“So… what do you do?” is a question I try not to ask. It’s only one step removed from, “What do you do for a living?”, asked explicitly to answer the implicit question “Are you of any value or interest to me?”. I have a three step strategy to answer such questions:

Questioner: So… what do you do?

Me: I work at Northumbria University

That satisfies 80% of queries. Sometimes that’s followed up by:

Questioner: Oh really, what do you do there?

Me: I work for an organization called JISC that’s based at Northumbria and deals with educational technology.

This deals with a further 15%. Only about one out of every twenty people ask for the full details:

Questioner: What type of things do you do?

Me: I work for a part of JISC called JISC infoNet. We’re funded indirectly by the taxpayer and provide guidance on digital technologies mainly to senior managers. We produce ‘infoKits’ which are detailed online briefings to get the further and higher education sectors up-to-speed on relevant topics. I’m currently working on  some giving guidance about Open Educational Resources and mobile technologies. JISC saves the taxpayer more than thirty times what they cost to fund.

If all three questions have been asked, this usually leads to a longer conversation where we both get to talk about what we enjoy and find interesting in life. I am, of course, slightly more loquacious than the above, but you get the idea. :-p

Apart from my absolutely most-hated phrase which I will no doubt write about soon – a phrase banned in our house since the birth of our son – apart from that particular phrase, the one I revile most is the one which asks what you do for a living?. Every action and utterance has a symbolic element. In this case, the questioner not only assumes, but serves to endorse and reinforce, societal notions that what a person does to earn money is necessarily the defining feature of their life.

I’m currently reading a book about Greg Mortenson called Three Cups of Tea. Whilst I’ve only devoured the first six chapters, Mortenson has already attempted to scale K2, been kept alive by the hospitality of a tiny, remote, and very poor village, worked as a emergency-room nurse, slept in a car to make ends meet, and returned to Pakistan to build a school after raising money through the writing of 580 letters. How would he have answered, “So… what do you do?” at this point of his life, I wonder? I’m guessing he would barely mention what happens to pay the bills.

I do enjoy working at JISC infoNet – how could I fail to? It’s a flexible occupation where I’m surrounded by great people doing work that the sector respects and deems worthwhile. I didn’t enjoy my previous job, however. I was constrained and cajoled into doing things against my better judgement. Refusing to sell out, I changed jobs (and educational sectors) and took a pay cut, despite having moved my family to a different part of the country specifically for the previous position. I write this not to self-aggrandise, but to make a point:

Your mission in life is bigger than your job.

So what’s my mission? I’ll find the specifics later but I’ve got the broad brushstrokes: improving user outcomes. Let’s just check that back against what I wrote 14 months ago, shall we? Does what I said then still hold water?

So what do I do?

• I blend digital and physical worlds.
• I tell stories about how learning can be.
• I show people stuff.
• I research.
• I find the best of the best.

My job’s what I make it. I can live with that.

Is that still true? Absolutely.

One of the things I love about having a blog is that it’s a space to think things through. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while and so needed to solidify my views by committing it to writing.

Interest can get you a long way in life. If you’re interested in something it fires your curiosity and motivates you to do something about it.

• People interested in photography tend to buy a decent camera and practice until they become better.
• Those interested in collaborative technologies tend to use them with others and evangelise their use.
• Individuals interested in endangered species are usually the ones found donating their money and volunteering.

That’s why interest leads to an increase in awareness and skill level. That, according to Seth Godin in Linchpin, makes you immensely valuable:

But.

The commonly-followed trajectory is from interest to a job/employment in that area. Which is great. What you need to make sure of, however, is that you don’t lose the relevant, up-to-date domain knowledge (green circle) in your trajectory to the right of the Venn diagram.

Good luck.

Last week my wife successfully interviewed for a new teaching job. She had to teach a lesson and asked me for advice as to how to make sure she would definitely have the interactive whiteboard resources to hand. That made me think about the lengths I’ve heard some people go to in order to ensure they have the slidedeck for their presentation…

I give you: The Ultra-Paranoid Guide to Ensuring You’ve Got Your Presentation Slides

Slightly paranoid

• Export slides to images
• Email to self
• Put on USB flash drive

Very paranoid

• Export slides to images and PDF
• Email to self
• Put on two USB flash drives

Ultra paranoid

• Export slides to images, PDF, and every version of PowerPoint/Keynote/OpenOffice.org Impress
• Email to self (two separate accounts)
• Add to Dropbox
• Put on two USB flash drives (in separate places)
• Print out large copies to stick to wall if all else fails

What have I missed? :-p

Image CC BY Rennett Stowe

JISC infoNet aims to be the UK’s leading advisory service for managers in the post-compulsory education sector promoting the effective strategic planning, implementation and management of information and learning technology.

The team are a great bunch who I’ve already been in to meet since my successful interview a couple of months ago. I’m looking forward to extending my knowledge and experience in education up to FE and HE level!

JISC infoNet is one of eight sub-sections of JISC Advance, which is funded by the UK taxpayer through the Research Councils. I’ll be researching (duh!), putting together infoKits and helping facilitate workshops in colleges of further education and universities around the country. I’m based at, although not actually part of (despite the new @northumbria.ac.uk email address) Northumbria University.

I’m happy to answer any questions you’ve got about the move by email – use this contact form. I’ll reproduce the most commonly-asked questions over at Doug’s FAQ.

It’s the time of year when people are applying for teaching-related jobs. I decided to write this 40-page ebook as I’m being asked more and more for advice, tips and guidance about the whole process involved. To be fair to everyone, and to make sure my advice is consistent I’ve written it all down in one place.

It’s 40 pages and costs £4 is FREE! No OpenBeta iterations. It is what it is. Preview and purchase Find #getthatjob at the link below!

http://bit.ly/getthatjob

(image CC BY Kain Kalju)

(image by atomicShed @ Flickr)

It should be an easy question. In fact, it’s the one that usually comes in rapid succession after enquiries as to your name and perhaps where you’re from. But ‘what do you do?’ is increasingly a difficult question for me to answer.

If I want to move the conversation onto other things – or indeed to get out of the conversation quickly – I simply say I’m a ‘teacher’. Except I’m not any more (although it is in my portfolio). As a ‘Director of E-Learning’ I’m in a job that has only existed for a couple of years in a handful UK educational institutions

So what do I say? One colleague referred to me recently as ‘Director of Excitement’. Sometimes, to get a cheap laugh, I refer to myself as ‘Chief Geek’.  But, whilst there’s a grain of truth in each, neither’s true in its own right.

The acid test is my 85 year-old grandmother who doesn’t really know what the internet is. I find myself at a loss for words to try and explain the world I inhabit. It’s so different to that which she grew up in it’s unreal; we have few common frames of reference.

So what do I do?

• I blend digital and physical worlds.
• I tell stories about how learning can be.
• I show people stuff.
• I research.
• I find the best of the best.

My job’s what I make it. I can live with that.

(N.B. this brief post has been ‘stewing’ a while, but was prompted directly by Chris Messina’s post The Elevator Pitch in which he recounts a similar problem)

Started as Director of E-Learning yesterday. Not going to be teaching at all until September – even then probably only 8 periods per week ‘across Key Stages’. Mostly team-teaching and modelling good practice. My primary role is to support teaching and learning using educational technology.

I have a vision.

Lots of meetings. It would seem I need to become more of a political animal…

(Image credit: Ahead of the Storm by Roy Levi @ Flickr)

Upon its arrival from Amazon, I eagerly opened and flicked through Flow. Just as sometimes you’re sitting in an audience and you feel that the speaker is talking directly to you, so it was with the section ‘The Waste of Free Time’ (p.162-3). Here’s my abridgement of that short section. Do you recognise yourself in it? I do!

Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback, rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate, and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.

…

The tremendous leisure industry that has arisen in the last few generations has been designed to help fill our free time with enjoyable experiences. Nevertheless, instead of using our physical and mental resources to experience flow, most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians. Instead of making art, we got to admire paintings that brought in the highest bids at the latest auction. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action.

…

The flow experience that results from the use of skills leads to growth; passive entertainment leads nowhere. Collectively we are wasting each year the equivalent of millions of years of human consciousness. The energy that could be used to focus on complex goals, to provide for enjoyable growth, is squandered on patterns of stimulation that only mimic reality. Mass leisure, mass culture, and even high culture when only attended to passively and for extrinsic reasons – such as the wish to flaunt one’s status – are parasites of the mind. They absorb psychic energy without providing substantive strength in return. They leave us more exhausted, more disheartened than we were before.

…

Most jobs and many leisure activities – especially those involving the passive consumption of mass media – are not designed to make us happy and strong. Their purpose is to make money for someone else. If we allow them to, they can suck out the marrow of our lives, leaving us only feeble husks.

Eloquently put, I’m sure you’ll agree! It reminded me somewhat of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in terms of the vision it conjures of a mass ‘citizenry’ obediently doing what the guiding voice behind the media they consume tell them to do.

It’s a wake-up call for me. Instead of spending money on gadgetry that allow me to consume mass media at an ever-increasing rate, I’m going to focus on creativity and meaning-making. For me, that will mostly be in a written format because of my interests and talents. But, you never know, it may stray into areas musical as well…

I’ve got new plans for edte.ch – linked, as you can imagine, to my position as E-Learning Staff Tutor next academic year (2008/9). I’ll unveil it when it’s ready, but for now I’ve blown up the existing site (see screenshot) and imported the posts to this blog (dougbelshaw.com)

I’ve mentioned this in passing in a couple of blog posts previous to this one: from next academic year I shall be E-Learning Tutor at my school. This new post (solicited by me, it has to be said) involves me spending 50% of my time (15 periods of 50 mins) per week teaching History and a bit of ICT. The other 50% will count towards the E-Learning Tutor role.

I’ve a meeting next week with my Head to flesh out my actual role. He mentioned today that I’ll have to do some “mundane” stuff, but that I will be free to push a few aspects of my choosing and accelerate perhaps one thing I’m really interested in. As you can imagine, with my Ed.D. thesis exploring the ‘Digital Literacy’, that’s the latter taken care of.

I’m expecting the mudane activities I shall have to undertake to be things like:

• Interactive Whiteboard training (the really basic aspects)
• How to use the new VLE (Virtual Learning Environment)
• Using the internal Microsoft Outlook web-based email system
• Ways to use Powerpoint and other presentation tools in the classroom
• How to transfer digital video from digital cameras/camcorders to staff laptops

Whereas what I really want to be pushing are things such as:

• Creating a blog to make resources available outside the classroom (I’ve already run a couple of staff workshops on this, with some success)
• Basic podcasting and digital storytelling for non-written assessment, leading to e-portfolios for students.
• Communicating with other educators worldwide (i.e. getting staff initiated in the edublogosphere – perhaps through the K12 Online Conference?)
• Giving staff the confidence to take students into the ICT suites more often to use the Internet as a publishing tool.
• Transferring schemes of work and programmes of study into an electronic format (perhaps in a wiki-like format using Google Sites within Google Apps Team Edition or the new VLE?)

Some context to help you understand where we’re at: my school has a plethora of RM One machines, Interactive Whiteboards in almost every classroom, and relatively unrestricted access (we can access Twitter, del.icio.us, Google Video, etc. but not YouTube, Facebook or games websites, for example). There’s a real mix of what I would call ‘digital literacy’ amongst staff. We range from those, like me, who use educational technology in some way in every lesson, to those who only use their laptop to help them write reports, and who certainly haven’t turned on their Interactive Whiteboard yet…

What else should I be looking to include in my responsibilities? How should my success and impact be measured, given that it’s a 1-year trial role? Suggestions in the comments section please! :-p

Image credits: Hugh McLeod @ gapingvoid.com (top one censored by me…)