Yesterday I took part in a marathon Mirandanet event on blogging which was fascinating and a welcome break from some very intense writing and constant BSF meetings with local authority teams I’ve been doing recently. There were a number of experienced educational bloggers round the physical table at the Institute of Education in Bedford Way, and a number of visitors joined the table remotely as the afternoon moved into the evening. I learned a lot, especially from Microsoft’s Ray Fleming, who had some great material on blogging guidelines from organizations as diverse as the civil service and the US airforce.

One significant thing struck me as the discussions shifted focus, and that was how the fundamental structure of a blog, a diary, lends itself to so many useful educational purposes, not least the much sought after e-portfolio. Does anyone really need anything other than a standard blog to create a meaningful and useful e-portfolio for any secondary school pupil? I doubt it.

There was also a hilarious moment during a discussion about manners and technology use in educational contexts, when Tina Preston’s laptop misbehaved allowing a video narrative to heckle one of the speakers. So I would tentatively offer the educational community a new word, to techle. Definition: the inadvertent interruption of a speaker by misbehaving technology.

In The Stuff of Thought Stephen Pinker has an amusing section on coinage and how the way new words get adopted doesn’t seem to follow any logic or value they might have, so I won’t hold my breath to hear techle crop up in someone else’s conversation. Pinker cites the wonderful furbling for example, definition: having to wander through a maze of ropes at an airport or bank even when you’re the only person in the line. Or given my predilection for Milton, my favourite, Beelzebug, definition: Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out. Neither word having any currency whatsoever, brilliant though they are.