilt or as complex as a repeated feather pattern or a celtic knot. It needs to be worked on a quilt attached to a tight frame or the whole quilt will distort and be ruined. Traditionally a group would come together to do the fine stitching at the end of the quiltmaking process and over a few concentrated days what was a solitary achievement (the piecing) would become a group effort dedicated to finishing the work for that individual. I suppose there’s an echo here with the peer-review process. Maybe the people I worked with in the learning set (beehive) acted to help me tie my quilt loosely together. I tend to prefer simply tied quilts to fussy ones with over-embelished surfaces Right at the start I asked my LF (Tim) if I could do my degree in Jellyquilts. It seems I did!

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I was catching up with my Edubloggers RSS feeds today when I came across this. It seems that Dave Cormier from Edtechtalk was reflecting on the business of edublogging/podcasting/on-line learning/learning 2.0, wondering if it could be described as a field or not and had a look at the Wikipedia entry for Stephen Downes

Dave’s Educational Blog » The Edubloggypodlearnonlinosphere - Are we a ‘field’ and if so…
I was looking for an appropriate category for an entry on another valued member of our community and failed to find a point of reference for it. Will Richardson, who thousands of people a year come out to listen to speak, is not there. I came across Stephen Downes’ entry and was shocked to discover this

* “The subject of this article seems to fail Wikipedia’s consensually-accepted criteria for inclusion of biographies. If you are familiar with the subject, please expand the article to establish its notability, citing reliable sources, so as to avoid it being considered for deletion. If notability cannot be established, the article is more likely to be considered for deletion, as per Wikipedia:Guide to deletion. If this article has no assertion of importance, then it may be speedy deleted under criterion A7 (unremarkable people). :

If we think that we have a field at all, then, agree or disagree with Mr. Downes, he is certainly “a widely recognized contribution that is part of the enduring historical record in their specific field.” That is… if we are a field.

So is Downes noteable? To me he seems a hugely important figure in the world of Edu blogging and it seems bizarre that soap stars and reality TV ’stars’ have pages whilst his might be marked as possible for ’speedy deletion’.
Dave also points to the pages on e-learning and on-line learning. (Dave’s post is only a few days old but these two pages have now been merged.) He ends his post :

lI have a strange feeling that the wiki-ers are not going to like me re-writing the entire field, so here is my call out to my peers. Support our Peeps. Go to wikipedia today and lets start getting the word out - outside our community.

Hmm, given that the Wikipedians are now considering if the pages on on-line training and web-based training should be merged into that page as well, Dave might have a point!
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