Background

During 2009 I tried the 365 project, where you take and post one photo each day of the year. I did very well until about May, then life got too busy for me to keep it up.

In the spring, I had been involved in a project Darren Kuroptka did called Teaching Well: http://bit.ly/73RQaU? I was amazed at people's varying perspectives.

Then, in the fall, I created http://bit.ly/6PZQY6 and several people joined and shared their ideas. Again, I was blown away by the various perspectives, and how people pictured the same word.

So, when I realized people were creating 365 groups again, I knew I couldn't commit to one, but I also realized how much I enjoyed looking around my world for oddities or beauty, and how much simply taking pictures helped me look at my world differently.

Thus the idea of looking for pictures around a specific topic or word, and doing it in short stints was born.

Both Chad Sansing and Russ Goerend immediately took this idea to doing it with kids in their feedback, so we are going to try it at http://images4words.wikispaces.com

Let us know if you'd like to join that one as well.

As I was considering how to set this up, I had some questions:

Do we all do the same word for a month, or do we choose a word and work on that whenever we want? There are advantages and disadvantages to both, I think. If we're all looking for and thinking about say, "learning" in January, it might influence also how we blog, how we interact on Twitter, on nings, at conferences, etc. If we 're choosing our word whenever we want, it may have more meaning for each individual, as I can relate it to what's going on in my day to day life and maybe this month I'm feeling reflective, when reflection is a word three months from now.

I also thought of more than twelve words that may be interesting to look for in our world, so then it became a question of do we create month pages in this wiki, or word pages. I decided I'd initially assign a word to each month, but leave it up to individuals to go with the months or do the words when one grabs them.

And, as I was setting this up and seeking input form friends and colleagues, Deven Black offered some more words.

Brainstormed words: habit, routine, practice, building, commitment, persistence, construction, outside of the box, inquiry, question, thinking, critical thinking, strategy, creativity, relationship, trust, respect, beliefs, conformity, conflict, frustration, bias, resource shortages, prejudice, stereotype