Welcome back! I'm currently in Turkey with Nick Dennis presenting about technology to History educators at the request of EUROCLIO. Resources (in Turkish!) here...
The biggest thing I learned this week offline was at a DriveTech Speed Awareness course after I was caught doing 36mph in a 30mph zone. It was mostly how not to use technology when teaching people stuff. There’s definitely a blog post in there somewhere…
Rapportive is a plugin for Firefox or Chrome that replaces the adverts in GMail with some contextual social media information about the people who send you email:
beWeeVee is like Etherpad on steroids. But likes Microsoft Silverlight a bit too much for my liking.
Picnik, the awesome browser-based image editor, has been acquired by Google. This is not a good thing: Flickr (owned by Yahoo!) allows you to use Picnik to edit your photos. I guess we can kiss that functionality goodbye.
ManyCam (Win/Mac) allows you to add effects to your webcam videos/chats. Which could be interesting for EdTechRoundUp tonight…
Productivity & Inspiration
Lifehacker has a great post on ‘just in case’ vs. ‘just in time’. The latter might seem like a good idea, but you’ll always miss out on opportunities to apply knowledge and skills when you don’t have them…
‘Spezzatura’ is an Italian word that means something like ‘doing your craft without a lot of visible effort’. It’s something I’ll be striving for in future!
Leo Babauta at Zen Habits has produced The Little Guide to Inspiration. I like his opening quotation from Jack London: “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
It’s a while since I’ve written a stream-of-consciousness. This post by Lifehacker shows how writing 750 words in such a way and then analysing them can lead to increased productivity.
The Shadow Children’s Secretary, Michael Gove, of the Conservative party, has made some comments about education this week. Turns out he’s a bit of a reactionary. “Most parents would rather their children had a traditional education, with children sitting in rows, learning the kings and queens of England,” he said. Not this parent. I’ve changed my voting habits.
UEFA want more officials in some crazy positions at Europa League games. The rest of the world wants goalmouth technology. <Sigh>
The UK Digital Economy bill could wipe out free wifi in many places due to draconian record-keeping requirements aimed to crack down on copyright infringements.
There’s an official petition to have 10^27 (that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) be prefixes with ‘hella’. That would make for ‘hellatons’ and ‘hellawatts’. Awesome.
“Enthusiasm is compressed expertise” – I like that idea!
Quotations
Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance. (Samuel Johnson)
I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everyone. (Bill Cosby)
Courage is being scared to death… and saddling up anyway. (John Wayne)
The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about. (Dr. Wayne Dyer)
Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do. (John Wooden)
I realised this week that, whilst I can always re-find what I share in my Things I Learned This Week posts, I wasn’t adding them to my Delicious bookmarks.
That’s why things are going to change (slightly).
From now on, you can find everything I’ve bookmarked of note each week with the abbreviation TILTW followed by the relevant number at my Delicious account. This week’s bookmarks, therefore, can be found at:
The top 5 in each section will go below, doing away with the generic ‘Top 3′ section. I think it’s an improvement.
I’ve also, after some great advice via Lifehacker, created an FAQ using Posterous (dougsfaq.posterous.com). A fair few people email me directly, or contact me via my Google Profile for advice. Whilst I’m in my email I can fire off a sanitised version to post@posterous.com, thereby creating an FAQ. Genius!
Tech.
Crocodoc is a way to collaborate upon and annotate Word, PDF and PowerPoint files (instead of having to upload and convert to Google Docs format, etc.)
I was tempted to dismiss Google’s claim that the prosecution of some of its employees in Italy is a ‘serious threat to the web‘ – but actually, it may be. After all, if companies can be prosecuted for what users upload even if they remove it ASAP, then we’ve got a problem.
Another reason to go and work in the sun. Research shows that living abroad is linked with enhanced creativity. I have a feeling there may be more behind it that this.
Do you over-organize? Perhaps it’s affecting your productivity. Learn to organize ‘just enough’!
Education & Academic
OK, so his approach starts to grate after a few minutes, but this guy (who recently dropped out of university) has some important points to make about education in the 21st century:
We need new ways of assessment. This RKM process looks promising.
Schools are ‘churning out the unemployable’, apparently. I was shocked to read that 20% of people of working age in the UK do not have a job – and not because there aren’t any, but because they’re ‘demotivated’.
You’d probably be hung, drawn and quartered for this in England, but these are some fun examplesof American defacing banknotes in the name of art/graffiti/self-expression.
I have never played World of Warcraft. I’m always shocked at how massive it is when I read statistics about it. For example, it pulls in more cash than some countries, celebrities like Elijah Wood and Jessica Simpson play it, and it requires 20,000 servers to keep it running!
Some great advice on the Rapid eLearning blog about the importance of contrast in design. Apparently, CRAP (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity) are the four main elements of design.
You’ve got to watch this. It seems that some universities are allowing video submissions in support of applications for undergraduate study (great idea!) Here’s one girl who likes Maths and dancing. Well, you can guess the result…
Misc.
I’m in my twenties. That’s why when I read posts like Ten Trends of 20-Somethings I tend to be a bit sceptical. This one, however, has it spot on – especially with things like ‘radical transparency’ and ’seeing luxuries as standard’!
I go to church. Sometimes I have my suspicions (unproven) about people’s motivations – especially if they’ve got kids. Here’s one family in the US who admit that they ‘fake’ Christianity for socio-economic reasons (and ‘play dates’ for their kids…)
Jon Becker tweeted that his son’s preschool document his learning through the use of (presumably privately-shared) Picasa Web Albums. What a great idea!
You know that an idea’s a good one when it generates its own parody. Check out #keepmehere – the anti-#movemeon!
Quotations
If you would take, you must first give, this is the beginning of intelligence. (Lao Tzu)
It is every man’s obligation to put back into the world at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it. (Albert Einstein)
Do not speak of your happiness to one less fortunate than yourself. (Plutarch)
The sole advantage of power is that it can do more good. (Baltasar Gracián)
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. (Oscar Wilde)
Want more great quotations? Find them via a Twitter search for #quote
If you create a service that people actually find useful then I suppose you’ve got a right to charge for it. Still, it annoyed me that FeedMyInbox has gone paid-for. $5/month is $5 more than I expect to pay simply for the privilege of getting email updates from blogs that haven’t provided the feature themselves. For those in a similar situation, I’m trying out Blog Alert and Reblinks at the moment…
Top 3
A stereotype was a printing plate case from movable type. A cliché was a phrase that, because it was used often, was cast as a single slug of metal. Thanks for that nugget, Seth!
I auto-tweet from this blog when a new post is auto-published. It makes me smile that I could be asleep yet people think I’m active online. The Make Me Social WordPress plugin takes this one step further, auto-posting to services such as Delicious (via @durff)
Google Docs now has a web clipboard that remains over sessions and between computers!
RealPlayer SP allows you to trim videos ready for posting to YouTube, etc. I haven’t tried it (yet) but it looks like it could be a basic alternative to Windows Movie Maker. And it’s cross-platform!
Some countries didn’t deliver on their promised Tsunami aid. Will the situation be the same for Haiti (I’m looking at you Austria and Germany!) (via @courosa):
I know I said that these posts would be called ‘Sunday Scientia’ but that, erm, isn’t very snappy. Or descriptive.
Top 3
From the wow-as-a-History-teacher-this-rocks-my-world department, it turns out that the Egyptian pyramids weren’t built by slaves after all!
Matt Mullenweg (he of the WordPress-coding fame) turned 26 this week. He made some resolutions for the coming year (much as I did) and on the list was ‘learn more about Captology’. It turns out that Captology is ‘the study of computers as persuasive technologies’. Interesting!
I’m sure that Graffiti markup is going to be extremely useful, but for me it just looks extremely cool…
I was reminded of Jott for voice to text transcription on-the-go via a post on dy/dan
Google offer some very competitive pricing for extra GMail/Picasa storage. I thought this could be used for off-site backup using gDisk (Mac OSX only), but it didn’t seem to be compatible with Snow Leopard…
The wireless networks at my house have fairly boring names. I like these ones better (via @swissmiss)
David Pogue reckons that the iPhone is for sheep, whereas Android is for geeks. Baa baa. (via Smarterware.org)
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, reckons that privacy is ‘no longer a social norm’. I’d contend that he’s correct about a certain kind of privacy but it would take me a full blog post to explain…
It turns out selling ebooks DRM-free doesn’t hurt sales. In fact, despite rampant piracy, it was found that sales actually went up!
Tuper Tario Tros is a mashup of Tetris and Super Mario. Play Tetris (kind of) as usual, then play Super Mario on the landscape you’ve created!
From the oh-my-goodness-this-is-unbelievable department, RCA Airnergy apparently charges gadgets using wifi signals. Which kind of makes me worry about what they’re doing to my body… (via @timlauer)
Are you still, as I was, wondering “why use Google Wave?” Try this FAQ. I especially like the definition of it as a multimedia wikichat.
Need to schedule some tweets? Twuffer is a Twitter ‘buffer’. (via @cwebbtech)
You can crop & remove ads/offensive content from YouTube videos using safeshare.tv (via @kiwicarol)
Although I’m not sure why you’d want to do this, if you’ve been crying out for a way to use up to 24 cursors on one screen you can now with this Microsoft tool. (via @tobywilson)
There’s a bewildering number of iPhone apps, which is why I was pleased to come across app.itize.us, a site dedicated to ‘the best produced and designed iPhone apps’ (via BoingBoing)
Productivity & Inspiration
I was delighted to come across this ‘How I work’ series again from a few years back, including how Marissa Meyer at Google deals with the amount of information she has to process. (via dy/dan)
If you’re not great at making decisions, Hunch might help. Or not.
Almost everyone I know uses an online calendar, usually Google Calendar. But what about if you need something slightly different? This online calendar roundup mentioned Cozi.com which looks especially useful for families.
Kathy Sierra (@KathySierra) recommended a book about the link between exercise and brain performance. That’s recommendation enough for me – I just bought it! If you don’t follow Kathy on Twitter already, do so now.
The claim that students only have an attention span of 10 mins is dealt with by James Clay. As he says, if you can only gain students’ attention for ten minutes, you’re doing something wrong. Having said that, I have heard it said that students have the attention span of their age plus 2 minutes… (via @downes)
Studies have shown that music education can build up your brain in a way that can have a positive effect for the rest of your life. So that Grade 4 piano aged 9 wasn’t a complete waste of my parents’ money… (via @elonahartjes)
Data, Design & Infographics
You’ve probably noticed from this site that I like minimalism. Swissmiss links to some great ones.
Macbooks cost different amounts around the world, which makes for an interesting infographic.
I found this infographic showing what covers the surface of the earth. Have a look below – I was surprised that there’s as much land covered by snow as good farming land):
This infographic showing ’social networking via letters’ in the 19th century shows that having to cope with a glut of information is nothing new!
I’ve been using the Sleep Cycle iPhone app for a week or so, which is why I found interesting this infographic showing what makes you feel good according to Circadian rhythms.
Nathan Yau of FlowingData has a ‘data underload’ series at the moment. I liked this one on what it takes to amuse us at different ages:
Misc.
Metaphor can be a powerful way of looking at some complex issues. Take organizational theory and decentralization, for example. A ’starfish’ and ’spider’ metaphor seems pretty useful (via @hrheingold)
Finding the right images for blog posts and design projects is all about searching using the right words. Try this Getty keyword guide and Stockvault.net for some free stock images.
The most significant things I’ve learned this week have been snow-related. Have a quick look at the above YouTube video of me building an igloo. That took me 7 hours! Instead of getting all philosophical and talking about how good it felt to create something out of nothing and how I started to feel ‘at one’ with the snow, I’ll reflect on some practical considerations:
I should estimate how long things are likely to take before they start
The size of an igloo depends on the angle of the walls – easy to forget!
There are lots of different types of snow.
Igloos are actually quite warm!
I considered sleeping in it, but having worked on it for 7 hours straight every single muscle in my body hurt. I went in the bath, read my book and went to bed…
Here’s a brief overview of other stuff I’ve learned this week, broken down by category.
Tech
Flocking.me allows you to search through your friends’ tweets only (via TechXAV)
Pretty much everything you need to know in terms of how Google’s new Nexus One phone stacks up against the Motorola Droid and Apple iPhone can be found in this post at Mashable.
Encoding.com looks like a rather useful way to transcode video so it’s in a suitable format for various mobile devices (via Mashable)
Confused by what the ‘Semantic Web’ and ‘Web 3.0′ are? Try this video!
Jay Cross posted links to Handy free online tools this week – including the rather useful-looking Rypple (for getting anonymous feedback)
This Google page is very handy for showing people the various types of searches you can do and information you can find quickly and easily.
I really, really want this iPhone stand that makes it look like an iMac!
Chris Messina, only a few days younger than me, has celebrated his 29th birthday by announcing he’s going to work for Google. I suddenly feel a lot more confident about Google’s ‘openness’.
Google Chrome extensions are now available for Mac (if you install the Developer build). I’m running several without slowdown! (via Mashable)
Seth Godin on why you should stop blaming other people and external circumstances from holding you back.
Academic
I read about Tetrads on Harold Jarche’s blog and incorporated it into my Ed.D. thesis. He’s also got a useful post entitled Sharing tacit knowledge on how hierarchies aren’t great for emergent practices.
Wirearchy is “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology” that is replacing hierarchies in forward-thinking organizations.
This resonated with me – via Jennifer Hagy @ indexed
The ever-relevant and insightful Harold Jarche looks back at Seth Godin’s predictions for 2009 from 5 years ago (startlingly accurate) and his own from 2007, as well as looking forward to new and emerging business models.
Mashable reflects on ways social media has changed us. This post makes a lot of sense and I’m going to start to use the term ‘ambient intimacy’ to explain a lot of what goes on, online. It makes sense.
BBC News posted a great satellite photo of what Britain looked like without the Gulf Stream last week.
There are some places in the world you’re just not allowed to go. This post on listverse (via @dougpete) highlights the ‘Top 10′ of these.
Vicki Davis (aka Cool Cat Teacher) in a reflective and revealing post entitled Sojourner Truth outlines her recent struggles with blogging and celebrity.
Quotations
You’re only given a little spark of madness. You musn’t lose it. (Robin Williams)
A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don’t need it. (Bob Hope)
If you’re reading this in a feed reader, you might want to click through or click on the images below.
A short post, this one. I’ve been working on-and-off for the past few weeks on a new blog theme courtesy of an excellent Wordpress plugin by the name of Theme Test Drive. This allows administrators (i.e. me) see a different theme when they visit this blog than non-logged in visitors (i.e. you).
Some may say they prefer the old one. It’s certainly more ‘visual’. But I didn’t like the font and the amount of time it took to load. Serif fonts are much more pleasing on the eye and it’s certainly faster loading. Readers don’t have to click through to read the most recent post, and I don’t have to write a summary and crop pictures down to 90×90 to go next to that summary.
Taking my inspiration from the Flickr blog and Seth Godin’s blog (see images below) I pared everything down as much as possible.
I took as my starting point the (very yellow) Old Popular Yolk theme, which looks like this:
It was then very easy to modify the CSS to end up with what you see now.
I’ve called this derivative theme New Geeky White. I’m no good at CSS or Wordpress hacking in general, but if you really want to use the theme get in touch and it’s yours!
We didn’t take the footpath to the terminal; he’s always taken the path less travelled. He didn’t turn around as he strode purposefully to the gate. I didn’t cry. We all knew it was inevitable.
A month away from retirement he announced he was off down to London.
“What for?”
“An interview.”
“What, for a job in London? I thought you were retiring!”
“No, a consultant job in Abu Dhabi.”
I laughed, thinking he was joking. He looked up from the laptop upon which he was booking his train tickets. It was at that point I knew that not only was he not joking, but that he would indeed be spending some time in the Middle East. He’s never done things by halves.
He didn’t get the consultancy role. He’s a teacher. Having tried his hand at Senior Management for a good fifteen years he’d returned to the classroom for the last ten of his career. It’s where he belongs. He’ll be team-teaching, working alongside native teachers in the United Arab Emirates on behalf of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT). I’m not sure you can teach enthusiasm and passion, although he’ll do his best to try!
It’s hard to measure the impact this man has had on my life. But it’s a lot easier to write down your feelings rather than say them. He was my junior football manager, the Deputy Headmaster of my school, and when I was younger a superhero. Without always needing to sayanything he’s guided me through lived example. He’s certainly not perfect, although upon reflection I’ve realised that the times I find him inappropriate can usually be put down to his exuberance and zest for life.
His M.Ed. spurred me on to do my MA and now my Ed.D. Until a few years ago I assumed that accumulating degrees and job titles would be enough; enough to command respect and guarantee a safe and easy passage through life. It’s not. The number of letters after your name and/or job title is irrelevant. It’s what you do with your life that counts. He’s ‘walked the walk.’
It’s common to trot out the platitudes and trite phrases when a teacher nears the end of their career about the ‘number of lives they’ve touched’ and ‘lives they’ve influenced.’ I wish no-one had ever said these things before so I could apply them for the first time here. It’s never been more true.
So here’s to you, Dad. This is for all the times I should have said ‘I love you’ but haven’t. This is for the times I’ve got annoyed and snapped at you. And this is to let you know that even when you weren’t talking, I was learning from you.
David Brandon is CEO of Domino’s Pizza. He’s one of the contributors to the 50 Lessons website. This website incorporates is a series of 4-minute videos from inspirational leaders of organizations. Brandon was a successful American Football player at college, an experience he looks back to often when thinking about leadership issues.
The following is what I took away from viewing his five videos on the 50 Lessons website:
Treat people the way they want to be treated
Leaders need to be able to adapt the way they deal with people to individual circumstances. The wrong approach is to take the same leadership style and apply it to all your dealings with staff in your organization. Find out the way people want to be treated and treat them that way. Brandon says this is the best piece of advice his father (who himself had no formal leadership experience) gave him early in his career.
Looking back to his college American Football days, Brandon talks about how his coaches trained the team to recognise sudden change within a game and to respond to it in a positive way. Transferring this to organizations, it’s importance to instill the idea that ‘change is good’ whilst recognizing that many will approach it will trepidation and indeed may resist that change.
Brandon talks about when he was unveiled as CEO of Domino’s Pizza and kept his message simple. He contrasted ’sitting around talking about the good old days’ with embracing change to make a good organization even better.
Brandon’s comments on things ‘never staying the same’ reminded me of a saying I had on my wall in my old classroom, attributed to Oliver Cromwell. It read, ‘He who stops being better stops being good.’ It’s a phrase I saw every day and spurred me on.
Brandon believes that when things are going well for an organization or team – sales are up, the team is winning every game, academic results are getting better every year – then it’s easy to fall into the mindset of ‘just turning up.’ To counter this, he says, coaches when he played American Football drummed into them the belief that ‘things either get better or they get worse, but things never stay the same.’ Fostering this mentality in your organization leads to constant striving towards improvement.
Don’t rely on internal benchmarks
It’s all very well hitting or even surpassing benchmarks and targets set internally within your organization. However, if no attention is paid to others in the field, then you can be left behind. Brandon talks about finding the best in the field and becoming as good or better than them.
With schools, this is less of an issue of competition and more one of keeping up with best practice, I believe. Of course, there’s local competition in terms of persuading parents to send their children to your school, but in the bigger picture it’s about raising standards across the board.
Deal with minor issues quickly
The time to deal with minor issues is as quickly as you can and when things are going well. Restructuring, procedural issues and suchlike are much better done at times of stability rather than when your organization is on ‘the edge of a cliff’. Making changes when things are going well means the organization is more resilient and can be more focused on those changes rather than on the survival of the organization.
Pivotal moments & decision-making
As a leader there will be ‘pivotal moments’ when going one way could lead to great rewards, whereas going the other way could lead to disastrous consequences. It’s the easiest thing in the world to make a decision when you and 100% of the people around you agree on what should be done. The tough decisions come when there is a 50/50 split.
When such a decision has to be made, make it and then act with ‘confidence, passion and a true sense of calm.’ Leaders, after all, must lead. Your actions after the decision has been taken are almost more important than the decision itself as you can energise the workforce into taking action for the organization to succeed. You need to explain your decisions and then stand by them.
A lot of what makes people ‘productive’ is common-sense. But sometimes this needs spelling out, hence this post. I’m always looking for ways to be more productive. Please let me and fellow readers/subscribers know your tips and strategies in the comments.
Here’s some of my tips!
1. Don’t read emails
If you make the first thing you do in a day reading emails, you’re starting off the day on other people’s terms. Instead, achieve something from your own agenda first, then catch up on what people want to tell you!
2. Read something inspirational
It might be the Bible, it might be some Marcus Aurelius, but make sure you read something (however short) – for a quick fix, try tivate.com!
3. Listen to podcasts
However you travel to work, podcasts are a great way to stop it being ‘dead time’. Audiobooks are also great (try Audible). Here’s the podcasts to which I subscribe:
4. Use an online to-do list
There’s lots of ways people will take money off you to ‘make you more productive’. I love Remember the Milk: it’s simple and free!
5. Share everything you do
If you share with other people, they’re a lot more likely to share with you. This, in turn, reduces your workload and increases your overall productivity. You can share things online through things like a wiki or a forum, or face-to-face.
6. Take pictures
I know very few people who haven’t got a camera built-in to their mobile phone. Instead of writing things out or trying to remember complex things, just snap it with your cameraphone! You could take this one step further if you’ve got an iPhone and use the wonderful Evernote for web-based synchronization.
7. Make everything you can, digital
The problem with paper is that unless you photocopy it a copy exists in only one location – and can’t search and organize it. If you’re a teacher, make your markbook and attendance registers digital. Plan things using Google Calendar. These things might take some time to set up, but will pay dividends in the long-term.
8. Take breaks
Know your limits. You’re far better of having a 10-15 minute break and coming back to something with fresh(er) eyes and increased motivation than slogging away at an activity non-stop.
9. Drink coffee
Coffee is a stimulant: it contains caffeine. Drinking too much coffee isn’t good for you and can generate withdrawal symptoms. However, drinking a couple of cups per day of good filter coffee increases alertness and attention. I tend to have one in the morning with breakfast and one when I come home from work. You could, in fact, combine coffee with taking a nap and have what Lifehacker calls a ‘coffee nap’ – more here.
10. Prepare well
A productive day actually begins the day before. Be prepared! Pack your bag, get lunch ready (if applicable), iron your clothes, go to bed at a reasonable hour. Done regularly, such a routine makes for large productivity gains.
Awesome 
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=6157f082-2d52-4c39-8c32-b8e4a3ca7c4f)
A lot of what makes people ‘productive’ is common-sense. But sometimes this needs spelling out, hence this post. I’m always looking for ways to be more productive. Please let me and fellow readers/subscribers know your tips and strategies in the comments.
Coffee is a stimulant: it contains caffeine. Drinking too much coffee isn’t good for you and can generate withdrawal symptoms. However, drinking a couple of cups per day of good filter coffee increases alertness and attention. I tend to have one in the morning with breakfast and one when I come home from work. You could, in fact, combine coffee with taking a nap and have what ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=ecd55eaa-368c-4184-8d91-ee2dfe7f127c)
