ME Blogger Network

Joseph Pisano, Owen Bradley and Darren Morton have a terrific blog over at Mustech.net. They write some great stuff, provide really useful and supportive information for music educators who want to get active on-line, and they also aggregate an extensive set of links, blogrolls and other music ed. resources.

More recently, they've put out a call to set up a 'Music Education Bloggers' (ME Bloggers) network. Go have a look at the info on their site under 'Join Our Campaign! 100 Music Education Bloggers (ME Bloggers) By January of 2009'. What they're asking for is as follows (and they provide help to set up, if your're new to some of this):

• You must have (or have started) a blog site and not a simple website.
  
• You must agree to post 2 or more posts per month about a topic that is interesting to you, your students, the music audience as a whole, etc. that related to music education and/or music technology in the classroom environment.
  
• You must agree to not “covet” your materials and share them with the world under a creative commons license.
  
• You must actively participate in our “global conversation” about our field by joining in the conversation with others: Agreeing to comment on two others ME Bloggers posts per month; share your blog with others by linking to the other ME Bloggers in either your blogroll or a page of ME Blogger; agreeing to answer legitimate quesions by ME Bloggers and others that post questions on your site in a timely manner.
  

Expressions of interest can be submitted on their contact page.

Post-Xmas holidays

Just back at uni from a wonderful holiday in Tasmania, surely one of the most beautiful and untouched places on earth.

(More pics at my DotMac site, if you want to see more Tasmania).

And what a promising start to 2008, what with a brand new Federal Labour government led by Kevin Rudd, the first thing I saw being the 26 January Australia Day concert held at Parliament house in Canberra. And with musicians (!) Lee Kernaghan awarded as 2008 ‘Australian of the Year', while Johnathon Welch of Choir of Hard Knocks fame was announced as Australia's Local Hero 2008. Both good guys who put a lot of time into looking after their communities – Kernighan for the bush and those badly effected by the drought and Welch for his fantastic work for the homeless.