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Registration Deadline
The deadline for Florida Canoe Symposium registrations (without a late charge) is January 31st. A fair number of registrations are already in. Emails received and inquiries promise many more to come.
I recently met with our caterer and am more confident than ever that a good choice has been made.
I’m in the process of fine tuning the curriculum for the new “Canoeing for Kayakers” class. I’ve received great input from several top instructors who have reviewed the 1st draft.
If anyone has any questions regarding classes, registration, accommodations or other issues, please contact me at dogpaddle@frontiernet.net.
Marc Ornstein
I think most people that are interested in FreeStyle have met other FS’ers at events and are comfortable reading and posting in an environment that is more nested…so to speak.
I know many folks are just not into posting on Facebook because of privacy concerns.
I think we should focus here on FS oriented discussions. As far as I know we are not interested in spurious arguments that sometime show up on solotripping and p’net. FS discussions have a way of going way off base in more open audience discussions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMIKe94s1jY&feature=digest_thu
Kringelfieber 2012
We often get questions about bent paddles. (this blog has been moved to POST status, Click on ‘Bent Paddles’ Upper Right of this Page) – LL
Laura,
I understand what you are saying, but is still leaves me with the question I originally stated, which is what types of things do we want on the blog and what things are better posted on Face Book? We should use both media to their best advantage.
some ideas: Articles. Reference materials. Cross post articles. History – Who’s who. Technique – maneuvers, heel, pitch… Practical Application. Boats. Forward Stroke. Creating a routine. Paired Solo. Marc O instructional videos.
and the blog page could be a chance for people to ask a question, or suggest a topic.
Marc’s been aware for some time that I’ve been working on a project to create a Single Blade “Wiki”: an online resource bank with a Who’s Who, a complete reference guide to technique, instructional videos, and much else – including as much of the history as I could glean from afar.
A Wiki implies an online community to develop it: such a project should be collaborative, with peer review and so on. My effort has been in creating a structure and model content as a basis for such efforts… and as I said to Marc earlier in the year, the idea was to then go “public” and recruit a team (including a host of the European Freestyle instructors, as we’ve been talking for some time about creating our own knowledge-base).
My initial efforts have been based on forum software, as folk know the way they work, and as discussion threads could then be run in parallel. I’ve just upgraded my hosting package to allow me to (later this month) fully investigate a few alternatives: best to invest time in the right solution from the outset than to have a nightmare transfer later due to exasperation with a clunky system!
Anyway… feel free to take a look at what I’ve been doing. The link is http://singleblade.com/ – though as I said, I’m not wanting that promoted far and wide at present!
Now to the point: this FreestyleCanoeing Blog appears to respond to the same concerns that I’d originally got… but with different software and a tighter focus. I really like the idea, and having just put a stack of work in on a WordPress site, I can see the potential.
The big question remains… for what? I don’t see a blog being all things to all people… so I can see a case for being very specific about what we set out to achieve.. and for whom. Who is going to subscribe (and how: lots of ways possible)… and what’s going to keep them reading the content?
If the idea is to promote Freestyle to the tens of thousands of everyday paddlers who have a casual interest… then I’d encourage a magazine-style format based on Crosspost plus stories centred on the big meets: the build up to (and feedback from) events like the Adirondack Symposium and Kringelfieber.
To my mind, that’s potentially clean and powerful… but it’s a separate project from creating a knowledge-base: all the Wiki stuff I talked about.
Now this WordPress Blog COULD be configured, instead, along Wiki lines, as a knowledge-base: I’ve seen “themes” which could be installed to make this work. That could be equally great (and I’d gladly support and contribute)… but it would be a completely different beast.
My fear is that this blog might be more useful this way to those of us who are ACA Instructors… but less appealing to others, and so less effective at promoting Freestyle.
What I can’t see working is combining the above (and perhaps more beyond that) in a single WordPress Blog. Two separate projects (promoting Freestyle and building a knowledge bank) strike me as needing two distinct solutions – even if that means two wordpress blogs!
Happy to help in any way I can.. though at present I’m just building a very different WordPress Blog: see http://canoesailor.com/blog/
Greg.
The Blog is a database. Posts can be categorized. Key word search is available.
Facebook is organized chronologically. Searches are for people, not information.
I think we need to make a decision as to what we want to post on the blog and what should go to the facebook page. I don’t pretend to know the advantages/disadvantages of either, but it strikes me that many folks may tend to follow one or the other.
Deciding what goes where sounds like a nightmare… and I would expect a lot of “grey zone” material… I like the idea of putting it all in one place, so I don’t have to jump around between web sites. My day job involves way too much computing, so I try to minimize recreational computer time as much as possible….
Could this site turn into a gathering place of FreeStyle discussions and information? If so, how do we make that happen? Should we find information from p-net, solo-tripping and facebook and re-post it here? How should information be organized and categorized?
What are your thoughts?