Woe is me. It’s my 28th birthday today and, for the third year running I’m ill. Last year I still went out for a meal, could taste nothing, and had a thoroughly miserable time. This year I’m staying in bed.

To add to my woes, I’ve been re-reading what certain characters from history managed to achieve in their 28th year of existence. Here’s a flavour:

• Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space.
• Jimi Hendrix died after a short but influential career.
• Ernest Hemingway published his first novel, The Sun Also Rises.

What have I done? Nothing quite so illustrious:

• Spoke at BETT 2008 with Dan Sutch of Futurelab about barriers and resistances to change and at the TeachMeet.
• Presented at the Schools History Project Conference alongside Nick Dennis.
• Became E-Learning Staff Tutor at my school.
• Completed two CD-ROMs of interactive whiteboard resources (History) for Folens publishers (Invasion, Plague & Murder and Renaissance, Revolution & Reformation)
• Passed my Ed.D. thesis proposal and gained a new supervisor.
• Joined a gym and got myself (slightly) fitter.
• Sold our house just before the full effects of the eceonomic slowdown hit home and moved into a rented property on a farm in semi-rural isolation.

Not quite in the same league! I am, however, considering writing a book. It won’t be ‘available in all good bookshops’. In fact, it won’t be available in bad ones either! Like Doug Johnson and others have done, I’m considering using Lulu.com to make my proposed book freely downloadable and available to purchase in paper format for a reasonable fee.

Technology wise, I upgraded in the last few weeks from a Macbook to a Macbook Pro, went through several netbooks (Asus Eee 701 -> modded OSX-powered Advent 4211 -> Asus Eee 1000), bought an iPhone, returned it, and then finally changed my Nokia N95 for an iPhone 3G 16GB, and bought a wonderful digital SLR camera in the shape of the Canon EOS 1000D.

What are my plans for my 29th year on earth? Hmmm… I’ll limit myself to three:

1. Apply for and obtain a job that means my wife, Hannah, doesn’t have to work.
2. Write half my Ed.D. thesis around the concept of digital literacies.
3. Start a new project – either through Folens or independently that brings together some of the ideas Nick Dennis and I have been discussing.

What are YOUR plans for 2009?

Alec Couros tagged me, so I’d better respond. I’m doing it here rather than on my teaching blog because I feel this is a more appropriate home.

1. Post these rules before you give your facts
2. List 8 random facts about yourself
3. At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them
4. Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged

Here goes (without, of course, me mentioning anything about how impossible it is for human beings to do anything truly random…)

1. My first pet was a fish called Banjo that spent more time swimming backwards than forwards.
2. I was brought up in Ashington, at one time the largest mining village in the world.
3. I bite my fingernails.
4. My political views swing wildly from fairly right-wing to quasi-communism.
5. I know every line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
6. I get really bad migraines from the colour annatto (and related orangey food colours), which can be found in Coca-Cola, coloured cheeses, etc.
7. As an undergraduate student I worked in HMV and developed quite an eclectic taste in music.
8. To my shame, my wife Hannah beats me at almost every game under the sun. Except cards.

Like Alec, I’m not going to bother commenting on the following people’s blogs to let them know they’ve been ‘tagged’. Instead I’ll leave it to the power of WordPress and Technorati! I’ll just go with those in my ‘edublogs – must reads’ folder in Google Reader:

• Chris Sessums
• Doug Noon
• Karyn Romeis has already posted hers
• Wes Fryer has already posted his
• George Siemens
• Clarence Fisher
• Karl Fisch
• Jeff Utecht
• Will Richardson

I had some free time. So after stumbling across extralogical.net whilst hunting for WordPress themes I thought I’d look for some blogs on philosophy (it’s what I did my first degree in). Oh the joy…

I’ll start with one of Benedict Eastaugh’s (he of extralogical.net) posts from his previous blog in February 2007:

In the spirit of enquiry, then, here’s a list of what soon-to-be graduates (perhaps in Philosophy) might know.

• They know quite a bit about their discipline: its fields and sub-fields, some of the big names, some of the big ideas.
• They’ve learned some techniques: how to generate counterexamples and formalise arguments, how to spot equivocation and split hairs.
• They know where to find the worst coffee, and the best beer.
• They know a lot of jargon

The greatest thing that philosophy taught me was that the structures that most people see in the world are man-made and actually quite fragile. Being a teacher, this means instead of focusing on what schooling has been, I focus on what it ought to be. I’ve got the bigger picture.

Allied to this is the fact that I continued my studies to do an MA in Modern History to become a History teacher at seconday level. This has given me a perspective from the history of ideas which shows the current age as simply the knife-edge upon which we are travelling (to use a poetic metaphor…)

A quick Technorati search for ‘philosophy’ took me straight to a YouTube video of Monty Python’s Philosophers Football Match. Classic:

Unfortunately, a Google search for related:extralogical.net returned stuff pretty much exclusively about WordPress themes. And then when I searched Technorati and Google Blog search for posts tagged with ‘philosophy’ I was disappointed. I don’t want long, technical posts like this or this thank-you-very-much. I prefer the Montaigne approach: you know, discursive writing on a theme that brings in social commentary, history and philosophy. I suppose the problem is that bloggers like that are a) few and far between, and b) don’t tag their posts with ‘philosophy’!

Oh well, if anyone wants me to point me in the direction of a few good blogs, feel free. In the meantime, I’ll be reading Benedict’s blog. He doesn’t update regularly enough, though…

(image: in ur mind @ Flickr)