It’s raining….again….the Northern Rivers area of New South Wales has had an unusual second half Spring season with cooler temperatures and lots of rain. Good for our water-thirsty garden – but not so good for my ambition to walk on the beach this morning.

Oh well….back to the blog, and my musings, which have been much neglected. Since the last PhD post on October 17 I have been to China and back and taken a weeks ‘holiday’ to mark my husband’s retirement. Yes, after 46 years in K-12 education, my ever-ready spouse has decided it is enough (and I agree!) and has officially retired. So….you can picture the scenario…I work from home, and he is now retired….we are working it out as we go.

My China trip was exhausting (maybe I am getting too old for this? no!). As a Learning2 Leader at the L2Asia conference I ran 2 workshops and prepared a short talk – the talk took me a long time to get ready – and it wasn’t on the ‘surviving your PhD’ topic I suggested in my last blog post. I went for my other passion…..which is of course PhD related –  ‘Global Collaboration – Learning on the Edge’ sharing examples of global collaborative learning and reasons as to why this should be a vital part of education at all levels of K-12.

Next week I am heading to Toowoomba (University of Southern Queensland, and where I am a PhD student) to the ASCILITE Conference (Australian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education). So excited and nervous to be co-presenting an academic paper based on my PhD research. This is a VERY big step for me. Despite years of presenting and leading and keynoting conferences with a totally or predominantly K-12 focus, I am quite nervous about this one because it is in the Higher Education area. I did present my developing research at the ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) conference in 2016 at a round table format – and that challenged my skills to speak about my research. Now, at ASCILITE it is a formal (albeit short – 30 minutes) session where we plan to succinctly share the following:

• What is online global collaboration and why is it important?
• Online global collaboration – affordances and inhibitors
• Teacher education – implications

The co-author of the 10-page paper accepted by ASCILITE is one of my PhD supervisors, Dr Petrea Redmond. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Southern Queensland with a focus on educational technology – and a real dynamo!

Meanwhile my PhD has taken a back step with everything else that is going on – but I do have a supervisor’s meeting in Toowoomba next week so better get moving on some work before then.

Listening to soft rain punctuated by shrill calls from the pair of Eastern Whip Birds that have taken up residence in our garden recently. I think they might be nesting. That link has an audio recording showing the male call with the female ‘choo-choo’ response. This video is a polished artefact sharing mainly the male call.

Back to the real world…..see you next Tuesday, or one not long after that!

Julie Lindsay
PhD student……surviving in the wild.