Looking for a wider network

I’ve been thinking today, in between lots of other bits of work, about the need to widen my network. I want to start to link up with other bloggers working in Further Education, particularly in the UK. Most of the people I already read are classroom teachers or edubloggers whose main concerns are the teaching of children. I won’t stop reading them of course but I’d like to find some new contacts who are working with adults. Trouble is I’m a bit baffled as to how to do it.

My network of people I read and sometimes interact more directly with grew up dynamically over the last 3 or 4 years. I must have gone looking for people at the start but mostly I just found them from other people’s blogrolls. It’s the same with Twitter. I just added people I saw other people following who looked interesting.

So where to start? Technorati seems like an obvious place. They’ve got a search button and they use lots of tagging. But what to search for? I tried “informal learning uk” as a starting point - I’m not too hopeful, might just link here lol!

Ah - well there’s Ewan of course And quite a few KM (Knowledge Management) bloggers but nothing obviously relevant.

So I tried GNVQ - none

Erm - Further Education UK?

• eew an Official Microsoft blog which hasn’t updated for 88 days. I suppose I ought to subscribe, I do have to use windoze at work
• Going through the Phases might be interesting, not a tutor though. More ICT stuff probably isn’t what I need. Might be fun though.
• EducationState - Promises:

  An alternative and critical view of UK education news, policy and issues and a fly-on-the-wall insight into the day-to-day running of educational institutions.

  But it has a baffling theme, still I won’t notice that in my rss reader and the posts look controversial & interesting I’m starting to feel better!

• AoC NILTA Aha - Josie Fraser, she’s usually worth reading Oh, Josie is listed as one of the authors in Technorati but she doesn’t appear on the “Who we are” page. The writing looks a bit dull but I’ll put it in my ‘on probation’ folder & subscribe anyway.

Everything else is either dead or totally corporate Where am I going to find ordinary FE tutors who love blogging and want to use Web2.0 with their students to read?

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