Merry Christmas 2006 to Friends, Family, and Community

It's the dawn of a new day, literally, a windy, rainy dawn in Abu Dhabi. It's CHRISTMAS day, and one of my New Year's Resolutions is to start using this blog more (I have several, blogs and resolutions) ... but I've started THIS one, as a central location to pull together some of my other projects (in which case if you want to track what I'm up to you could do so via this blog's RSS feed, in theory).

Right now, my project is Christmas. In Abu Dhabi, we work the day before and after Christmas, but our gracious hosts always grant us the day itself off. There is therefore a rare chance for pause and reflection in what is otherwise a routine work week.

I intend this blog to be about education, in particular adVances made possible through adVancED techniques in EDucation as facilitated through principled use of the read/write Web 2.0, but as I'm just starting out I'll introduce it as our annual season's greeting card. At this time of year, I try and spend time with family, friends, and community, and this post is addressed to all three.



Family: Dusty flew out from California and Glenn drove in from his workplace in the desert of Abu Dhabi, so the four of us were together again this Christmas, as you can see from our picture above or here: http://www.prof2000.pt/users/vstevens/homepage.htm#061225

Friends: For my friends I would like to offer a special holiday treat. The gift, properly wrapped, should appear below, and you can unwrap your gift by clicking here http://www.rsc-yh.ac.uk/advent/ or on the picture:

Community: For my friends online, educators all, we have our Wiki: http://happywebhead2006-7.pbwiki.com/ . Year after year we have what we call F.U.N. in this community, as you can see at the link and in the picture below.

You can click here or on the picture to see Vance's elf dance

Meanwhile, my family Bobbi, Glenn, Dusty, and (me) Vance and the cat, Musky, wish everyone a happy holiday season, and perhaps in this coming year, at last, an ascendancy of the common people, especially those in the groups listed above, whose collective activities online and elsewhere contribute to the realization of peace in the world.