Tag: iPhone

10 things I did during Belshaw Black Ops.

Posted on January 10, 2011 by Doug Belshaw

For the past three weeks I’ve been on Black Ops, a better term than ‘digital hiatus’ to describe my being digitally incommunicado. It’s felt like longer, to be honest. I managed to stay off Twitter completely – the occasional, accidental, and hastily-deleted autopost from Amplify notwithstanding.

Email was a different story: although I had a ‘Black Ops’ autoresponder on my Gmail account, I had to use email for some of the following activities.

Here’s a list of what I’ve been up to:

Collated and published Best of Belshaw 2010 (freely downloadable or available for purchase in physical form at cost price)
Waited patiently for Hannah to give birth to our second child. She was due on the 28th December 2010, but still no sign. It’s the reason I’m not at the Learning Without Frontiers Conference today/tomorrow.
Bought a fair bit of new technological kit and sold older stuff on eBay.
Took my son, Ben, to the beach (to burn off excess sugar) almost every day.
Experimented with Quora and Licorizer, re-joined Facebook, and unfollowed 90% of people I was following on Twitter.
Lost all my iPhone contacts on Boxing Day whilst unjailbreaking my iPhone so I could upgrade to iOS 4.2.1 (text me your phone number if I had it before!)
Kicked off a stealth project with Andy Stewart which will culminate in a manifesto and small events this year, building (hopefully!) to a large event in 2015.
Wrote my first-ever journal article (it’s entitled Seven Types of Ambiguity and Digital Literacy)
Engaged in some consultancy which I may develop a bit more in 2011. I’ve come up with a Hierarchy of Understanding which I’m going to work on (and may even turn into a journal article) before sharing.
Played a whole lot on my Playstation 3, especially Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (the Vietnam expansion pack came out on my 30th birthday!)

More on the above over the next week or so. I may be sporadic given I’m both getting back into my digital routine and having to deal with the imminent arrival of a new baby. :-p

Intention vs. Effect

Posted on July 21, 2010 by Doug Belshaw

Like many people I had, up until a couple of days ago, the following appended to all my outgoing emails from my iPhone:

Sent from my iPhone.

My thinking? They’ll understand why I haven’t written a longer reply. That was my intention.

But the effect? Variously:

I’ve got an iPhone. You haven’t. Ergo, you suck.
You’re not important enough for me to spend longer replying to you.
I’m busy. Leave me alone.
I don’t know how to change the default message on my iPhone. Ergo, I suck.

The effect was vastly different to my intention.

So what have I done about it? Replaced it with:

– – – – –

http://bit.ly/dajbelshaw

http://five.sentenc.es

At the top is a shortened link to my Google profile, whilst underneath is a website that states that it is my policy to use no more than five sentences (where possible) to reply to an email.

How does that make the recipient feel now? Is the effect closer to my intention?

I think so.

A life in my technological day.

Posted on July 6, 2010 by Doug Belshaw

Introduction

This post is prompted by 3 things:

Re-discovering Stammy’s Why I’m more productive on a Mac post from 2006.
Reading Cory Doctorow’s post What I Do where he outlines the hardware and software he uses (and why).
A discussion at EdTechRoundUp on Sunday night where I was asked to explain why the iPhone 4 is ‘better’ than the Dell Streak.

Continue reading “A life in my technological day.”