1.)   5 Things Worth Sharing Challenge Karen Jeanette is part of my PLN. Her encouragement of my, 10 Things Worth Sharing, format meant a great deal to me. She in turn, felt that the format provided her with a blogging technique that made the whole challenge of blogging more approachable/accessible. Last week Karen posted, Five ideas worth sharing – March 10, 2015, and it is great!! I love the way she framed her presentation with a question. This is a bit of a chain reaction as my, 10 Things Worth Sharing, format originated with Austin Kleon’s newsletter.

In my initial, 10 Things Worth Sharing, point #5 (ironic that it was pt. 5) was Christian Tietze’s, The Collectors Fallacy, about the temptation/inclination to simply collect information rather than process it. So, Karen (and indirectly Christian) got me thinking about shifting my posts to, 5 Things Worth Sharing, and giving a bit more attention to processing, annotating and creating rather than primarily listing.

HERE IS MY CHALLENGE TO YOU! Why not create a one-off, or a series of, 5 Things Worth Sharing, blog posts. Let us know by using the hashtag, #5thingsworthsharing. Challenge your PLN to contribute. I will be watching #5thingsworthsharing, but if you would like to be direct, add @jmc3ualberta -or add a link in my comments section or a pingback!

2.)   METACOGKNITTING Last week I highlighted some of Stephanie Posavec’s work, Stephanie shared that, “Some people knit scarves while watching television; I, on the other hand, knit together information visualisations.” Stephanie was partly responsible for my knitting antennae being on high alert. This week, Mark Miodownik, wrote an article, 3D knitting: after more than 8,000 years a new dimension in weaving and spinning, where he talked about the importance of material links to the world of our everyday lives and contrasted the maternal comfort of home knitting with some of the advances in fabric technology.

This reminded me of a poem I wrote several years ago after reading a story about an Italian grandmother (nona) who survived an earthquake.

Knitting and Knowing  

At 98, Nona wore black,

Even in bed.

She wore a black shift

And a little black headscarf.

Her scrawny chicken legs

Poking out, like the

Branches of a faded birch tree.

She went to bed with her

Dreams and her knitting

Clicketty clack, clicketty clack

Knitting comfort and colour.

Family members came and went,

Snow fell, the ground shook

The sky fell in and still

Nona knit the colours of

The rainbow

At peace with not knowing

If the end had come

Or rescue was eminent.

At peace, knitting and not

Needing to know

Because the end was irrelevant.

Clicketty clack, clicketty clack

Knitting comfort and colour.

3.)   Microcogblogging is what I call Twitter! Twitter is the centre of my PLN universe. It is fascinating to consider, How Twitter Is Reshaping the Future of Storytelling, or to view it in light of scholarship, Twitter and the Locus of Research.

I see a parallels between tweeting and poetry. In, Internet Poempathy, I discussed the language of the Internet being associated with “overwhelming amounts of information  . . . where exposition results in getting bogged down – best to tag, find key words and phrases that can be staircases to mystery chambers. Doors unlock not with passwords to walled gardens but through hyperlinked tags and trusted allies leaving bread crumbs. Curation is a form of practicing poempathy (a word I coined), gathering strands that dangle enticingly in one’s peripheral vision. The central, focused vision is reserved for navigation but the periphery provides for depth and serendipitous associations ~ waves of convergent and divergent thinking replace directed thinking.”

@jessifer tweeted, “Like a poem, a tweet can condense what might otherwise be inexpressible into a very small space and self consciously constrained linguistic space.”

While thinking about Twitter it would be a pity to miss Tom Ewing’s post, The Elegant Awesomeness of Hashtag. Ewing awakes us the idea of hashtags being; invitations, secret doors, colliding networks, shadow communities, time machines, seeds, and yes – hard to control. Maria Popova, of Brain Pickings, fame wrote an intriguing article about Twitter as discovery  and a way of focusing digital attention. “there’s an “emerging sense of the author as moderator — someone able to marshal ‘the wisdom of the network.’””

4.)   Lignaippe ~ one of my university profs introduced me to the idea of creating a lignaippe (a little gift, a giving back, a returning the favour, a little something extra) for all the people who have shared their thoughts and ideas with me via the Internet. My 5 Thing Worth Sharing, initiative is a form of lignaippe. My first Internet lignaippe creation was to curate resources for PLN newbies at, PLN 2 Go. Building your Network for the most part means engaging, listening, being genuine, and being interested in someone else’s story, their thinking. I have collected a few more resources worth sharing including, How to Build Online Relationships into Meaningful Networks.

5.)   Natural Networks – Now for networks of a different kind. Do trees communicate? Networks, networks . . . Dr. Suzanne Simard presents interesting and compelling evidence, via an easily understood video, that mycorrhizal networks connect the roots of trees and that not only do they communicate but they share resources! It gives a whole new meaning to the term, underground network.