beeonline

I met Bee on a deserted island in secondlife. It was easy and interesting then we met again around a camp fire. The third time was in a cocktail bar in London which was kind of a bit less cartoon like, and just as much fun.

It was great finally getting to meet Bee offline! In RL she is exactly the same as her online persona – warm, funny, thoughtful and smart. Would have been happy to hang out for a week.

I met Josie virtually through James Farmer at the time she started helping him organize the Edublogs Awards. I also invited her to be a guest speaker at the Blogstreams Salon last year and we have been viewing each other’s photos on Flickr.

I hope I can meet her f2f when I go to London after Easter. Will you be around, Josie? It would be fantastic if we could organize something.

I do not remember how and when I started reading Stephen’s Old Daily. I must have surfed upon it on the early Internet wave and liked what I read because I promptly subscribed to it.

I just know that some time later, he asked for people to write a letter of support, which I did because the service he was providing to the community was invaluable.

Later, he took a break and although I did not know the real reason for it, I somehow felt him anguished and needing it badly, so I wrote a comment on his blog.

Last year (2006) I was surprised to get an invitation for the Future of Learning in a Networked World unconference in NZ and even more surprised to find out he was the person who had nominated me.

We finally met f2f at the airport in Dunedin on Sunday September 17th, where we arrived on the same day and almost at the same time.

I think I first read Nancy’s blog Full Circle without knowing much about her but went back to it again and again as it gave me a lot of information about communities and networks, a topic I am also very interested in.

Then I interacted with Choconancy in the online social networks forum in 2005 and her name kept cropping up everywhere I surfed. She gave several workshops in Australia and Portugal, where people I know were involved. Finally she joined my Nature in Circle groups in Flickr and I have added her as a contact.

As I am going to Seattle for the Tesol conference this year, I hope she will be there so I can finally meet her f2f.

A question people often ask about me is why I have given myself the “bee” nickname as this usually refers to Beatrice and not Barbara.

Well, my real nickname for family and very close friends is Basia, a Polish diminutive for Barbara. However, in Portuguese, it is pronounced “baixa”, which means short or low so people kept asking my why on earth my parents would call me this and I had to start givig them the explanation.

I decided then to start signing my mails B. until a friend sent me a little buzzing bee gif. I thought that was fun, as it not only corresponded to the letter B but also gave origin to lots of derivatives – beeonline, beewehbead and so on.

So voila…here is the answer to your question.

I really want to meet Bee – we have spent the last few years being involved in diverse and interesting online educational projects together – I became a webhead thanks to her, got more involved in blogging because of her interest in it, and first discovered podcasting after a conversation she had during one of our online courses. Apart from all that, she is an inspiration and seems like a fun, warm, human being, and I think that this year we actually might get to meet when she comes to Spain.