What kind of bird are you?

I’ve been writing an application for an award on behalf of my work team this week, and as I was writing one section I found myself jokingly describing us as “wise owls, not magpies after the shiny shiny”. I was talking about ed tech, or course, and the need to ensure that it’s appropriate for the proposed use, and not just being used because it’s the newest thing, or because it’s trendy, or because it’s been hyped up by somebody. Then Niall remarked this morning that he thought that a magpie had stolen one of the tent pegs holding our vegetable patch covers down, and as I laughed at the thought of a magpie in a tent-nest, I remembered about owls and magpies again. Then I thought about other attitudes to technology – there’s ostriches who stick their heads in the sand and pretend that they don’t need to engage with these new-fangled things, and of course they might well go the same way as the dodo. And flamingos – that look awfully pretty, but they’re really not practical; and nightingales – who don’t look anything much, but their song is beautiful.  Then of course there are cuckoos – who don’t hold with doing any of the hard work themselves, but are quite happy when somebody else does it for them, and white-browed sparrow weavers, who apparently have unequal workloads so some of them burn themselves out. This list could go on and on! So, I was thinking – it would be fun to find out what type of bird you thought you were, or which attitudes to tech could be represented by particular birds. Here’s  a game we can all play together 🙂

Owl flickr photo by Farid Fleifel shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

Magpie flickr photo by pjoh  shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license

White-browed sparrow weaver flickr photo by berniedup  shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license