dougbelshaw.com/blog

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Go to http://google.com. See how certain elements are revealed only when you move your mouse? That’s über-cool in my book. I wanted the same for the main part of my site - but have the coding skills of a rhino.

Fortunately, my good friend Paul Lewis (@aerotwist) is a bit lot of a coding ninja. In fact, he’ll soon be packing his bags for Sweden to work for Fi, one of the foremost web design companies in the world. He took about 3.1 seconds to knock up the relevant scripts, etc.

So now, if you go to dougbelshaw.com you’ll notice that the bullet points fade in when you move the mouse. Classy.

I’ve rewritten the README file included in the zip file below to make it more understandable by mere mortals, but you’ll still need to know your way around HTML. I’ll do my best to help if you get stuck and add a comment below, but I’m making no promises!

Posted: March 2nd, 2010
Categories: Technology
Tags: aerotwist, DOM, download, fader, Google, HTML, Paul Lewis, script
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As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a bit uneasy about Google’s de facto monopoly on, well, pretty much everything I do online. Yes, they provide everything for free, yes they’re offerings are class-leading, and yes they support Open Source. But that doesn’t make me feel any less worried about the control they have over my life online.

Recently I read How To: Escape From Google’s Clutches, Once and For All which is a great (if slightly paranoid) look at how you can shift your online life to other services.

Here’s what I’m considering:

Email

Advantages: Ultra-secure, out of Google’s clutches
Disadvantages: Paid-for ($49.98/year for 10GB), less features

 

Search

Advantages: Searches Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask from one box
Disadvantages: Still not completely rid of Google, no ‘product search’, integration with maps, etc.

 

Online office

Advantages: More features (e.g. Zoho Planner)
Disadvantages: Familiarity, integration with email

 

Web Browser

Advantages: Fast, visual tabs, Bittorrent and file-sharing built-in
Disadvantages: Fewer extensions/add-ons, less widely-supported

 

What do YOU think? Am I being paranoid? What would you consider switching to? What do you currently use?

(Image taken from modernl.com. Presumed fair use)

Posted: February 23rd, 2010
Categories: Technology
Tags: Dogpile, Google, Hushmail, monopoly, Opera, services, Zoho
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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!

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

• Scraping Away Layers Of My Own Skin
• The Blue Students
• You Have No Life
• How I Work: Coffee Shops
• Just stay hungry.
• Wherever You Can Find It (my absolute favourite post of his – just for the honesty)

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.

Posted: January 25th, 2010
Categories: Education
Tags: blog, Dan Meyer, Google, PhD, posts, teaching, tribute
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I had intended, as per my proposal in The new blog order to post another batch of some humorous, light-hearted stuff today. But I don’t feel like it.

Why? It would seem a little inappropriate given the huge loss of life due to the earthquake in Haiti to do anything else but provide a link to a place where you can donate to help the relief effort. Having grown up through various appeals (Ethiopia, Kosovo, etc.) I used to be pretty much immune to such appeals. Things kind of change, though, when you start a family of your own. A BBC Radio 4 report this morning about injured children sleeping amongst dead bodies did enough for me to donate this time around.

$

Don’t want to use this? Want to donate to another charity? Check out Google’s Support Disaster Relief in Haiti page.

Posted: January 15th, 2010
Categories: Everything Else
Tags: BBC Radio 4, charity, donation, earthquake, Google, Haiti, UNICEF
Comments: View Comments.

Quentin Hardy, Forbes:

Your day begins with a wake-up call from your Google Android phone. As you run to the shower, you hit Google News and check headlines, then Gmail. Your first appointment of the day has been moved to a new location; Google Maps will direct you there. Quickly update your expense report–including the printout of that sales presentation using, say, Google Template–and shoot them to the back office in India (in Hindi, if you prefer, with Google Translate). Your boss wants to discuss your group’s contributions to some marketing documents? Lean on Google Groups. You’re not even out the door yet. You have the rest of the day to search for work-critical information on the Web while you’re at the office–to say nothing of snatching a few moments to download a game, check stock prices, organize your medical records, share photos and pick a restaurant and movie for the evening. How convenient.

I love Apple stuff. I love Google stuff even more because it’s free, is often the best solution, and most of the time promotes collaboration and sharing. However, I’m a bit concerned that they could know a little too much about me. Here’s the Google stuff I use currently:

• Google Chrome web browser
• Google Apps (personal)
• Google Apps Education Edition (at work)
• Google Picasa
• Google Product Search
• Google FastFlip
• Google Maps
• Google Dictionary

I wasn’t very far away last month from purchasing AlertMe Energy for our house. This uses Google PowerMeter to show how much energy you are using at home. It’s better than the LCD display we’ve got currently, but I was a bit uneasy about it – for the same reasons that I would be about using Google Health.

It’s all very well using the best stuff, but at what cost? All it would take is a government requisition of the data from one company and, if I used Google PowerMeter and Health in addition to the products I already use, they could know:

1. What I’ve been looking at online.
2. The names of my family and friends.
3. Where I’ve been recently.
4. Who I’ve been communicating with and what about.
5. What I look like, as well as what my friends and family look like.
6. My political bias.
7. How much energy I’ve been using at home.
8. My health record.

I think that’s too much information to put into the hands of one company, even if there mantra is Don’t be evil.

So I won’t be buying an Android phone. I won’t be buying AlertMe Energy (or any other service that uses Google PowerMeter) or using Google Health either.

I have to say that it’s a potential problem, not an actual one at the moment… I’ll keep you updated.

Further reading:

• New Statesman – Is Google Evil? (August 2009)
• Google Public Policy Blog – Google’s Approach To Privacy (December 2009)

Posted: December 21st, 2009
Categories: Technology
Tags: AlertMe, data, diversity, excellence, Google, identity, privacy
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The problem:

Kerry Turner:

Any educator launching into the world of social media has to know its risks.

…

One evening, after reading several posts on Twitter, it was mentioned that school Acceptable User Policies were declaring that all contact with students on social media was to be avoided.

…

There are strong cases for and against its use. Most important is where the very public nature of social media spotlights professional conduct, where it is used as a vehicle for bullying, or presents us with evidence which we might need to flag up or report to a higher authority. Teachers worry that their natural way of conversing; expressing themselves after a frustrating day, or humorous posts about their personal life could compromise their position at work and result in a telling off from a superior. Yet we teach children to mind themselves online. Within reason, do we not need to consider the same? My belief is that as more students and NQT’s are educated about their use of social media, so the number of incidents which have resulted in censure will become less.

(my emphasis)

A solution?

IF “teacher” AND “http://www.google.com/search?&q=teacher” = “unprofessional” THEN “censure”

Goodness knows I’ve tried my best to put together some reasonable Acceptable Use Policies and ‘Digital Guidelines’ in the past. I think that we have to come to terms with the fact that people live increasingly large amounts of their lives connected via social media. So if you’re a teacher, use Twitter and occasionally swear, then protect your updates. If you don’t, and mind what you say, then as you were.

Using Google (or any search engine, for that matter) to search for an educator should bring up positive results on the first page. If it doesn’t, you’re doing something wrong.

After all, anyone can find out something negative or ‘unprofessional’ about a person if they do enough digging.

Posted: December 7th, 2009
Categories: Education, Technology
Tags: AUP, common-sense, e-safety, Google, guidelines, Kerry Turner, social media, Twitter
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Image CC BY derrickkwa @ Flickr

I tried to do something very simple yesterday. Surprisingly, it caused me a bit of a headache. What was it? I just wanted to subscribe to some blogs via email.

Why would I want to subscribe to blogs via email? Well, for all I love Feedly, I have to go to a different location to access this. This involves a physical and conceptual shift. Making blog posts (or links to them) appear in my email inbox means I can’t really ignore them. In other words, I’m more likely to keep up-to-date.

However, when I went to subscribe to some blogs the option to subscribe by email wasn’t available to me (necessitating the use of xFruits) or seemed to be available but then didn’t work.

It’s trivial (and free!) to enable readers to subscribe via email to your blog. Here’s how:

1. Go to Feedburner and login using your Google account.

2. ‘Burn’ (i.e. add) your feed to Feedburner (you can find your feed URL by clicking on the RSS icon to the right in your address bar when you visit your blog):

3. Within Feedburner, click on the ‘Publicize’ tab and then on ‘Email subscriptions’ on the left-hand side:

4. Follow the (clear) instructions as to how to proceed. It shows you how you can add the option to subscribe via email to your blog’s sidebar.

5. Click on the ‘Optimize’ tab within Feedburner and then ‘BrowserFriendly’ on the left-hand side:

6. Follow the instructions, enabling the BrowserFriendly service.

7. Make sure all the links to your RSS feed on your blog point towards the new Feedburner feed. If you’ve got a self-hosted Wordpress-powered blog, the easiest way to do this is to download the relevant plugin to do this for you!

The result, if you follow these steps, will be that if users click on your RSS they should see something like this:

If you need any extra help or have some tips please use the comments section below!

Posted: October 25th, 2009
Categories: Technology
Tags: blog, feed, Feedburner, Google, guide, howto, RSS, Wordpress
Comments: View Comments.

Image BY-NC-SA Kaeru @ Flickr

I’ve got an idea. Educators need high-quality videos explaining key concepts and processes. There are some great providers of these out there (notably BrainPOP) but these cost $$$. On the flip side, there’s graphic artists, illustrators and animators who are starting out and need examples to add to their portfolio.

The quality of visuals in a video makes a great deal of difference to its overall impact. An example of this is the Shift Happens video, originally created by Karl Fisch. You can view the changes and improvements it has been through on this wiki. Whilst v1.0 was powerful, you’d have to agree that v4.0 has a lot more impact!

My idea, then, is this:

1. Educator comes up with idea for short explanatory video (e.g. how Google and other search engines work)
2. Educator (with help of their Twitter/Facebook/whatever network) comes up with storyboard for idea including a script.*
3. Storyboard and script are put in a central repository under a Creative Commons BY-SA license.
4. Graphic designer comes along and chooses one they believe they can produce to a high quality and cost-effectively.
5. Graphic designer produces video and shares on video-sharing site (e.g. YouTube). They are free to monetize this through Google Adsense and the like.
6. Repository updated showing video has been created.

The great thing about this model is that everyone would win.

So… is this a good idea?

I’m up for creating the repository (with help from others) if enough people think it’s a goer.

* Details of graphics required for this wouldn’t be as important as the script itself.

Posted: October 11th, 2009
Categories: Education
Tags: animators, Creative Commons, designers, edte.ch, educational technology, educators, elearning, Google, illustrators, videos, YouTube
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People come from far and wide to read this blog:

Source: Clustrmap

At my previous blog (teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk – back online soon!) I used to reflect monthly on blog visitors and subscribers via RSS or email. In a relentless drive to improve vistors’ experience when visiting the blog I’d analyze which browsers were being used, their screen resolution, and so on.

I haven’t really done that since moving over to blogging here at dougbelshaw.com/blog. Whilst I don’t intend to produce monthly blog posts on the matter, I thought it would be interesting and useful to reflect on the information I’ve got about blog visitors and subscribers!

The two tools I use to find out about blog visitors are both now owned and provided for free by Google: Analytics (for visitors) and Feedburner (for subscribers)

Visitors

The following graph shows how many visits were made to this blog per week between 26 February 2009 (when I installed the Google Analytics Wordpress plugin) and today:

Visits are slowly on the rise and are affected significantly by the school year! I’m slightly concerned that people spend, on average, less than two minutes here and tend to only visit one or two pages or posts.

Perhaps I need to make the blog easier to navigate and flag up related material?

So what are people looking for when they come here? The Top 10 most visited posts/pages is make interesting reading:

Unsurprisingly, stuff that was of direct practical utility – either in the form of a downloadable resource or a how-to guide – featured heavily in the Top 10. Geeky stuff also features significantly. I was, however, delighted to see that my Director of E-Learning interview presentation on How E-Learning can contribute to raising achievement was up there as well and that people, on average, spent over five minutes reading through it!

Finally on the general visitor front, I’m pleased to see plenty of people coming from referring sites:

The majority of these referring sites were social media/networking sites such as Twitter and Disqus (the comments system that I use on this blog).

Subscribers

As I expected, most subscribers use either Google (iGoogle, Google Reader) or FriendFeed to keep up-to-date with my blog posts:

At one time this would have been dominated by Bloglines. Google, as with most things, now rules the roost!

The above chart shows a combination of those who subscribe to the RSS feed via a feed reader or by email. Almost exactly 10% of the 964 people who subscribe to this blog do so by email. The great advantage of this is that I can see who they are and (potentially) contact them without having to put up a public blog post.

Subscribers act differently to general visitors. The latter might only ever view this blog once, having searched for a very specific thing on a search engine and leave after gaining that new knowledge or insight. Subscribers, on the other hand, have (presumably) made a judgement that this blog consistently produces content that they find relevant and useful.

You’d expect the Top 10 posts/pages for subscribers to be different. And it is!

I think it’s fair to say that the majority of subscribers to this blog are those related to education in some way. And that would make sense given that the tagline is Educational Technology, Leadership & Productivity!

The best indicator of which posts have been most popular, however, comes from the sidebar widget at dougbelshaw.com/blog (RSS/email readers will need to click through to see it). This is powered by the previously-mentioned Disqus and measures how much interest a post has caused based on factors such as the number of comments it generated directly, how many tweets there on Twitter link to it, the number of trackbacks it received, and the number of pageviews.

To finish off, then, here are the current Top 10:

1. HOWTO: Present using Cooliris (the basics…)
2. Why I’m trying to make myself redundant.
3. HOWTO: Present using Cooliris (advanced)
4. Assessment in UK schools: a convenient hypocrisy?
5. A Week of Divesting: an introduction
6. A (temporary) farewell to a hero.
7. Heuristical Templates (or, how to review elearning stuff in a way that benefits others)
8. On the important difference between hitchhiking and bandwagon-jumping.
9. How Wordpress-powered P2 is (hopefully) going to leave me more organized and productive!
10. Carol Dweck on ‘growth mindsets’ and motivation.

Posted: October 8th, 2009
Categories: Everything Else
Tags: blog, Bloglines, Disqus, Feedburner, FriendFeed, Google, Google Reader, iGoogle, RSS, stats, Twitter, website, Wordpress
Comments: View Comments.

I’ve just typed ‘Director of E-Learning’ (in quotes) into Google. The results left me surprised, pleased and dismayed all at once…

I was surprised that Laura Walker’s blog post of her (successful) expression of interest in the ‘Director of E-Learning position at her school was in first place. I was pleased for her, and for Dan Stucke – another Director of E-Learning – whose blog post also featured on the front page.

But… where am I? It sounds a bit egotistical, I know, but I was kind of expecting to be there too. Where’s the link to my Director of E-Learning interview blog post? Some may construe this blog post as a blatant attempt to point out to Google that I’m a Director of E-Learning too, thank you very much and to get my name on that front page.

You’d be right.

Posted: August 28th, 2009
Categories: Education
Tags: Dan Stucke, Director of E-Learning, Doug Belshaw, Education, Google, Laura Walker
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