As part of my ongoing Project Reclaim, and spurred on by D’Arcy Norman’s recent post on abandoning Flickr, I’ve been playing with openphoto.me.

In a similar way to the idea behind Unhosted, you bring your own data (i.e. photos) and the application does something with it (i.e. display them nicely, allow you to share them easily). I’m using Dropbox, but you can use Amazon S3, Box.net and more.

I like openphoto.me. I’ve uploaded two sets, one public and one private. The private one is of my children and shared only with family. The public one is of some photos I took down at Druridge Bay yesterday.

Where do you store your photos? Why?

Yesterday, as I sat in my study finishing off some work, my wife called me into the lounge to look out the window. She and my two young children stood transfixed as black, billowing clouds of smoke drifted over our back garden. It was clear where it was coming from: the nature reserve close to our house.

Tragically, someone (or some group) had decided to set fire to the bird hide on the end of a jetty that goes out into the pond. By the time I’d called the fire brigade and got down there, all that the steadily-increasing group of concerned onlookers could do was watch as fierce flames consumed the wooden structure.

I overheard, but have not had confirmation, that the bird hide was doused in petrol before being set alight. In the end, the firefighters put out the fire and knocked down the hide. All that’s left are some wooden stumps.

My reason for writing about this is merely, at this stage, to document that it happened. I’m not sure who did it, nor why they did so, but feel sad that it happened. All my five year-old son asked yesterday was “Why would they do that, Daddy?” I didn’t know how to answer him but encouraged him to draw the picture at the top of this post to let out some of his emotions.

The nature reserve was opened last year after a community group secured National Lottery funding to transform the space. It’s a beautiful space within which to walk in this usually peaceful village. My children used to enjoy peeking through the windows in the bird hide.

Not any more.

There’s two books I read regularly. Both of those books are by authors who evidently love the written word but treat it quite differently.

The first is The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracian, a 17th century Spanish Jesuit. I read his short, pithy maxims every single day on repeat. When I get to number 300, I flick back and start at number one again.

The second, which I’ve read many times is Michel de Montaigne‘s Essays. This rambling, inconsistent and charming tome is by a 16th century landowner and reluctant public servant. I (and others who have read him) feel like I know him personally.*

Both works make me want to write not just about the kinds of things I write about on this blog, but just for myself. Not necessarily for an audience, and about anything I want.

Ideally, I’d write in the series of journals I’ve kept since turning 18. Realistically, I write in there sporadically, and usually when I’m feeling down. I want more regular outpourings and means typing instead of physically writing.

I’m a fairly fast touch-typist. I used to be up to the heady heights of around 100 words per minute (wpm), but nowadays I’m happy with 60-70 wpm. That’s obviously way more than I’d get if I was scrawling: I’d be lucky to hit 30 wpm, and even that would be illegible.

Thankfully, and you’ll be delighted to know there’s a point to this post, I’ve re-discovered a place that embodies this ‘private, unfiltered, spontaneous, daily’ element for which I’ve been grasping.

Not only is 750words.com extremely well-designed, but it’s got semantic analysis of what you write, co-operative style values and badges!** The image at the top of this post shows some of the analysis the site does. There’s more than the limited amount I’m sharing there.

Read this for Buster’s (the site owner) reason for creating – and continuing to run – the site:

750 Words exists because of mutual good will between myself and the people who use it. The site wouldn’t exist without the generosity, patience, and humor of everyone involved. Rather than charge for the site, I want to keep the site free, and simply offer an opportunity for people who have the means and the desire to help keep things going. I don’t want to make a ton of money, I just want to have enough to justify the time, energy, and money it takes to build, maintain, and enjoy, while also keeping the spirit of it fun and friendly.

That’s my kind of site.

*I’m also greatly enjoying Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: A life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer.

**Although not, sadly, of the ‘Open Badges’ variety.

I can’t string any of these out to a blog post in their own right, but they’re definitely worth bringing to more people’s attention.

First, I’ve re-launched Things I Learned This Week as a free newsletter. You can sign up here.

I’m helping co-ordinate Purpos/ed’s #500words Take 2 campaign. All of the ‘official’ spaces have gone, but you can still contribute! More details.

Version 0.2 of the e-book I’m writing, The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies is almost ready. Invest now whilst it’s only £1 to do so!

Last, but not least, the JISC Developing Digital Literacies programme has two (free!) upcoming webinars. This Friday (27 April 2012) it’s Erin Knight and Michelle Levesque on Mozilla and web literacies, and next Friday (4 May 2012) it’s Tabetha Newman and Sarah Payton on A history of Digital Literacy in UK & EU.

Image CC BY kevin dooley

Last week I was cooped up indoors with my son.

Ben is an energetic five year-old on Easter school holidays whilst I was ill and off work. It rained most of the week meaning that there were fewer opportunities for him to get out of the house with my wife and Grace (our one year-old daughter). The temptation to let him just watch films and play on the iPad was quite high, to say the least.

Thankfully, we’ve already laid down some ground rules for him that help manage his behaviour.

1. Food

Young children can be inordinately grumpy if they’ve got low blood sugar. Actually, I’m inordinately grumpy if I have low blood sugar.

The first job for my son every morning is to eat some fruit. This is usually a banana. Given that he usually rises at around 6am, it stops him being super-grumpy before his breakfast at 7.30am.

I don’t care what anyone says about children and sugar: too much is bad for both their teeth and their mood. Ben gets that wild look in his eyes when he’s had too much. Fruit, however, contains fructose which seems to be a useful compromise.

2. Screen time

I have to admit, the notion of limiting children to a certain amount of ‘screen time’ seemed slightly ridiculous before we had Ben. But, oh my, you have no idea how more than 15-20 minutes on the iPad (or watching TV) has on his behaviour.

The rule in our house is that he’s not allowed on the iPad until after lunch. This means that at weekends and during school holidays he usually wants lunch at 9:30am!

Whilst Ben has got some games that are purely for entertainment (like Smash Cops which he got as a birthday present, or Gravity Guy and Sonic Racing), most of what he plays has a puzzle element.

His favourites?

• Angry Birds
• Aqueduct
• Cat Physics
• Cut the Rope (he recently completed this with some help from my wife)
• Feed Me Oil
• Feed That Dragon
• Scribblenauts (he’s a little young for this)
• Super Stickman Golf (an all-time favourite – we’ve completed it twice)
• Tinkerbox
• Where’s Wally

He has periods where he’ll just focus on one game to the exclusion of the rest. And that’s fine (for 15 minutes at a time…)

3. Entertainment

Partly from necessity, partly from principle, we ask Ben to go away and play by himself every day.

We live in an age of mass entertainment when it would be easy to find him something for him to passively consume. When I was young I read books and played with cars because there was nothing more exciting to do. Now there’s a million TV channels, apps and digital distractions fighting for our attention.

Clay Shirky puts the problem well:

I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!”

It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty high. Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment. But now it is an act of significant discipline to say, “I’m going to stare out the window. I’m going to schedule some time to stare out the window.” The endless gratification offered up by our devices means that the experience of reading in particular now becomes something we have to choose to do.

In a way, therefore, by insisting on analogue play (including reading and writing) we’re teaching mindfulness. It also reinforces the role of my wife and I as parents as opposed to mere babysitters/entertainers.

Are you a parent? What rules do you have in YOUR house? Do they work?

PS You’ll love Leo Babauta’s The Way of the Peaceful Parent

Last month Seth Godin posted 9 ideas in search of a blog post. Here’s my version:

1. Formal education should probably be free up to whatever level you want (and perhaps only compulsory up to age 11).
2. 99% Invisible is the podcast that most often makes me see the world in new ways.
3. I still haven’t figured out how to balance my photophobia and SAD. Thank goodness for Spring (and f.lux)
4. Tools are constraining. This is both good and bad.
5. Learning to touch-type at a young age (I think I was about 12) is possibly one of the best things I’ve ever done.
6. Things I Learned This Week is back, phoenix-like, as a free weekly newsletter.
7. There are no absolutes, only contrasts.
8. People tend to be skeptical about non-physically-obvious medical symptoms.
9. E-Prime blows my mind (via Simon Bostock)

Feel free to hit me up in the comments if you’d like me to expand upon any of these.

Image CC BY smlp.co.uk

Apologies for the relative drought here over the past couple of weeks. I’ve been working hard on some presentations that I think you’ll want to see.

You know what? I’ve been at JISC infoNet almost two years now but something I’m still getting to grips with is the different peaks and the troughs over the academic year. They’re just not the same in Higher Education as they are in schools. For a start, some of them are my own choice.

This past few weeks have definitely been a peak for me, one that will last until mid-March. All of my writing energy recently has been going into preparing three talks I’ve got coming up:

1. Are Open Badges the future for recognition of skills? (JISC CETIS conference, Nottingham, 23 February 2012)
2. Why we need a debate about the purpose(s) of education (DML Conference, San Francisco, 1 March 2012)
3. The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies (TEDx Warwick, Coventry, 10 March 2012)

So, three different topics in three very different formats. The Open Badges talk tomorrow is part of a wider session and will be fairly relaxed and informal. The Purpos/ed one is an Ignite talk where I get 5 minutes (exactly!) to talk about my subject. I’ve got 20 slides and they’re advanced automatically every 20 seconds. Eek!

Finally, and the one I’m most excited about giving, is my TEDx Warwick talk. I’ve been using and adapting the advice in Nancy Duarte’s books Resonate and Slide:ology to help get my message across. I haven’t quite finished this one yet (and I’d better get a move on because they want my slides two weeks in advance!)

I hope you understand, therefore, why updates here might be quite light until March 11th. I’ve posted a couple of quick things over at literaci.es over the past week and I’ll make sure I update my conference blog. Other than that, why not get involved in the OpenBeta process for my new ebook, if you haven’t already? And, if you can, why not join me at TEDx Warwick?

Image CC BY-NC-SA foto_mania

The e-book is going to be called The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies and I shall be employing the OpenBeta publishing model I pioneered a couple of years ago with #uppingyourgame: a practical guide to personal productivity.

 

Invest now for £1 and get each chapter as it is completed FREE!

Can’t see anything above? Click here!

What are ‘digital literacies’? Why are they important? How can I develop them both personally and in other people? These are some of the questions that ‘The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies by Doug Belshaw seeks to address. Informed by his doctoral thesis and experience as an educator, ‘The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies’ Doug is producing a timely resource for those who are interested in both the theory and the practice of digital literacies!

FAQ:

When are you going to finish this?

It depends on many things, but here’s my proposed timescale:

• v0.2 – April 2012
• v0.4 – June 2012
• v0.6 – August 2012
• v0.8 – October 2012
• v1.0 – December 2012

I’m erring on the conservative side here. I’d rather under-promise and over-deliver!

In what formats will the book be available?

The OpenBeta version will be available in iPad-friendly (and reasonably Kindle-friendly) PDF format. The finished version will be available in the following forms:

• PDF
• Kindle
• ePub
• (Paperback/Hardback depending on demand)

How much will the final version be?

£10 – around $15/16 at the current exchange rate

(this is subject to change without notice)

I still don’t understand the OpenBeta process?

More here, but this should help:

How long will the book be altogether?

I’m envisaging each chapter being about 1,000 words, so about 11,000 in total. This is subject to change when I start writing but it will be at least 10,000 words.

Are there any refunds? How do I know you will complete it?

No refunds, but I have managed to write several e-books before and have much more free time now I have completed my thesis! You can always wait until it’s finished, but that will cost more…

Image in book cover CC BY { pranav }

Got a different question? Ask it in the comments below!

The result of the analysis I carried out yesterday is a 34-page PDF document including graphs and anonymised feedback from the 137 readers who took part. You should be able to see it below (I recommend viewing fullscreen – click the arrows!)

If the above isn’t working for whatever reason, you can also get it at the Internet Archive.

1. The survey is now closed. Thank you very much to those who took time to give me some valuable feedback!

2. We have three winners of physical copies of Best of Belshaw 2011 randomly drawn from those leaving their name and email address. Congratulations Melanie Knight, Katie Hassman and Lesley Gourlay. Witness the process of randomly choosing here.

3. Interestingly, despite their having ceased over a year ago, re-introducing my Things I Learned This Week posts featured heavily in the question about how I could improve this blog. I’m still mulling over what to do about this.

Thanks again to those who took part. It’s given me much to smile about and lots to reflect upon. I’ll have an anonymised breakdown of results in a post next week. First I need to crunch the numbers and produce some pretty charts…