Ada Lovelace Day – Sarah Stewart

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, and I pledged a number of months ago to write a post about an unsung heroine in technology that I admire.

My unsung heroine is @SarahStewart or as non-geeky people might call her, Sarah Stewart.

I had been planning a bit of time to write this, and yet again I find myself at the end of the day trying to corral my thoughts into something coherent.

Sarah Stewart is absolutely awesome. I have so much admiration for this woman who until the last few months, I didn’t even know existed!

Connecting through our Personal Learning Network (PLN)

I “met” Sarah via my Twitter PLN (of course) and found her right from the start to be friendly, curious, articulate, engaging in her communication style and open and willing to share and discuss on Twitter, flickr and so forth.

Connecting with Western Australian Peers

Knowing that Sarah was a Midwife and doing some amazing things with e-Learning, students and midwifery professional practice using technology, I invited her to participate from the other side of the country in a staff development day with our School of Nursing, Midwifery & Post-Graduate Medicine at ECU (named in honour of another kick arse awesome woman before her time).

She didn’t bat an eyelid and was excited to contribute.  As a part of our planning we did some time online with Skype and Mindmeister……and what a depth of experience and innovation did I find!

Our Academic staff were engaged and asked a multitude of questions. Sarah was a total trooper as we had to turn off the video feed from Skype and she really was flying blind that day.

From A to G……and not even close to Z as yet

To give you some idea, here is a quick and dirty run down of her “tech journey” in the last decade or so (hopefully its in chronological order from my notes)

1. Career started as a nurse and then moved into midwifery
2. 
3. Moved to New Zealand with family from England mid – late 90′. When I say New Zealand, I mean remote, rural, low infrastructure of any kind, New Zealand.
4. Communicated with “home” via email and developed midwifery professional practice “LISTSERV’s”  to keep in touch with contemporary practice (it was all very cutting edge then!)
5. This community of practice created a sense of feeling much less isolated from the world and her profession in a remote area.
6. In 1999, she moved to being an educator and a university. In Sarah’s words

“I always had a passion to teach and share the benefits of experience and knowledge with young women”.

• This shift led the the completion of her Masters on midwives connecting and supporting each other through the Internet.
• These concepts were integrated into her teaching practice and she introduced the concept of networking and reflective practice to her students. Given this was the “turn of the Century” (still feels odd saying that) it was quite revolutionary practice looking back.
• She put several courses online and particularly worked with e-Learning in post-graduate programs.
• In 2007 Sarah met Leigh Blackall and discovered a world she had been seeking and trying to articulate for some considerable while.  The world of connectivism, community and collaboration.   A networked world.  Words / expressions used to describe her world include: sharing, collaboration for the greater good, non-possessiveness, e-volunteer.
• The e-volunteer concept is one in the last few years that Sarah has exemplified.  She has supported Japanese midwives with professional practice from NZ (and they in Japan); developed and run free mid-wifery session online in the middle east (including Pakistan and Afghanistan) and had such a profound impact that she was asked to work on location in this part of the world in auditing of curriculum.

…and now?

Sarah now finds herself in Brisbane, Queensland Australia working on an e-Mentoring project as her latest challenge. Her blog is an endless, continual resource of self-reflection, reflection on her industry and the professional development.  Her fingers are still in a variety of virtual pies, one of which includes building a “virtual birthing unit” in Second Life (which kind of makes even my head pop!)

I must say, she also puts herself out there with her professional e-portfolio open for the world to see. She has cast some doubt on herself with this of late, but fundamentally I believe it is a revolutionary practice and in 10 years we will look back and see her as a pioneer and wonder what all the fuss was about.

Reflections

What an amazing woman – to reach out from the other side of the planet and positively affect peoples lives so profoundly with something as simple as a computer and a keyboard.

I continually feel inspired by Sarah, even though I am in a different (albeit learning in the end) industry sector.

Inspired to continually challenge the boundaries of the accepted “norm” and striving to make a difference in the world around me and those whose paths I cross.

Thank you Sarah

Footnote: I feel I have left so much of Sarah out and her achievements as an unsung hero. Visit her blog and see just how bloody awesome she is yourself!

All images blatantly flogged from Sarah’s flickr site – silly girl put them out there! MUWHAHAHAHHA

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Have you ever taken a walk on the wildside?

For some reason I always seem to get some perverse thrill out of presenting to audiences where the pear-shaped potential quotient is extremely high.

I haven’t done one in a number of years, and on Tuesday this week I gave a 1 hour PD session to our School of Nursing, Midwifery and Post-Graduate Medicine.

I had been asked to talk about “innovative” new technologies and of course the obvious out there at the moment was the old Web 2.0 stuff.

Getting the credibility

In order to get the “cred” I invited Sarah Stewart to guest facilitate with me. Sarah has a background of being a health practitioner in nursing and midwife along with working as an educator and researcher in higher education (in New Zealand).

The pitch relevance

The angle we took was about lifelong learning, extending professional networks through “non-traditional” means, and use these networks to create connections and relationships there by staying on the cutting edge of industry practice.

Source: Lynetter

The method

Given Sarah was now in Queensland (a smaller time lag than NZ thankfully), we went with plan C (plans A and B came a cropper at point of testing – Elluminate and Ustream – for one reason or another), Skype by video.

Note: you can NEVER NEVER test too much with this kind of presentation prior to the event

The development

Sarah and I both used Mindmeister, a free collaborative online mapping tool to plan this session. It can be used both synchronously and asynchronously to develop a data set / picture.

You may need to open this image further to see the complexity of the planning. Mindmeister allowed us to make notes and also add links out to sites we thought may be of value to the audience during the presentation.  It was invaluable in getting a sense of where we were going to go with this presentation and what we might possibly cover.

The testing and planning

Having been caught short at venues before – ie turning up and having tech failure / internet failure etc, I made it a mission to visit the Perth Entertainment Centre a week before to trial the connection, speed, bandwidth etc etc and work out what was and wasn’t going to work.

Glad I did. Elluminate bombed out. I have NEVER seen such issues with Elluminate ANYWHERE on ANY connection as I did there. We just could not get through the file wall with it (but could with everything else – go figure).  IT came down and spent 90 minutes with me testing. They even took me off the conference network where clients pay, and put me on the staff network with still no joy. Finally they (not a clue how they did this) made my OWN network with still no love. We tried every config setting in Elluminate and the lappy but nadda. Interestingly I STILL say it was them. How can you NOT  have port numbers to open up when it was so obviously looking for open ports /sigh….bygones…

What I insisted on for the day was cat 5 cabling. I knew I was going to be loading up the connection and wanted to ensure real stability (been there caught with that previously).  I was promised such, and happily I thought it was going to be smooth(ish) sailing.

Presentation day [Pre-delivery]

….the good…..

I arrived 2 hours early. Yes…..paranoia of technical failure is a big motivator.

It took nearly half an hour to get the IT guy to come get me sorted (we had arranged a pre-time for setup outside of the room). I was set up on a bar (unfortunately empty), but that wasn’t an issue.

Everything ran like a dream – connections, opened all my tabs on browser, the presentation was working fantastic – I could hear and see Sarah.

Unfortunately I hadn’t used the wireless headset in a while and had forgotten to load the drivers. Never mind I had a back up plug in one.

….the bad…..

The room broke at 10 am for morning tea. I had a 30 min window to unplug the computer, move to the room, plug it in and pop the ethernet cable in for my “stable” connectivity.

It appears IT hadn’t patched through the cat 5 cable to the port.  At 10.27 am (3 mins before kickoff), there was a room full of people, sweat pouring off my brow; me hovering anxiously to the IT dude (who wasn’t looking happy either); I hadn’t connected to Sarah in the room;

I was still wanting the wireless headset, but was now doomed to be confined to the laptop on the podium, but, we go there at 10.35 – only 5 minutes late.

….the best laid plans of mice and men hey?

The delivery

Well, I think it went ok – all things considered – here is a summary of my reflections.

a) they could at least hear Sarah clearly (we canned video early in – bandwidth obviously created issues)

b) it generated a lot of questions and internal group discussion around wellness, network support of wellness, educational value, organisational restrictions and limitations on technology, use & issues as a health practitioner, networking

c) there were still groups of conversations going when I left (always a good thing in my opinion)

d) Sarah was amazing. She is articulate, funny, intelligent, keen mind and the perfect person for this audience with her experience and industry background

e) I would have liked more time to look at some of the tools out there (waylaid by questioning – but that’s a good thing)

f) To me most of the room was engaged with session (although this might not be the case)

g) I need to get that damn wireless headset driver sorted – its caught me out before. I like to work the room and walk miles in a presentation – being stuck at a podium kinda sucked

h) the network issue from 10 am – 10.35 am pretty much had my brain frying and running out my ears. Although I planned for every single contingency I could – having 100% of an presentation running via an “unknown” connection is kind of scary (and a rush….and scary again). I did feel rattled at the beginning and had major dry mouth – weird, because public speaking doesn’t worry me – i think it was the tech probs that rattled me

The outcomes?

Well, not sure really. I feel that as long as we opened the minds and exposed people to new thoughts and new ideas / ways of working then it can only be a positive outcome.

It will be interesting to see if we get anyone from this particular School participate in our 23 Things @ ECU: Learning 2.0 program later in the semester

Source: Lynetter

…and Sarah?

Sarah has reflected on the experience from her perspective if you would like to read it!

Thank you Sarah