I spent last week in New York at the Mobility Shifts conference. No, I wasn’t there on JISC business; I took some annual leave and got there thanks to the generosity of Scott McLeod, Director of CASTLE. In return, Scott gets my undying gratitude and the following blog posts:

• Introducing Doug Belshaw, blogging at #MobilityShifts
• Day 1 – Wikipedia and Formal Education
• Day 2 – Privacy, Surveillance and the Academic Commons
• Day 3 – Hacking, Playfulness and Free Universities
• Day 4 – Open Access, Mobile Devices and Connected Learning
• Day 5 – Emerging Learning Environments, Peer to Peer grading and an Interview with Cathy Davidson
• #MobilityShifts – 5 key trends for the future of education

I’d usually put this on my conference blog but, well, I spent longer than usual crafting these posts and they constitute a body of work that (albeit predicated on the thoughts of others) I think you should go and read.

Only got time to read one of these posts? Try Day 5 featuring my interview with Cathy Davidson!

In two weeks’ time I’ll be in Dubai with my Dad and sister for a final celebration of his time in the UAE working for the SSAT. It should also, all things being equal, be a celebration of my having finished my doctoral thesis, having started my studies over six years ago.

The thesis is on the subject of digital literacies and, I believe, not only is a useful overview of the development of the digital and new literacies arena, but contributes a model of how to develop digital literacies which should be pragmatically useful. Since 2007 I’ve been updating dougbelshaw.com/thesis as I have written and updated each chapter. Recently, I also started a new blog at literaci.es.

One blog that came at some speed onto my radar in the last couple of years is DMLcentral, a project funded by the McArthur Foundation in the US:

DML Central is the online presence for the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the systemwide University of California Humanities Research Institute and hosted at the UC Irvine campus. Digital media practices are fundamentally reshaping society in far-reaching ways, especially in how people all around the world are learning and connecting with one another.

Across the globe, an ever-expanding number of researchers, policy-makers, practitioners, industry, scholars and youth are exploring the boundaries and possibilities of digital media and the networked world of the twenty-first century.

At DML Central, we want to do all we can to fuel that exploration – to enable break-through collaborations and evoke illuminating conversations that lead to innovations in learning and public participation.

There’s some well-known individuals in the field of new literacies and media who blog for DMLcentral – you may have heard of danah boyd, Howard Rheingold, and Aleks Krotoski for example. The About page also demonstrates the partnership between DMLcentral and Futurelab, and organization with whom I’ve worked before.

Seeing a synergy between my own research and DMLcentral, I sent a speculative email to the team expressing a desire to contribute to the blog. I’m delighted to say that they were enthusiastic about the idea and after some discussions I’ll be contributing my first post next month.

I’ll still be blogging here and the other various places online I mentioned in this previous post (which also details an easy way to keep up with all of my writing and research!)

Years ago, I realized that there was no way to take a vacation and manage the always-on, always-in-contact lifestyle that technology affords. Initially, I thought that it’d be possible to simply ignore email while on vacation and deal with it afterwards but I realized that this was untenable. It takes months to catch up on thousands of emails and I’d come back and immediately burn out again trying to catch up.

She goes on to add that “disappearing without properly making certain that everyone has what they need is irresponsible and disrespectful.” That’s why I’m giving advanced notice that I’m going on a personal digital hiatus from Friday 17th December 2010 until Monday 10th January 2011.

In practice this means that during this period:

• I won’t reply to any email (and any email I do receive will be deleted).
• I’m uncontactable via Twitter.
• I won’t be blogging or moderating comments.

If you need to get hold of me, there’s two options: phone me (if you haven’t got my numbers already, you don’t need them) or contact me at work (until 21st December / after 4th January)

I’ll keep on clipping the occasional article I come across, but I’m intending to swear off Twitter, email and blogging for three weeks, during which time my wife will almost certainly give birth to our daughter. If that isn’t reason enough, I’ll also be doing the following:

1. Getting back into shape. The snow has knocked my exercise regime for six.
2. Producing ‘Best of Belshaw: 2010′
3. Working on my Ed.D. thesis
4. Thinking hard about the future.
5. Spending time with my Dad (back from the UAE for Christmas)

So, if you’ve got something to ask of me, best ask before Friday. Please.

I realised at the weekend that it’s been about 5 years since I started blogging properly, having got into my groove sometime in November 2005. Back then, as a classroom teacher, I wrote at teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk about education and educational technology. What got me started was reading and commenting on the high-quality blogs of a small number of international educators, the dilution of which I lamented a few years later.

In the past 5 years I’ve gone from History teacher to E-Learning Staff Tutor to Director of E-Learning to working at JISC infoNet. I’ve also cultivated increasing amounts of stubble, as this video of me as a 24 year-old demonstrates! Hopefully, as I’ve read, learned and understood more about the world, my style of writing has improved. Well, one can hope.

The following are the things that I think anyone with a blog would do well to heed. I’d be interested in your take.

1. Comment count != quality

The quality of a blog post has almost nothing to do with the number of comments you get – and everything to do with the zeitgeist, the way you phrase questions and how you structure your blog.

2. How to get more readers

To get more people visiting your blog, go and comment on other people’s and autotweet your blog posts via Twitter. This works up to a point, after which you can either keep it real or become a cynical marketing machine. I prefer content over style. Most of the time.

3. WordPress and Bluehost rock

I’ve tried lots of different blogging platforms and webhosts, but have found WordPress to consistently do what I want of it and Bluehost [affiliate link] to be cheap, feature-filled and rock-solid.

4. Have an ‘ideas garden’

I’ve blatantly appropriated this term from someone who used it in conversation with me a while ago. Sorry if that was you – I try to credit the sources of ideas I share as well as images I use. An ideas garden is simply a collection of draft blog posts that you come back to, adding pictures, further ideas, etc. until they form whole posts. It can also stop you ranting when you’re in a bad mood. :-p

5. Digital footprint

I used to have a link to my curriculum vitae on my blog but, in fact, the whole thing is a digital portfolio, with my last three positions secured to a great extent because of my online presence. SEO is important, as is attempting to control the first page of Google search results (so that they’re all positive): my digital footprint is more important to me than my credit score. Fact.

Image CC BY Michael Ruiz

This week I have been mostly…

In hospital

First of all we had a bit of a scare with Hannah’s pregnancy. The risk of the baby being born with Downs Syndrome was elevated from 1/1000 to 1/28. She had an amniocentisis (which means she needs to take it easy for a couple of weeks) but everything’s fine. Oh, and it’s a girl! (due late December)

And then, whilst at nursery on Thursday, Ben decided it would be a great idea to stick a chickpea up his left nostril. Cue my coming home from work early. Two hospitals, three doctors, some pinning down from Daddy and a bloody nose later, it was out! I don’t think he’ll do that again…

Presenting

They say things comes in threes and that no buses tend to all come at once. It’s the same with me presenting. I’ve got three in the space of a week – yesterday I demoed the OER infoKit at the Open International Resources International Symposium.

Next Tuesday I’m presenting to a JISC Advance comms group about the benefits of Google Apps, then it’s Google Teacher Academy on Thursday. Awesome.

Blogging

Whilst I’m no longer committed to blogging every day, it would seem that being free to post every day (and not necessarily with images) means I might as well be!

I’ve also been experimenting with Posterous, importing this blog to http://dajbelshaw.posterous.com. It was mainly an experiment (took 5 days, worked flawlessly) but it actually looks great and works really well. Hmmm….

Running

Well, not since the BUPA Great North 10k, actually, but I was really pleased that I managed it in 49:30. That’s underneath the 50 minute target I set myself! My main target was to get around the course in under that time and at the end I felt I could have gone faster. I’m aiming for 45 minutes for the next one (although it’s a half-marathon next according to the plan)

Many thanks to those who sponsored me. Overall, including Gift Aid, UNICEF received over double the target amount!

To me, productivity is always productivity for something. I see no point in being productive simply for the sake of it. That’s because it’s all about outputs. The thing I love about working at JISC infoNet is that I’m ‘measured’ on what I produce, not how I go about doing it. In other words, I’m treated as a grown-up.

Something that mature people do is constantly reassess what they’re doing and why they’re doing it; as their circumstances and priorities change, they adapt. The fancy word for it is probably recontextualization. At the moment I’m a husband and father who’s away from home more than I used to be, in the final year of my Ed.D. and blogging every day. One of those has to give.

Blogging every day since the start of the year has been a wonderful discipline for me. But there’s three reasons why I’m going to have reduce my outputs here:

1. I spend at least 10 hours per week blogging. That’s time I need to spend getting my thesis done by 21st December.*
2. Blogging produces ephemera. I want to produce more e-books (and physical books via Lulu)
3. It’s time for me to prioritise things that don’t involve screens during my leisure time.

So what’s staying and what’s going? As a minimum Weeknotes (Saturdays) and Things I Learned This Week (Sundays) shall continue. Other items will appear as and when.

I hope you understand.

* Why 21st December? I’ll turn 30 on the 22nd and my wife is due to give birth to our second child on the 28th!

Image CC BY-NC-SA net_efekt

You may recognise the middle part from My Digital Reading Workflow.

So, to summarize in bullet points:

• I use a template to make sure I lay them out in a standard way (and to make it easier for me)
• I read things via RSS (email) and ‘favorite’ things on Twitter, add to Instapaper, etc.
• Interesting stuff is bookmarked with the week’s tag on Delicious (in this case TILTW9)
• On Saturday evening and Sunday morning I choose the most interesting for each section to share in the post

Hope that helps!

(image CC BY-NC Jeremy Brooks)

So here’s the plan. To make blogging every day sustainable, I need a system. Here’s what I’m thinking:

• Monday Motivation – hints, ideas and tips about productivity, motivational quotes and the like.
• Tuesday Tech. – an update on edtech stuff and related musings.
• Wednesday Wisdom – a mashup of Creative Commons-licensed photos and quotations from Balthasar Gracián’s The Art of Worldly Wisdom.
• Thursday Thesis – parts of, or ideas, related to my Ed.D. thesis.
• Friday Fun – some end-of-the-working-week light heartedness, fun and random stuff.
• Saturday Stats – an opportunity for me to post things related to visualization and infographics.
• Sunday Scientia – the new name for Things I Learned This Week (‘Scientia’ is Latin for ‘knowledge’)

Thoughts? It may mean I need to change the categories around a bit…

How do you connect to people online? from D’Arcy Norman on Vimeo.

Connecting with people online is, in a sense, a very strange experience. I can know a lot more about someone that I’ve never (and probably will never) meet in person who lives on the other side of the world than I ever will about a work colleague. In fact, as I’ve often commented to people when doing this, I think meeting people online actually leads to better relationships than if the situation is reversed.

For instance, this might sound silly but I’m always very careful never to wear my glasses when meeting people for the first time. Why? I don’t want them to pigeon-hole me. The next time they see me and I’ve got my contact lenses in I’m the guy ‘not wearing his glasses’. It’s a perception thing.

Meet people online, however, and it’s almost a window into their soul. One thing I find fascinating is people’s choice of avatar on Twitter. Some people choose to have an image of themselves to aid recognition when people meet them in person. Others change their avatar often. The people I’m interested in, though, are people like me: people who stick to one avatar and use it everywhere they go online. Presumably that’s because their avatar says something about them. Here’s a few by way of example from people in my Twitter network – what do you think their avatar and bio says about them?

@lisibo

Primary MFL teacher, ADE, eTwinning Ambassador, speaker and blogger, improving techie and generally enthusiastic gal who loves her iPhone

@durff

[no bio]

@gsiemens

Changing the node set…

In the video embedded above, Dave Cormier talks about the ‘light’ connections we make with people and how these build up over time. I think this is what D’Arcy Norman (author of the video and, as of last month, no longer on Twitter) and Stephen Downes (a one-way user of Twitter) don’t get about social networking. Yes, 140 characters may be all too brief. But if I connect with you 50 times over the course of a few days, having had to craft each message to fit within the 140-character constraint, I bet we know each other a whole lot more than we did previously. And then you can go and look at my Flickr stream, my blog, etc. for more background. It’s not a replacement, it’s complementary.

Knowing an individual’s personal background and beliefs helps you judge when making decisions on whether to follow their advice and/or lead. But that’s not always best done only on the strength of meeting them face-to-face. I, for example, am much better (in terms of being coherent, understandable) when expressing myself using the written, rather than the spoken, word. Most connections online these days inhabit a world that is partly synchronous, partly asynchronous.* People may respond straight away to something you put online, or they may respond hours, days, weeks, months, or even years later. Because online content is an implicit open-ended invitation to give your opinion and make comment, you can do so at your leisure. This promotes thinking and drafting when blogging, and iterating towards your actual opinion when using tools such as Twitter.

People who haven’t seen videos or listened to podcasts in which I feature are often surprised when they meet me in person. For a start, I’m often younger than they thought (one person commented that they assumed, because of my avatar, that I was ‘a fat, balding, forty-something’ – thanks!) People also don’t tend to realise I have an, admittedly diminishing, Northumbrian accent – replete with the rolling R’s. I’m all for personality and individuality, but sometimes these two factors – my age and my accent – have proved to be barriers in the physical world. Not so online.

So an ode to the internet and the connections it makes. No, scratch that. An ode to the people who give up their time to connect to people. To those who make my life better by contributing, questioning and criticising my work and my thinking. It’s great to have and to be part of an active audience!

* There’s probably a word for this, but I don’t know what it is!

That may sound a little, shall we say, geeky, so let me explain. There’s two ways you can ‘live for ever’ in this world. The first is to become so famous that people talk about you until the end of time. As that’s difficult for most of us, the second way is more likely. All you’ve got to do with the second way is to pass on your genes (and your surname) to your offspring. I’m doing well with the latter: my son Benjamin Belshaw was born 20 months ago and will, I hope, continue the illustrious Belshaw line. With the first method, however, I’m still struggling.

My problem is this:

1. Most of my ideas are in the form of writing in the digital landscape (i.e. on this blog or others on the Internet)
2. Books and other printed matter in the physical realm are a lot more ‘permanent’ at present that writing in the digital realm.
3. When I die dougbelshaw.com will cease to exist.
4. Ergo, unless my ideas are so amazing that they become ubiquitous during my lifetime, they will have little impact after my death.

So I’m left with a problem. Should I start writing a book? Is all I’m writing here ultimately futile? Should I be creating static HTML pages so archive.org can index them?

Does this even matter?