I am Nici, a new SAGovt employee, who is in her late 30’s and the mother of 6 children between the ages of 11 and 15. As a family we struggle internally with the usual round of ‘why can’t we use MSN whenever we want?…why can’t I have a laptop of my OWN in my room? and why do we need to ask you before going on the internet?’, which are issues each family has to deal with. We try to make use of the information at hand in order to formulate our own family community ‘policies’ about such things. Everyone makes their own choices and it’s great we all don’t have the same view. My comment here regarding discussions which should be happening at home, is around educating parents (who may or may not be net savvy) to the joys and potential pitfalls of the internet and the scale of decisions which need to be made about the internet at home. What it means to have a facebook page, what you can and can’t change about your FB profile to make elements public or private (as one example), that there are fantastic opportunities to connect, re-connect and learn from social media and following ‘tweets’. Parents need tools and real life examples and how to’s in order to form opinions about their own internal ‘policies’ about social media and it’s use. On the work front….I have just attended a forum in Adelaide set up by the Office of the Chief Information Officer (SAGovt)in regards opening up our ideas and work practices to embrace social networking tools…..my impressions from the forum are, that as a collective, the participants were all in violent agreement that Government and it’s agencies need to and should embrace (web2.0) technology and begin to form a view about how we could utilise and benefit from the social media space. Education about what it is to make ’smart’ decisions about personal facebook pages and tweets is vital and appropriate and perhaps (dare I say) in favour of making a ‘policy’ for something which moves and morphs at the speed of sound. I await with interest the ensuing chapters of this debate.

Mobile phones are hugely convenient, although I use mine more as a texting device and alarm clock, partly because my plan is such that it will be expensive for me to make long calls, but more so because I don’t want the phone to intrude on me all the time. I got interested in Facebook (myspace is a pain, too tricky to use - I notice they have now made myspace look more like Facebook!) when organising a school reunion in 2008, and we now have several hundred former students (including many folks over the age of 40) who joined FB just to access all the school photos I uploaded. Now they have reconnected with old friends both electronically and in person, which was perhaps the most gratifying outcome of the reunion beyond the day itself (400 people attended). They are supporting each other via FB in a range of ways, from one former student recently being diagnosed with lymphoma who was chatting to an ex schoolmate for support just as he had discovered this, to another whose autistic son has just spoken for the first time in his 11 years! Yet another former student happens to be a Special Needs teacher, and has been supporting the mother of this boy (who also has a son with Asperger’s) in finding a welcoming secondary school place for this other son. I personally have found my long lost godson who is interstate - I last saw him when he was 10, he is now 23! An old friend I haven’t seen in ten years who I have caught up with twice in the last few months. Another long lost friend from overseas who was an exchange student I was given the role of taking under my wing back in high school. Facebook is also valuable for me in finding and disseminating sustainability related material and making valuable new contacts. As you are not posting material to a particular community of interest (ie. those who are already into things), often you can cross fertilise and find out what other people are into as well as them being exposed to the kind of ideas they might otherwise not be. I find that mobile phone and social networking technology helps me plan and find out about face to face socialising opportunities, for example my musician friends who have gigs post them as events on FB, you can then easily share this with others. It is easy to fritter time on FB, and some of it is just another form of electronic entertainment - I watch less TV instead. It all depends on how you want to use it! You make it work FOR you - not become the master of you.

My name is Liam, I use technology for my education. I am a year 7 student, who is part of Marden Open Access College. I have lessons on my laptop, using Centra, via a wireless broadband connection . If not for the technology I would struggle with my education. My mum, dad & I have been travelling around Oz for the last year. Hi I’m Madeleine and I also do my lessons on the computer. With out my computer I’d go nuts because I’d be so bored. I connect with others using msn and AIM (A roleplaying site) sometimes I use email too. Hi I’m Sian and I use my laptop to go to school. If I didn’t have technology I would not be able to learn.

The switch from paper to electronic - I had no idea how hard it would be when we started out! My wife and I have scheduled our lives with a paper diary for many years. In December we decided to go digital, intending that we’d each have our own digital diary and be able to read each other’s diary, and also have read & write access to our diaries “out and about” through a portable electronic device. That should be pretty easy for current technology to do, surely? It turns out it is pretty easy only if you can afford to throw money at it - buy an iPhone each ($1800 for 2) with an iPhone internet data plan ($50/month/person = $100/month for us) and use Google to host & share the calendars - and then it all just works. But that’s a total cost of $3000 in the first year, compared to the $2 cost of the paper calendar it is replacing! Is an electronic diary 1500 times better than a paper diary? To achieve the same effect on a small budget is much harder. I’ve now evaluated many calendar programs, calendar websites, calendar sharing tools, calendar synchronisation tools, and portable devices including PDAs and smartphones. After many hours of evaluations and reading reviews and blog postings, months of elapsed time, we have an electronic diary system that *almost* does all we want. There are still bugs in the synchronisation tool which cause duplicated calendar events sometimes, and because of this my wife is holding off from buying a portable device. Instead she prints out her electronic calendar every few days, and carries the printout around with her! For me synchronisation with my PDA is working well, so I can see my calendar on the road and schedule a new calendar event wherever I am out and without using any mobile broadband data charges. The new or updated event will be propogated on to my online calendar and on to my wife later when I dock the PDA with my desktop PC.

fibre optic internet? it’d be fantastic. if only broadband wasnt still completely an unrealistic dream for most of the country !