News for January 2010

Things I learned this week – #5

Welcome back!
#uppingyourgame: an educator's guide to productivity is now up to v0.4!
(I'm looking for people to translate it into other languages when finished - if you're interested get in touch!)

Image CC BY-NC mikeabney

Top 3

  1. I thought that I kept myself fairly anonymous online to all but the people I want to interact with. Turns out I was wrong. Check out Panopticlick to start being worried about ‘browser fingerprinting’.
  2. Vooks look either cool or completely pointless, depending on your point-of-view and mood. (via @betchaboy)
  3. Dunbar’s Number is the theoretical maximum number of stable relationships an individual can sustain. It turns out that it’s about 150, which makes some people’s Twitter and Facebook profiles look ridiculous!

Tech.

  • Apparently the iPad is ‘iBad’ for freedom according to the Free Software Foundation. They’ve got a point. But I’ll still be getting one. ;-)
  • Stephen Fry weighed in, along with seemingly the rest of the world, with his views on what the iPad means for mankind.
  • Thankfully, the iPad supports the ePub format for ebooks. You can find lots of these at epubbooks.com (via @chrispenny)
  • The Polarize iPhone app allows you to create photos that look that they’ve been taken with a Polaroid camera. Cool! (example here)
  • Screensplitr for the (jailbroken) iPhone allows you to output any app to another screen (via @wesfryer)
  • I found this 360-degree video of Haiti unbelievable. It uses the same YellowBird camera that Google uses for ‘Street View’ (via OLDaily) I was going to embed it here, but it auto-plays, which is annoying…
  • You can now upload email into a Google Apps email account using an (official) OSX app. This might be a good time for me to switch to an @dougbelshaw.com email address… :-)
  • That button in Tweetie that I’ve never pressed (see below – looks like a business card)? Turns out it adds contact details from someone’s contact details from Twitter to your iPhone address book. Sweet!

Productivity & Inspiration

Education & Academic

  • I was shocked to discover that some UK Local Authorities are going to pay £10,000 on a filter to remove comments from being displayed when students visit YouTube. Kerry Turner (@4goggas) who gave the heads-up also pointed out youtube.com/xl which I hadn’t used before. Handy!
  • JISC published their final report into ebooks as (appropriately) a rather nice issuu document. Worth looking at the Executive Summary if nothing else!
  • Not having actually used one doesn’t stop some people ruminating on how the iPad will change education. Inevitable.:  (via @baldy7)
  • Futurelab has a really well put-together video about the future of education using the research from Beyond Current Horizons (from Beyond Current Horizons research) Apparently, half the population of Europe will be 50 by 2030 and will expect to live another 40 years (I’ll be 50 in December 2030 – scary!)

Data, Design & Infographics

  • Dan Meyer threatened us all with driving round to our houses to force us to watch this excellent video called Vanishing Point. No need – it’s great!
  • I bought Autograph for $6 this week (OSX only). It allows you to draw, in a simple way, using your Macbook trackpad – ace!
  • Turns out the type of font you use determines how hard you perceive something to be. There’s a reason I use Georgia in everything I do – I read years ago (when I was at uni) that it has a positive effect, psychologically-speaking… :-D
  • This chart shows the number of mobile subscribers, per 100 people, worldwide.
  • I saw this first time around but didn’t blog it. Some designers showed how much ink different fonts use by colouring in words with biros. If you’re concerned about the amount of ink you use, try Ecofont!
  • I’m rather pleased with the sparkline (mini-graph) I added to the footer of this blog. There’s a kind-of howto here, but I’ll be screencasting how to do this next week. In the course of doing this I was reminded about the Google Charts API. Lots of services provide a front-end for Google Charts, but this tool in particular makes it very quick and easy to make stunning charts!
  • There’s a guy who records everything he does. He creates wonderful and interesting visualizations in his annual report. Check it out! (try Daytum or your.flowingdata.com if you’re crazy enough to do likewise!)

Misc.

Quotations

Misfortune shows those who are not really friends. (Aristotle)

If change doesn’t cost you anything then it isn’t real change. (John C. Maxwell)

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. (Winston Churchill)

Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. (Natalie Goldberg)

The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language. (J. Michael Straczynski)

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Posted: January 31st, 2010
Categories: Things I Learned This Week
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A subtle redesign.

As I’ve mentioned several times before, pretty much everything I do is perpetual beta. What that means in practice is that I’m always looking to make things better – including this blog!

The three subtle changes I’ve made are:

  • Menu text replaced with icons (it was a bit text-heavy)
  • Slide-down posts replaced with links to permalinks (to speed-up page loading and encourage commenting)
  • Addition of Wordpress icon and sparkline (mini-graph) to footer* (looks cool!)

You can see a quick before and after below.

Before:

dougbelshaw.com/blog minimalist v1

After:

dougbelshaw.com/blog minimalist v2

The icons, in case you’re wondering, can be found here. They may be used ‘without attribution’ for personal and commercial projects.

Update: I’ve added ‘tooltips’ (using this) at the request of some who found the icons needed explaining. Thanks for the feedback! :-D

*I’ll explain how I did this next week. It’s easy but took some researching…

Posted: January 30th, 2010
Categories: Everything Else
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Daniel Pink on motivation.

I was very fortunate on Tuesday to get a last-minute invite (thanks to Ewan McIntosh) to a sold-out event at The Sage in Gateshead. The organisers of the event managed to get hold of Daniel Pink (Twitter), author of A Whole New Mind, as he came to the UK to promote his new book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. I’d seen Dan’s TED Talk last year (see below) and found it extremely interesting. I was slightly concerned however, that he would just rehash that talk. He didn’t. :-D

The warm-up guy for Dan was Caspar Berry (Twitter), former actor, professional poker player, screenwriter, television presenter, poker advisor on the James Bond film Casino Royale, and now consultant to large multinational companies. Caspar spoke about risk and the fear of failure. His main message was that in order to be successful you have to fail many times. If we redefine failure as long-term failure then this, as in poker, empowers us to take short-term set-backs, losses and ‘failures’. I appreciated his message, but felt that his constant references to how he was fitting a 45-minute presentation into 25 minutes a bit much to take. How hard is it to alter a slidedeck and tailor your talk for a particular audience? We teachers do it all the time… ;-)

I made quite a few notes on Dan Pink’s talk. I love the way he signposted, as all good teachers and presenters do, not only what he was going to talk about but also how he was going to deliver it. A good presentation, he believes, consists of:

  1. Brevity
  2. Levity
  3. Repetition

It also helped that his slides weren’t used to drive his talk but used almost exclusively for quotations from academic and business journals. I have to say that I was impressed that one came from this month’s Harvard Business Review! In addition, he had obviously tailored his slides (spellings, colloquialisms) for a UK audience. It would be easy not to do that on a worldwide book tour. :-)

Using props and audience interaction, Dan started by explaining that we all have a biological drive that motivates us to do things – hunger, third, sex, and so on. No-one doubts that. We also have a ’secondary drive’ that includes things like money, reward and punishment. Most efforts to motivate people centre around these two drives: we throw money at people to be more productive and more innovative: we appeal to people’s hunger and desires. A surprising study, however, by the Federal Reserve Bank in 2005 showed that, whilst financial incentives worked in a linear way for purely mechanical tasks (more reward = more productivity), if even ‘rudimentary cognitive skill’ was required, performance was inversely proportional (more reward = less problem-solving). The study, initially carried out in the USA was replicated with even more profound results in India.

Dan gave lots of examples of companies changing the way they do business in order to increase creativity, innovation and profitability. These went beyond Google’s famous 20% time, thankfully. I’ll not list them here – you should buy his book! The (false) assumption that most businesses have is that human beings are fundamentally inert, that they need external motivation to do things. Instead, Dan says, we should assume that people are active and engaged. Look at toddlers, for example: they’re always engaged! It’s actually our default setting. The third drive, then, is ‘interest’ which Dan divided down into:

  • Autonomy
  • Mastery
  • Purpose

Autonomy is tapping into people’s desire to be in control of their own lives. Using the example of call centres, Dan talked of how they treat people like lightbulbs: one burns out so we get another from the shelf and screw ‘em! Zappos.com, a company recently bought by Amazon for close to $1bn, do things differently. They offer people $2000 to leave the company after the two-week training period, figuring that anyone tempted by such an offer would cost them more in the long-term. Once they’ve completed their training and refused the $2000 they are set to work with one message: “solve the customer’s problem”. No timers, no scripts. Revolutionary autonomy. :-)

Mastery is our powerful impulse to get better at stuff. In fact, a longitudinal study by Harvard Business Review of many companies found that the biggest motivator for employees across a whole range of industries was “making progress”. Dan talked about performance reviews, about how they’re not often enough. Imagine, he said, if Serena Williams received only annual feedback on her tennis. How would she improve? He encouraged us to take control of our own performance reviews and goal-setting, “calling yourself into the office” at the end of the month after having planned and set targets at the beginning of it.

Purpose is being part of a project bigger than yourself. Or, in the words of a McDonald’s executive, about having ‘a purpose bigger than your product’. For businesses it’s important to sell a dream or vision other than increasing profits by X% to motivate your staff. For individuals it’s important to motivate you for the smaller tasks and activities you need to complete.

Dan said he could sum up his message by saying “human beings are not horses”. Here’s how he puts it in a recent interview with Seth Godin (who also has a new book out called Linchpin):

Stop treating people like horses and start treating them like human beings. Instead of trying to bribe folks with sweeter carrots or threaten them with sharpen sticks, how about giving them greater freedom at work, allowing them to get better at something they love, and infusing the workplace with a sense of purpose? If we tap that third drive more fully, we can rejuvenate or businesses and remake our world.

Amen to that! I’ll definitely be incorporating some of these ideas into #uppingyourgame: an educator’s guide to productivity. :-D

Posted: January 29th, 2010
Categories: Productivity
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Literacy -> Digital Flow: The Autotelic Self

This continues from my previous posts on Literacy -> Digital Flow. References can be found at http://dougbelshaw.com/wiki

CC BY-NC-SA DareMo Shiranai

Is the word ‘literacy’ useful? Literacy is a state which has traditionally been ascribed (or not) to individuals. Is the state that writers on ‘New Literacies’ espouse simply a case of encoding and decoding texts? It would appear from the above, given the references to ‘identity’ and ‘community’ that perhaps we have moved beyond literacy. An idea to be explored in what follows is that a digital version of the concept of Flow may be a Pragmatically-useful concept to use in place of the seemingly never-ending ‘umbrella terms’ outlined earlier.

In his seminal book of the same name, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi introduced flow as being at the root of true happiness, successful learning experiences and what can loosely be termed ‘intrinsic motivation’. In a state of flow, individuals undergo what Csikszentmihalyi refers to as ‘the autotelic experience’:

The term “autotelic” derives from two Greek words, auto meaning self, and telos meaning goal. It refers to a self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward… Most things we do are neither purely autotelic nor purely exotelic (as we shall call activities done for external reasons only), but are a combination of the two. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, 2008:67)

Focusing on the term ‘literacy’ and attempting to shoehorn 21st-century behaviours, technologies and attitudes into the concept could lead to anachronism. Literacy, as we have seen, is predicated upon technologies used to encode and decode texts. The reason Traditional Literacy was such a stable concept with a definite meaning in the minds of most people was due to it built upon a technology that did not change significantly in hundreds of years. It is the pace of innovation in new technologies that has caused a problem for conceptions of literacy.

If instead of a ‘top-down’ approach to literacy (‘x, y and z consitute literate activities’) a ‘bottom-up’ approach was considered this could potentially side-step the difficulty caused by the pace of technological change. The reason that concepts such as ‘digital literacy’, ‘cyberliteracy’, ‘new literacies’ and the like have been proposed is to give a name to a socially useful state to which individuals can aspire. Given that most proponents of such terms would agree that their thinking is built upon Traditional Literacy, it would seem that using ‘literacy’ as an epithet for these extra skills, abilities and behaviours is unnecessary.

What may be more useful in a Pragmatic sense may be to assume Traditional Literacy and combine these skills with digital tools and sociocultural practices that lead to socially and educationally-useful outcomes. Instead of viewing a ‘digital’ version of literacy as a pinnacle to be achieved or surmounted, the focus would be on Flow. When dealing with digital ‘texts’ (loosely defined) this would result in Digital Flow depending upon literacy. Literacy becomes a staging-post on the journey instead of the destination itself:

Literacy mountain Flow mountain

Mass education – as developed in the 19th century – served to instil a minimum standard through drill-and-practice within the realm of Traditional Literacy. Some have likened this to a factory model with Taylorism as its guiding principles. This is slightly unfair, given the constraints, social problems and political landscape of the time, but does throw light upon how debates surrounding the purpose of education have shifted. It is no longer enough to ensure that young people leave school with the ‘3Rs’. Indeed, under initiatives such as Ofsted’s Every Child Matters (ECM), wider concerns such as children’s (mental) health, and their ability to achieve ‘economic wellbeing’ have necessarily been brought to the forefront of planning and curriculum design in UK schools.

Despite this, skills and abilities in almost every area of the curriculum are, somewhat indiscriminately, designated ‘literacies’. Courses are designed around concepts as ‘health literacy’, ‘financial literacy’ and ‘emotional literacy’ as a shorthand to convey action relating to the ECM agenda. It may be more productive and instructive to replace this ’scatter-gun’ approach to literacy with a more far-reaching commitment towards helping young people develop their ‘autotelic self’:

A person with an autotelic self learns to make choices… without much fuss and the minimum of panic… As soon as the goals and challenges define a system of action, they in turn suggest the skills necessary to operate within it… And to develop skills, one needs to pay attention to the results of one’s actions – to monitor the feedback… One of the basic differences between a person with an autotelic self and one without it is that the former knows that it is she who has chosen whatever goal she is pusuing. What she does is not random, nor is it the result of outside determining forces. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, 2008:209)

Instead of having to continually widen and redefine literacy to cater for new technologies and methods of social interaction, a focus on Digital Flow would be consistent with the idea of ‘liquid modernity’. It would serve to end the idea of a ‘life-project’ being something external to the individual and encourage individuals to embrace short-term, pragmatic strategies when approaching digital technologies (Martin, 2008:153). Digital Flow is focused on the creative act, as opposed to never-ending definitions of literacy predicated on the consumption of media or physical goods. As a result, Digital Flow can be considered the ‘umbrella-term’ for which theorists have been grasping and over which they have been arguing. Moreover, it can be seen as a coherent target at which to aim educational experiences.

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Posted: January 28th, 2010
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Wednesday Wisdom #4: Ruling your impulses

Wednesday Wisdom: ruling your impulses.

You can purchase an inexpensive copy of The Art of Worldly Wisdom book from Amazon or read it online for free via Google Books. :-D

Posted: January 27th, 2010
Categories: Wednesday Wisdom
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Why I no longer wear a watch.

CC BY-NC spengy

I remember fondly my first ‘proper’ watch: a digital Casio black-and-blue affair with a stopwatch. It was awesome. When I got older and a bit more style-conscious I requested a Seiko Kinetic for my 18th birthday. The Kinetic range had just come out and seduced me into thinking I’d never need to replace the battery in it. They were right, I didn’t. Instead, within two years the whole drive mechanism needed changing at a price not far away from the original purchase price of the whole watch. You never buy version one of anything, trust me. For my 21st birthday I received (at my request) another Seiko that looked very similar but used a good old battery. That’s the one I’ve still got but, as of January 1st, 2010, no longer wear.

I was at university when I got that watch, in my third and final year. During that year I had a lecturer for one of my Philosophy modules who would whip out his Sony Ericsson T68i every so often to look at the screen whilst he was lecturing. At the time I thought this was incredibly rude: how dare he be checking to see if he had any text messages whilst lecturing?! :-o

Later I became the proud owner of a T68i. It dawned on me that my lecturer didn’t wear a watch and, because the phone has the time in big, bold numbers as a screensaver, he had been merely checking what time it was so he didn’t run over. I forgave him post-hoc. ;-)

I’m always a bit worried about getting RSI, and so began to take my watch off automatically upon sitting down at my Macbook Pro after I noticing that taking my watch off whilst using it made my right wrist ache less.* But then I started to think… When I’m using my Macbook the time is displayed at the top-right of the screen; when I’ve got my iPhone on me (pretty much always) it displays the time on the lockscreen. Why am I wearing a watch at all?

The nail in the coffin for my watch, now cutting a forlorn figure on the kitchen table, was an article in WIRED magazine (to which I now subscribe). It too laughed at watches as an anachronism. Why on earth, it asked, when the time is all around us – including on personal devices that we carry everywhere – do we insist on wearing something that can only single-task? That was it, I decided I’d be watch-less in 2010.

Since then, I’ve found how liberating not knowing exactly what time it is can be. Yes, it’s necessary sometimes (when teaching, for example) but when in and around the house it certainly leads to more Flow experiences. And that’s a good thing. :-D

How about you? What else do we do or wear that could be considered anachronistic in this day-and-age?

* Yes, I (used to) wear my watch on my right wrist. No, I’m not left-handed. And no, I don’t know why I (used to) do this. I just always have done. :-s

Posted: January 26th, 2010
Categories: Productivity
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A tribute to Dan Meyer.

I’ve had my run-ins before with Dan Meyer when we were young(er) and (more) foolish.* But I have to give the guy credit – he can really think, write and teach. Read How Do You Turn Something Interesting Into Something Challenging? – almost the perfect template for how a teacher should reflect on their own practice. Dan goes from spark of an idea to a video showing how he taught it in practice in the space of the post. Exemplary! :-D

Once you’ve checked out that post, you might want to try these as well:

On returning to subscribing to Dan’s blog I assumed he was still teaching full-time. He’s not. First he decided to enrol to study towards a PhD (What Just Happened?) and then deferred to go and work for Google (Going Corporate). Who wouldn’t?!

It serves to demonstrate, however, something of which I’m increasingly aware: it’s extremely difficult to sustain outstanding teaching over more than a few years. I think I’m correct in saying that Dan’s been teaching five years. I’ve been teaching six (at a lower standard) and it’s taking its toll.

Perhaps guaranteed sabbaticals after 5 years are in order? (combined with the MA in Teaching & Learning?)

* Perhaps we’re too much alike. I didn’t like Paul Lewis (@aerotwist) much when I first met him. Now we get on like… a warm house. :-p

Posted: January 25th, 2010
Categories: Education
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Things I learned this week – #4

CC BY cooldudeandy01

On a personal level, I learned that when taking a toddler on a trip to somewhere (reasonably) far away like the National Railway Museum it’s always a good idea to ensure they have a very good sleep the night before, and to take a buggy. Even if you think they’re too big for it… :-o

Top 3

Tech.

  • Some (big-name) people have had problems with their Twitter page outranking their personal blog or website. Lifehacker, as you would expect, has aquick-and-easy fix (which I’ve already carried out here!)
  • I got my hands on a Pro code for BumpTop, the 3D desktop app, this week. I concluded it’s ‘interesting’ rather than useful.
  • My mother’s in the market for a point-and-shoot digital camera, so this warning by Lifehacker to stay under 7 megapixels to avoid photo noise and diffraction in such devices is timely!
  • I love this video of mini-ninjas unboxing the Google Nexus One. Best. Unboxing. Video. Ever. :-D

  • YouTube has a multi-video uploader (I found out thanks to this post). Unfortunately, it would seem that Google Gears – which powers it – isn’t yet compatible with Mac OSX Snow Leopard?!
  • Charles Leadbeater has an article in The Guardian in which he expresses concern (quite rightly) about corporate control of cloud computing. You get what you pay for, I suppose…
  • RockYou, who provide apps and services for Facebook users, had a security breach recently and user account details were stolen. An analysis reveals, worryingly that some of the top passwords included ‘12345′, ‘123456′, 123456789′ and ‘password’. Unbelievable! :-o
  • Ethan from Flowtown.com got in touch to make me aware of what they do. Put in an email address, get details from various social networking (and other sites) about the person that owns it. Here’s what it has to say about me (not all correct!):

My (slightly incorrect) profile on Flowtown.com

(I don’t live in Doncaster any more and I’m not on Facebook…)

Cloud computing will grow faster than almost all other tech sectors, but it is not taking over the world because of concerns over reliability and security.

  • Stephen Downes has produced an interesting visual overview of how ideas diffuse in the blogosphere in 2010 compared to 2005 (see above). I’d contend that it’s a bit more complicated than that – as a commenter points out, there’s no mention of Facebook. And what about half-way houses like Posterous? And Delicious/Diigo networks?
  • If, as I kept getting this week, you get the WordPress ‘Fatal Error: Allowed Memory Size’ error, here’s what to do!

Productivity & Inspiration

Education & Academic

  • According to another study, kids spend 53 hours a week on media, apparently (via TechXAV):
  • D’Arcy Norman defined educational technology as “whatever stuff you need to use to support the practice of effective teaching and learning”. That’ll do for me! (via OLDaily)
  • Ludoliteracy is a book about games in education. It’s a free PDF download. (via OLDaily)
  • Will Richardson makes a good point: this is the first generation of students not to have a choice about using technology in their learning.
  • In the UK, languages are becoming ‘twilight subjects’ in state schools.
  • There is no adequate evidence for ‘learning styles’ (via @hjarche). Stephen Downes would argue (I think) that no evidence doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but I’d defend myself with Occam’s Razor… ;-)

Data, Design & Infographics

  • This video games by the numbers infographic is interesting. The average age of gamers is 32 and the average amount of time playing per week 18 hours, so I’m still justified in ramping it up! ;-)
  • I like this hand-drawn overview of the electromagnetic spectrum (via Cool Infographics):

  • Digital access varies hugely worldwide, according to this graphic.
  • I’ve never heard of the term ‘information architecture’ before, but these are some useful resources! :-D
  • Google Earth can be used for stunning data visualizations (via datavisualization.ch):

Misc.

Quotations

He who knows enough is enough, will always have enough. Lao Tzu

It is never to late to be what you might have been. George Elliot

The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it. Woodrow Wilson

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. Louis Hector Berlioz

Knowledge will give you power, but character, respect. Bruce Lee

There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning. Louis L’Amour

Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future. Kathleen Norris

And finally, as Nick Bilton from the New York Times states, and (appropriately) Scott McLeod links to, we’re all human aggregators now:

If someone approached me even five years ago and explained that one day in the near future I would be filtering, collecting and sharing content for thousands of perfect strangers to read – and doing it for free – I would have responded with a pretty perplexed look. Yet today I can’t imagine living in a world where I don’t filter, collect and share.

More important, I couldn’t conceive of a world of news and information without the aid of others helping me find the relevant links.

Posted: January 24th, 2010
Categories: Things I Learned This Week
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GCSE results by location/ethnicity [visualization]

The consistently helpful Nathan Yau at FlowingData posted a brief tutorial this week on how to make heatmaps quickly. I had a play given that the UK government launched the surprisingly useful and well thought-out data.gov.uk recently!

Here’s what I came up with:

Proportion of students gaining 5 or more A*-C GCSE grades in England, 2006-9

(yes, I too was surprised that the North East leads the way in number of students gaining 5 or more A*-Cs!) :-p

Posted: January 23rd, 2010
Categories: infographics
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BumpTop: ‘interesting’ or genuinely useful?

I heard about BumpTop a few months back when it was Windows-only. It’s makes your desktop 3D in an aesthetically-pleasing way. This week they launched the Mac version which I found out about via Mashable. It turns out that Mashable had 100 free ‘Pro’ upgrades to give away and I was lucky enough to be quick enough to apply to get one. This gives BumpTop extra functionality and features. :-)

My thoughts can be found in the following quick overview:

(higher quality version at the Internet Archive – do they not do transcoding any more?) :-s

Posted: January 22nd, 2010
Categories: Technology
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