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?

Some people talk of ‘learning styles’ but I think that, really, we use each main type of style (kinaesthetic, visual, aural) depending on what it is we’re learning. In fact, as a teacher, I’ve observed this in the classroom.

Those (high-flyers) who have the groundwork understanding to quickly assimilate concepts need merely aural input to learn effectively.

Those (most of the class) who need some consolidation of the groundwork before assimilation need things explained visually.

Those (SEN, etc) who need to re-explain the groundwork completely before moving on need kinaesthetic activities.

Feel free to shoot me down, but that what I’ve observed. And the same is true for my own learning.

At the moment I’m trying to apply Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity to my Ed.D. thesis. Specifically, I’m interested in finding out how terms such as ‘digital literacy’ and ‘electracy’ are ambiguous. It’s confusing. So I did my equivalent of breaking out the Duplo:

Note that this is visual learning for you but kinaesthetic for me – I did something similar when doing my MA.

Thoughts/comments? Do you do something similar? :-p

I only had a short time to browse, but a book entitled As They Say In Zanzibar: Proverbial Wisdom From Around The World caught my eye. I love stuff like this; a country’s sayings reveal a lot about it’s culture and people.

Here’s some of my favourite from the (literally) thousands in the book:

Don’t put each foot on a different boat. (China)

Heroism consists in hanging on one minute longer. (Norway)

When it rains, fill the jar. (Turkey)

Hunger doesn’t say, ‘Stale bread,’ and cold doesn’t say ‘Old coat.’ (Georgia)

What is said over the dead lion’s body could not be said to him alive. (Republic of Congo)

No matter how long a log floats on the river it will never be a crocodile. (Mali)

Grief and joy are a revolving wheel. (India)

People who do what they say are not cowards. (Nigeria)

When you show the moon to a child, it sees only your finger. (Zambia)

A basket-maker who makes one basket makes a hundred. (Brazil)

Another reason why I like proverbs is because they’re a great example of what Steve Higgins, my Ed.D. thesis supervisor, would call productive ambiguity. They can be applied to many situations beyond the obvious!

I’d love to have the time to match up all of the wonderful proverbs to relevant Flickr pictures. I’ll have to make do with the rather handy Phrasr to semi-automate stuff instead… :-p

What are YOUR favourite proverbs?

Which iPhone apps do you use and wouldn’t like to be without?

This is what’s really going on. And I think Google’s only grudgingly pulling in Flickr and Twitter streams. They’d much rather you used Picasa and Google Chat. :-p

As a consequence, I’m in the market for an upgrade to a paid-for cloud-based backup solution. I asked a few people on Twitter and in person what they used for off-site backups. They mentioned the four below:

(too small? click on the table to enlarge!)

I tried these out. I found that all of them apart from Dropbox had something lacking:

• box.net is a bit too business-focused.
• MobileMe may provide extra features but only 20GB of storage. Also don’t like having to pay in one big chunk for a year’s service.
• SugarSync is interesting and the cheapest of the options above, but I didn’t like the interface.

As I navigated to the Dropbox website to give them my credit card details, I remembered Zumodrive. I used to use it all of the time last academic year, but hadn’t looked at it for a while. I thought it could be perfect for my needs! Why?

1. It now has ‘folder linking’. This means changes made in a particular folder are always reflected in Zumodrive with no extra actions needed by the user. This is also the case in the other solutions outlined above, but didn’t used to be the case with Zumodrive (it used to be like an online USB flash drive).
2. Photos are automatically synced with either iPhoto or Picasa (I use the latter). This is particularly handy for the photos I don’t deem worthy enough to go on my Flickr account.
3. As with Dropbox and other solutions, you can instantly share any file with others through a link on Zumodrive.
4. The cheapest upgrade is only $2.99/month.
5. You can open files from iWork 09.

I signed up for the $6.99/month 25GB option.

However, calculating the amount of data I was going to need to backup overall it looked like I was going to have to spend $9.99/month for 50GB and then, before long, probably have to move up to the 100GB $19.99/month plan. I didn’t like the sound of that.

I tweeted about this and Mark Wagner, amongst others, replied:

Thinking about this, I realised that I’d conflated cloud-based and off-site storage. What I really need is something to sync Documents and other files of my choosing so they’re available quickly and easily (e.g. via my iPhone). And then, separately, I need an ongoing archive of all of my stuff.

I’ve signed up for Mozy. They do unlimited non-commercial storage for $4.95/month. That’s my off-site storage solution. My cloud-based storage solution is going to be a free Dropbox account. Why? Because it’s truly cross-platform, has a great iPhone app and you can gain an extra 250MB storage for every referral you make!

I need 7 more people to sign up for Dropbox to get my maximum referral bonus space (3GB). If you’re going to sign up, would you consider using one of the links to the service in this post please?

What are YOU using? Why?

You can purchase an inexpensive copy of the book from Amazon or read it online for free via Google Books.

* Want to do this yourself? Try this script (which I used) or Mbedr.

The guidelines:

My response:

I know 2009 hasn’t finished yet, but Animoto (which I used to create the above video) has an image limit of 250.

View all of my #twitter365 photos and those of everyone who took part in the project.

Image CC-BY-NC-ND bobsd46 @ Flickr

These last few weeks have been difficult for me. Being promoted quickly is great but comes at the expense of very steep learning curves!

That’s when quotations mashed with images like the ones above are useful to spur me on. I’ve just used an online poster-printing service to get a bunch printed for my office. There more images like the one above available at the Flickr group entitled Great quotes about Learning and Change.

What are YOUR favourite images or quotations relating to motivation/productivity?