Open Thinkering

Menu

Tag: favourite

My 5 favourite non-fiction books

Posted on by Doug Belshaw
  1. The Art of Worldly Wisdom (Baltasar Gracian)
  2. The Complete Essays (Michel De Montaigne)
  3. The Passion of the Western Mind (Richard Tarnas)
  4. Pragmatism (William James)
  5. Moving Mountains: the art of letting others see things your way (Henry M. Boettinger)

These are all, either explicitly or implicitly, philosophical. This, of course, reflects my background, my first degree and my approach to life. But you don’t have to be a philosopher to enjoy these works: they’re extremely readable and the ideas and wisdom they contain is of use to everybody!

Owning a Kindle means I can carry around many of my favourite books with me wherever I am. The search functionality means I can quickly find the section I’m looking for. It’s regrettable that not every work is available digitally but I’m sure Google are working on it… 😉

What are your favourite works of non-fiction?

My favourite music of the ‘noughties’.

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

You can listen to all of the music I mention below through this Spotify playlist!

My Last.fm history, June-October 2009

So 2000-2009, commonly referred sniggeringly as the ‘noughties’, has come and gone – and with it the majority of my twenties. For all of it I listened to what I would deem quality music, and for a good deal of it used Last.fm to track what I listened to (and make recommendations). The visualization above shows my listening habits for part of 2009, courtesy of LastGraph.

It’s not always the case that what you listen to most is the music you actually love the most. In fact, quite often it’s the case that you save music for special occasions or ration it so familiarity doesn’t breed contempt. So here are the three tracks that were made in the ‘noughties’ that I love the most – and why. The links will enable you to listen to the song on Spotify. 🙂

John Mayer – 3×5 (2001)

I remember being in Café Rouge in York with Hannah when we heard this for the first time. It must have been 2003 as we were just married. We asked the waiter which album was playing and he replied it was John Mayer’s Room For Squares. I went home and immediately bought the CD. Annoyingly, however, it’s the only album of Mayer’s that isn’t available on Spotify (which I now use instead of CDs and MP3s).

What I love about 3×5 is the feeling of distance, the sense of the inexpressible in the lines:

Today I finally overcame
tryin’ to fit the world inside a picture frame
Maybe I will tell you all about it when I’m in the mood to
lose my way but let me say
You should have seen that sunrise with your own eyes
it brought me back to life
You’ll be with me next time I go outside
No more 3×5’s…

In perhaps my first use of the term, I’d call it a ‘bittersweet’ song. It’s positive yet mournful at the same time. I wish the live version did the studio version justice. It’s legendary – perhaps even more so in the context of the rest of the album. 🙂

The Cinematic Orchestra feat. Roots Manuva – All Things to All Men (2002)

When this came out I was working at HMV in Meadowhall, Sheffield. The Cinematic Orchestra produce that sound that’s all encompassing and envelops you. I absolutely adore, for example, the soundtrack to the film The Crimson Wing: Mystery of the Flamingos they did recently. The first three-and-a-half minutes is Cinematic Orchestra at the top of the game. Then Roots Manuva’s rhyming kicks in.

His lyrics make little sense. That doesn’t matter. It’s more than the sum of it’s parts. Wonderful. :-p

Bon Iver – Woods (2009)

Like the rest of the known world, I found Bon Iver’s album For Emma, Forever Ago to be beautiful and with an engaging backstory. However, it was when I started using Spotify that I came across the excellent EP Blood Bank – containing the sublime Woods. It’s rare for a track to be perfectly matched in sound, concept, and execution, but that’s exactly what we find here.

Wondeful melodies combine and build up to a crescendo. Use of auto-tune actually adds to atmosphere of the song, being used to make elements sound almost like wolves howling. It’s an extremely atmospheric track. One to play with headphones on, alone. I love it. 😀

Honorable Mentions:

Conclusion

Although you wouldn’t know it from the above, my tastes are fairly eclectic. I’m as likely to listen to The Prodigy as I am to some Ludovico Einaudi. But the above are those I come back to time and again. I’ll no doubt have made some glaring omissions – if so I’ll come back and edit this.

Hope you enjoy the above songs as much as I do!

The very best of teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

A couple of private messages and a comment on a previous post on this blog made me realise something the other day. Here I am assuming that readers of dougbelshaw.com are aware that I blogged for two years solely on teaching and education-related stuff at teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk. It would appear that this is not the case. And why should it be? After all, I make very little mention of it here.

So what follows is a roundup of what you missed between 2005 and the end of 2007. Hope you find something useful! 😀

According to the Most Popular Posts plugin still installed at teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk, the most visited posts are (in order) :

  1. How to write an application letter for a teaching-related job
  2. Online Storage
  3. I can’t teach properly
  4. 20 Ideas: Getting students to use their mobile phones as learning tools
  5. Interesting Desktop Backgrounds
  6. 10 Top Behaviour Management Tips
  7. WikiMapia.org
  8. 8 things that irritate me with edublogs
  9. Weekly Roundup (3 September 2006) – 1 – Theory
  10. Using Twitter with your students

There’s a few posts in there – numbers 2, 5 and 7, for example – that are there because of general Internet searches unrelated to education. Most of the rest in this list gained some traction due to being referenced on one or more sites with a larger number of readers! :-p

My all-time Top 10

1. The kind of school in which I want to work…

I referenced this post recently. In it, I attempt to explain the type of education system and school I want to be a part of. I compare teachers to being like ‘lifeguards’. Creating the graphics for this post and coming up with the metaphor helped clarify my thinking a great deal!

2. I can’t teach properly

I spend a lot of my time frustrated in life, but I’ve learned to live with it. In this post, I poured out this frustration in a way that seemed to strike a chord with quite a few other educators (judging by the comments!).

3. 5 reasons why I love teaching

Despite being frequently frustrated, I do actually love teaching. Most of the time, it doesn’t even feel like a job. Before we had Ben a couple of years ago, I would frequently tell Hannah (my wife) that I’d do it for free! That’s obviously changed a bit now that I have dependents, but the actual interfacing with young people, their enthusiasm and lack of fear to ask questions, is so refreshing. 🙂

4. 1 year on… How has blogging affected my life as a teacher?

I started blogging in 2005 after having read the blogs of other educators for a good while and commenting on them. My blogging regularly – usually every day – began when I was off work at my previous school due to stress. Connecting with educators worldwide made such a difference, and 2006 ended up being a great year. 😀

5. Infectious Learning: Teachers as Lifelong Learners

I’m a firm believer in teachers being allowed the time to be learners too. In fact, I think it’s essential to prevent stagnation. This post was sparked from an exchange during an interview in which the Head of a school I shall not name stated he was ‘somewhat suspicious’ that I’d remained in full-time education (when I did my MA in Modern History) ‘longer than I had needed to’. The post outlines four reasons why teachers need to be effective learners.

6. Digital Natives, Mountain Men and Pioneers

During 2006 I became increasingly tired of seeing both in blog posts and ‘academic’ research the terms ‘digital immigrant’ and ‘digital native’. This post was a follow-up to an earlier post in which I called the dichotomy a false one and suggested an alternative.

7. Do textbooks hamper 21st-century learning?

This post was in response to a call by Wes Fryer for a moratorium on the purchase of new textbooks. Others, such as Stephen Downes and Vicki Davis had joined in the debate. I looked at the ins-and-outs of textbook usage, adding that I managed to burn myself out during my first year and-a-bit of teaching by seeing textbooks as evil things that should be avoided. A blended approach is a much better option… 🙂

8. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teachers

There’s nothing like a good-old ‘list’ post! This one goes through, unsurprisingly, the seven ‘habits’ I believe teachers I would class as ‘effective’ and – dare I say it – inspirational teachers possess.

9. Homework-casting using del.icio.us

I don’t think I would have included this post in my Top 10 was it not for a conversation during last week’s EdTechRoundup FlashMeeting. I suggested a couple of years ago a possible method for automatic resource-delivery to students via RSS of homework/coursework materials. Theoretically, you should be able to deliver any type of file via RSS – not just audio, video and PDFs. Unfortunately, I’m still not aware of any program that allows the automatic downloading of any type of file enclosed in the RSS feed. 🙁

10. Yearly Roundup – The 20 best edublog posts of 2006

I used to really enjoy doing my weekly, monthly and yearly roundups of the edublogosphere. There’s two reasons why I can’t do that any more. First, I have less time these days – what with my son, working for educational publishers in my ‘spare’ time, and an additional role in school. Second, the edublogosphere has (happily) expanded greatly in the last couple of years. It’s just impossible to keep up… 😉

What are YOUR favourite posts on your blog(s)?

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
css.php