dougbelshaw.com/blog

Welcome back!
I've just got back from Turkey with Nick Dennis presenting about technology to History educators at the request of EUROCLIO. Resources (in Turkish!) here - blog post to follow!

I was interviewed last week by Tim Bradburn of Connected Teaching (@cpd4teachers) who was interested in having me expand up the ideas contained in #uppingyourgame: an educator’s guide to productivity.

In the extracts below (taken from the interview) I explain my belief that productivity is a learned behaviour based upon serenity, reliability and focus.

 

 #uppingyourgame: Serenity: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 #uppingyourgame: Reliability: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 #uppingyourgame: Focus: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

(if you’re reading this via email or in a feed reader you may need to click through!)

Image CC BY-NC Darren Hester

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…

http://delicious.com/dajbelshaw/TILTW10

Tech.

• 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.
• Second Life has never been more than a curiosity to me, but Leon Cych has put together a video showing some new features which might make it a viable proposition to do something useful:

• 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.
• Dumb Little Man has an important post, I think, on the importance of tracking and writing down your achievements.

Education & Academic

• Google Apps Education Edition is all very well, but what can you actually do with it in practice? This presentation gives you some ideas:

• 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.
• As I blogged about this week, Will Richardson’s started a wiki on 10 big questions for education. I’ve volunteered to moderate the page for What does an educated person look like today? Please contribute!

Data, Design & Infographics

• This is not only a beautiful visualization, but extremely useful: Snake Oil? The Scientific Evidence For Popular Health Food Supplements

• The video below gives some stats on The State of the Internet as it currently stands. YouTube serves 1 billion videos per day(!)

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

• Tableau Public is a free, online visualization tool that I’m looking forward to playing with.
• This visualization of the potential tsunami after the Chilean earthquake I found interesting:

Misc.

• There’s a flower that blooms once every 3,000 years! It’s pretty rare. A Chinese nun found one under her washing machine.
• 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)

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

1. 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!
2. Toward a grand theory of n00bs. Seriously, you couldn’t make up some of this stuff!
3. Why ’serious games’ work (via OLDaily):

Lifehacker

I felt compelled to devote a section to Lifehacker this week, just because so many of their articles/posts were top-notch:

• What’s the easiest way to share large files and media with friends?
• Make sure you’re not de-motivating your team
• Why Google Apps users miss out on regular GMail features – and some solutions
• Choose Wisely lets you select your default browser on a per-link basis
• Set up a fully-automated Media Center
• Best Start Page? (I’m using Google Sites for my 3 year old son’s new domain: BenBelshaw.com!)
• TuneGlue helps you find new tunes you’d like by mapping music connections
• Sweet Home 3D models your home, rearranges your furniture without breaking a sweat
• How to blur out faces and other portions of video
• Five best netbook operating system (I’m still loving Jolicloud!)
• Air Video streams your videos to your iPhone with minimal effort, is incredible
• Use CoreAVC to enable HD playback on netbooks (Windows-only, unfortunately)

Tech.

• 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!
• Published blog posts now appear instantly in Google Reader. Which is nice.
• How many oranges does it take to charge an Apple iPhone? About 2,380 slices apparently (via TechXAV)

• Hoccer is a very futuristic way to share info from your iPhone or Android phone (via @iusher)
• You can now track your dog via Twitter with a tweeting dog collar
• HOWTO: make a Google Buzz-specific desktop app
• Intel and Nokia have collaborated to make a new Operating System called MeeGo. Failure imminent (well, as soon as Google Chrome OS is launched…)
• You CAN delete more than one photo at a time in your iPhone’s Camera Roll. Hurrah!
• PumaPhone is like Nike+ but for the whole phone! (via Mashable)



• The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have produced a checklist to go through when you buy an ebook.
• TweetGuru allows you to send Direct Messages (DMs) to up to 12 Twitter users at once (via TechXAV)
• Some reasons to ‘drop Google’ (via @ginatrapani)
• URL shorteners are so 2008. ShadyURL makes your shared URL look sinister! (via BoingBoing)

Productivity & Inspiration

• Drowning in email? Zen Habits has some advice!
• Kairos is saying or doing something at the right time. Here’s how you can put it into practice!
• Some suggestions on how to achieve ‘creative flow’.
• Chris Guillebeau has some useful tips for stress-free travel. And let’s face it: he should know!

Education & Academic

• Fisher Price has started making e-readers for 3-6 year olds (via the xplanation)

• A school used laptop webcams to spy on students (Their statement after being found out can be found here)
• Some tips on how to create a live online learning event.
• We should cut teenage girls some slack. It ain’t easy – hence the sugar, fat and carbs!
• Academia.edu is a social network for academic researchers (via @ianrobsons)
• Building an e-learning course? You should probably read this then.
• How to write a 20-page research paper in under a day (slightly tongue-in-cheek) (via @simfin via @Documentally)
• Learning in Hand has some useful advice for deploying a class set of iPod Touches (via @WebGalPat)
• The Differentiator is a great tool for getting teachers where they’re pitching their lessons in relation to Bloom’s Taxonomy (via @lnewton)

• Some schools in the US are showing their true colours and are working in tandem with Wal-Mart, training students to be good workers (via OLDaily)
• Researchers have tracked 19,000 children born in the UK at the start of the 21st century. Lots of data and interesting reading (if somewhat depressing in places)
• Designing a school? Make sure teenagers get enough ‘blue’ light or they won’t sleep very well at night!
• The good people are Futurelab are crowdsourcing ideas for their conference later this year.
• Some recommended iPhone games for young children (via kottke.org)
• A ‘burbclave’ is a walled garden that segregates various people in society. Dean Groom doesn’t like them. Neither do I. Let’s not encourage them, eh?
• Connexions is a site trying to move beyond the textbook. Richard Baraniuk, the brains behind it, has done a TED Talk (via Don’t Waste Your Time)
• By the time children from the poorest families get to school, their vocabulary can be a whole year behind their middle-class peers. (via @Darcy1968)

Data, Design & Infographics

• SlipCover produces icons that look like game/Blu-ray cases, etc. (via @jamesforcee)
• An amusing look at how to create big, important infographics.
• Facebook relationship status and happiness:

• How Open Source runs the world infographic (via @glassbeed)
• The ocean is very, very deep. This is how deep. Deep, eh?
• 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):

• Awesome PhD brain development comic-style infographic (via @usablelearning)
• The Wall Street Journal has new guide to creating infographics (review at FlowingData)
• Fonts as landmasses. Quality.
• Ever wondered how memory works? Check out this National Geographic 3D guide! (via Chart Porn)
• I don’t necessarily agree with the conclusion, but this infographic about the difference between pirated and ‘legit’ DVDs makes a good point.
• This is a rarity. A well-presented argument with fantastic design! (via Scott McLeod):

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Misc.

• PleaseRobMe.com is a Twitter mashup that makes an important point – why are you telling everyone that you’re not at home?
• Bantu is just Japanese craziness taken the extreme. Oh. My. Goodness. (via @nickdennis)
• Birds ‘poop’ every 15 minutes (via @gardenglen)
• This Dilbert cartoon remind anyone of anything?
• Deforestation is affecting the evolutionary shape of birds’ wings.
• Holding a Realist epistemology can be dangerous for your career. Unbelievable.
• Don’t understand the economic theories of Keynes and Hayek? Perhaps this gangsta rap-style explanation will help! (via BoingBoing)
• Create your own comic/story with Spore (via @kukukukuku)

Quotations

A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes (H. Downs)

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. (Henry David Thoreau)

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle, or the mirror that reflects it. (Edith Wharton)

Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak. (Anon.)

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence. Helen Keller

(image at top CC BY-NC Brandon Christopher Warren)

A photo I took with my iPhone last weekend. It feels related somehow.

Introduction

Some days it feels like someone’s trying to tell you something. At first it’s subtle, but then the coincidences stack up until you’re left in no doubt that there’s a message in there somewhere. See if you come to the same conclusion as me. Here’s what came my way in a single day recently:

1. Seth Godin on ‘modern procrastination’

I don’t know how he manages to churn out gems like these every day and convince us that everything is related to marketing:

Laziness in a white collar job has nothing to do with avoiding hard physical labor. “Who wants to help me move this box!” Instead, it has to do with avoiding difficult (and apparently risky) intellectual labor.

“Honey, how was your day?”

“Oh, I was busy, incredibly busy.”

“I get that you were busy. But did you do anything important?”

Busy does not equal important. Measured doesn’t mean mattered.

2. José Gonzalez – Cycling Trivialities

I’m fond of music by the looks-Spanish-but-is-actually-Swedish-of-Argentine-descent singer-songwriter. Last.fm, to which I’ve been ’scrobbling’ songs for over 7 years, is fully aware of this and therefore served up Cycling Trivialities by José Gonzalez (from his album In Our Nature):

Too blind to know your best.
Hurrying through the forks without regrets.
Different now, every step feels like a mile.
All the lights seem to flash and pass you by.

So how’s it gonna be.
When it all comes down you’re cycling trivialities.

Don’t know which way to turn.
Every trifle becoming big concerns.
All this time you were chasing dreams,
without knowing what you wanted them to mean.

So how’s it gonna be.
When it all comes down you’re cycling trivialities.
So how’s it gonna be.
When it all comes down you’re cycling trivialities.

Who cares in a hundred years from now.
All the small steps, all your shitty clouds.
Who cares in a hundred years from now.
Who’ll remember all the players.
Who’ll remember all the clowns.

So how’s it gonna be.
When it all comes down you’re cycling trivialities.

So what does this really mean.
When it all comes down you’re cycling trivialities.
Cycling trivialities.
Cycling trivialities.

3. Correspondence

I’ve recently become a fan of the work of Alexander McCall Smith. I tend to avoid ‘popular’ writers as I’m a bit of a secret book snob (I refused to read anything written after 1950 until I was about 25…) I’ve just finished his The Right Attitude to Rain all about a middle-age female Scots philosopher and her mini moral dilemmas. My favourite series of his was actually that featuring Professor Von Igelfeld as it reminded me of Frasier (the only TV sitcom I’ve been able to bear), but I digress…

On page 123 of The Right Attitude to Rain one of the characters is left alone to deal with his ‘correspondence’. We’re not talking emails here, we’re talking hand-writing letters. It struck me that this has been a much more normal thing to do (albeit for a certain class of people) for a lot longer than emails.

Conclusion

So if you’d experienced these three things in quick succession, what would you have thought? I’ll add what it made me think to the comments below later this week.

Becoming more productive and motivated is like digging a well. Those around you might question why exactly you’re spending time and effort digging that hole; after all, there’s puddles around the place, right? Why not draw what you need from those like everyone else?

But the digging is worth it. Discovering your own personal well of productivity and motivation may be hard work in the first instance (and the well may require constant maintenance) but you’re pretty much guaranteed that it’s not going to run out when you need it most.

I dug that well very deep during my teacher training and first couple of years of teaching.It’s served me admirably in the time since then – allowing me, in fact, to focus on other things that developed my interests, talents and, ultimately, my career.

Have you found your well yet?

Want to find your own personal well of productivity and motivation? You might find the hints, tips and ideas that I’ll be sharing in #uppingyourgame: an educator’s guide to productivity useful!

(Image CC BY-NC-SA eph2810)

Image CC BY-NC-SA miss_blackbutterfly

On a personal note, I learned this week never to give people more information than they strictly need, and that spending time making an eBay listing look good does actually pay dividends. Oh, and that Creative-Commons licensing my photo of some famous local graffiti was very helpful…

Top 3

• Wow! We’re going to be multitouching everything fairly soon if this comes to market! (via @timekord)
• It’s too long to post here, but check out this very long and very detailed State of the Internet 2009 infographic!
• WWII imagery is now in Google Earth as an official layer. This rocks for History teachers!

Tech.

• Google Chrome is a great browser, but have too many tabs open and it gets a bit cramped. That’s where VerticalTabs becomes handy!
• HTML 5 isn’t going to save the internet. Apparently.
• You know the ‘lorem ipsum’ dummy text that people use for layouts? You can now do something similar with images. :-
• A ‘census’ of files available on Bittorrent has been carried out. Guess what? Only 1% were non-copyright-infringing… (via BoingBoing)
• Remember the humorous ‘iPhone vs. Stone’ comparison graphic from a couple of years back? Try this one comparing it to the Apple iPad… (viaTechXAV)

• Siri is a virtual assistant for your iPhone. Useful if you live in a big city and spend your days at restaurants, hailing cabs and going to the cinema. I don’t.
• ‘Grant Theft Impairment’ is the term for the carry-over of violent habits from games like Grand Theft Auto.
• Need to generate wall-size, high-res, Google Maps? You need this then!
• File this under ‘inevitable but cool’. Astronauts are now using Twitter to send TwitPics from space.
• Tuenti is Spain’s #1 social network for teens and #1 for the iPhone(via @ewanmcintosh)
• MultiURL is a (potentially) a better version of linkbun.ch for getting lots of URLs to people (via @dkuropatwa)
• You can now preview iPhone apps in your browser. About. Freakin’. Time.
• The BBC has a huge microsite (oxymoron?) to support their Virtual Revolution series (via @SwanseaITeC)
• Phrasr grabs Flickr photos to illustrate any phrase you enter (via @planetadams)
• Almost half of all UK mobile phone internet time is spent on Facebook. About half of mine is on HotUKDeals… (via @josiefraser)

Productivity & Inspiration

• Distractivity. Or, how-to-create-a-new-word-to-describe-something-old.
• 6 ways to be a better presenter. Pay attention to number four! (via @hrheingold)
• Here’s 10 tips to sleep better without spending longer in bed. I’m realising just how much of my life depends on the food I eat…
• Want to become a minimalist? It’s not as easy as it sounds ! Here’s 10 steps to help you.
• Chris Guillebeau and Zen Habits teamed up this week. Check out 9 steps to a thriving, very small business
• Lifehacker shows you how to become a GMail master. Keyboard shortcuts FTW!

Education & Academic

• Check out this Education futures timeline. Nothing happened between 1657 and 1900?

• Now that Prezi’s got education licensing, you may want to check out this guide to the advanced use of Prezi. It’s going to become the new Powerpoint, isn’t it?
• Seth Godin pigeon-holes us (and more importantly, our students) into Hunters and Farmers. But in a good, insightful way.
• I don’t think there’s no such thing as a ‘digital native’. But if there were, this is what they’d be like. Apparently. (via @wfryer)
• Spelling is important. Very important. See below… (via @mguhlin, form a presentation by @cburrell)

• Here’s 17 ways to use Second Life in your classroom. This would have been useful in 2005.
• 50 videos every educator should watch. Apparently. I haven’t seen them all, but definitely check out Ken Robinson on Creativity. (via @robingood)
• The 4C initiative is an attempt to ‘increase digital content capacity for education on a global scale’. It won’t succeed. Why? It hasn’t got a cool logo. (via OLDaily)
• I came across Penzu ages ago, but couldn’t see its utility. It’s good to see that people are now advocating is an online journal that can be used in schools (via OLDaily)
• WWII imagery is now in Google Earth as an official layer. This rocks for History teachers!

• Here’s how to ‘Google-proof’ your questioning. I can’t believe teachers really need this guidance. For. Goodness’. Sake. (via @mwclarkson)
• Incredible. DirectGov launches kids’ site with same name as gay porn site. You’d google it first, wouldn’t you? (via @josiefraser)
• This is a legendary annotated bibliography, and something to which I aspire. (via @oddhack)

Data, Design & Infographics

• Seemingly aiming to surpass himself, Dan Meyer has posted his 2009 annual report (and, usefully, how he did it). Not only did he have the discipline to gather all this data, but just look at the quality of the finished article!

• Amen to this. Some advice for people who make the news about statistics.
• The Japanese like their crazy, crazy landing pages (via @presentationzen)

• Clothing choices, 1941 (via @akipta)
• Australians use social media more than anyone else, it would seem.
• Wow. There’s a lot of satellites orbiting Earth. And spying on us (presumably).
• Data.gov.uk is better than Data.gov – or so says FlowingData. Oh good.

Misc.

• The Hourly Press is ‘news about news’ (via @hrheingold)
• Seth Godin has some random rules for ideas worth spreading
• We’re publicly disappointed all the time. True.
• It’s possible to get pregnant even if you don’t have a vagina. Wow, bizarre!
• Want to write an incendiary blog post to drive lots of traffic to your blog? Here’s how!
• Here’s a nice idea: Spotify for Desert Island Discs.
• Someone buy me this 8-bit tie. Please. (via Mashable)

Quotations

Any circumstance that has the power to hold you back also has the energy to push you forward. (Anon.)

Limited expectations yield only limited results. (Susan Laurson Willig)

At a distance from home a man is judged by what he means. (Anon.)

You’re stapling wings to a pig and hoping it will fly. It’s hard to see how you get from there to an F-16. (Art Stine)

Virtue is not left to stand alone. Those who practice it will have neighbours. (Confucius)

Due to having a bit more time on my hands than I anticipated recently, I’ve pressed on with #uppingyourgame: an educator’s guide to productivity. I’m delighted to announce that v0.2 is now ready! This is the first version to contain a chapter, in this case The Philosophy of Productivity. #uppingyourgame is the first book to be published using the OpenBeta publishing model and will be completed over the course of 2010.

If you want to buy into the ideas that this book contains (and will contain) NOW costs £3. You will receive free updates and notifications as each version is published. Buying into the contents means you have access to each subsequent version up to 1.0. If you decide not to purchase now the price will increase as I complete each chapter (and release each version) – up to a maximum of £10.

This version has now been superseded. Permanent link to the book’s page at http://bit.ly/uppingyourgame

Once you’ve completed the payment process clicking on the orange button to ‘Return to DAJ Belshaw’ will take you to the download page.

Image CC BY-NC mikeabney

Top 3

1. I thought that I kept myself fairly anonymous online to all but the people I want to interact with. Turns out I was wrong. Check out Panopticlick to start being worried about ‘browser fingerprinting’.
2. Vooks look either cool or completely pointless, depending on your point-of-view and mood. (via @betchaboy)
3. Dunbar’s Number is the theoretical maximum number of stable relationships an individual can sustain. It turns out that it’s about 150, which makes some people’s Twitter and Facebook profiles look ridiculous!

Tech.

• After some pressure from @mwclarkson, Prezi have announced their Edu Pro and Edu Enjoy licenses for use in the classroom. Now students can abuse Web 2.0 in the same way that they abuse Powerpoint…
• Need to create an iPhone app quickly and easily? Try http://isites.us!
• Google Docs now has thumbnail previews. The world rejoiced (although it doesn’t make my thesis look very pretty)
• Paul Stamatiou re-affirmed his geek credentials by pimping out his Macbook Pro with a RAID 0 array. I’m tempted, but not really ready to sacrifice my DVD-RW drive yet!
• The Apple iPad was never going to live up to the hype. Here are 10 things allegedly ‘missing’ from it.
• Engadget has a handy post for geeks: iPad – the definitive guide so far (via @chrispenny)
• It would be remiss of me not to embed the following YouTube video: Hitler debunks the iPad

• Apparently the iPad is ‘iBad’ for freedom according to the Free Software Foundation. They’ve got a point. But I’ll still be getting one.
• Stephen Fry weighed in, along with seemingly the rest of the world, with his views on what the iPad means for mankind.
• Thankfully, the iPad supports the ePub format for ebooks. You can find lots of these at epubbooks.com (via @chrispenny)
• The Polarize iPhone app allows you to create photos that look that they’ve been taken with a Polaroid camera. Cool! (example here)
• Screensplitr for the (jailbroken) iPhone allows you to output any app to another screen (via @wesfryer)
• I found this 360-degree video of Haiti unbelievable. It uses the same YellowBird camera that Google uses for ‘Street View’ (via OLDaily) I was going to embed it here, but it auto-plays, which is annoying…
• You can now upload email into a Google Apps email account using an (official) OSX app. This might be a good time for me to switch to an @dougbelshaw.com email address…
• That button in Tweetie that I’ve never pressed (see below – looks like a business card)? Turns out it adds contact details from someone’s contact details from Twitter to your iPhone address book. Sweet!

• Air Show is a free iPhone app that lets you stream your camera roll over wifi to any UPnP-enabled device (e.g. Xbox 360, PS3)
• Need a non-linear video editor (like iMovie or Windows Movie Maker) for Linux? Try OpenShot!
• These, apparently, are the 9 most important events in Open Source history (via @sc_r)
• Is the fact that only 20% of Twitter accounts are active ’shocking’? I can think of more things that shock me. Quite a lot. Most things, in fact. :
• Turns out that UK iTunes customers get a better deal than their US counterparts. But less cool stuff, unfortunately.
• The Apple SDK now allows VOIP over 3G. Hello Skype! (via @burntsugar)

• Flickrriver is an easy, enjoyable and intuitive way to view Flickr photos (via @betchaboy)
• You can now get Google Voice on the iPhone thanks to HTML 5 (but when is it coming to the UK?!)
• You can get Google Toolbar’s features without installing it, for those who are concerned about privacy.
• Sikuli is a free (and easy) way to automate stuff for free on Mac/Linux/Windows.
• Looks like Mozilla Weave is living up to its promise as it reaches v1.0. It syncs everything!
• Looking for a game to play on various platforms? BoingBoing’s got you covered
• Create Nintendo Mii-like avatar (via @tombarrett)

Productivity & Inspiration

• Lifehacker has 10 tips for better reading online and offline (definitely check out Stanza and Instapaper if you haven’t already!)
• Some things give you energy, some things drain it. These are the 10 worst energy-zappers, apparently.
• In a wonderful and timely post, Chris Guillebeau makes the simple yet extremely effective point that What you don’t do doesn’t matter
• I found the idea of ‘firing’ your community every so often fascinating. I’ve unfollowed everyone on Twitter and unsubscribed from all blogs before and started again. Perhaps time to do so a second time?
• ‘Hustle’ when you want to learn new things. I think we in the UK would call this ‘blagging’.
• Some ways to make your work environment more creative.
• I always work to music or ambient noise. RainyMood is now another tool in my toolkit.
• Always rushing around? It’s not good for you! Try How not to hurry

Education & Academic

• I was shocked to discover that some UK Local Authorities are going to pay £10,000 on a filter to remove comments from being displayed when students visit YouTube. Kerry Turner (@4goggas) who gave the heads-up also pointed out youtube.com/xl which I hadn’t used before. Handy!
• JISC published their final report into ebooks as (appropriately) a rather nice issuu document. Worth looking at the Executive Summary if nothing else!
• Not having actually used one doesn’t stop some people ruminating on how the iPad will change education. Inevitable.:  (via @baldy7)
• Futurelab has a really well put-together video about the future of education using the research from Beyond Current Horizons (from Beyond Current Horizons research) Apparently, half the population of Europe will be 50 by 2030 and will expect to live another 40 years (I’ll be 50 in December 2030 – scary!)

• Leigh Blackall wrote an interesting post on How to produce, publish and distribute a textbook these days
• I knew about the Open Educational Resource stuff but didn’t, strangely, know about OERcommons – nice search engine! (via @betchaboy)
• Lisa Nielsen (aka The Innovative Educator) has a great post on allowing kids to grow ‘digital wings’. I agree!
• This is a handy visualization to show how everyone from senior leaders to students can use internet technologies  (via @BFChirpy)
• Scott Leslie, one of the advisors for the 2010 Horizon Report, recorded some video interviews with some people who created the report (via OLDaily)

Data, Design & Infographics

• Dan Meyer threatened us all with driving round to our houses to force us to watch this excellent video called Vanishing Point. No need – it’s great!
• I bought Autograph for $6 this week (OSX only). It allows you to draw, in a simple way, using your Macbook trackpad – ace!
• Turns out the type of font you use determines how hard you perceive something to be. There’s a reason I use Georgia in everything I do – I read years ago (when I was at uni) that it has a positive effect, psychologically-speaking…
• This chart shows the number of mobile subscribers, per 100 people, worldwide.
• I saw this first time around but didn’t blog it. Some designers showed how much ink different fonts use by colouring in words with biros. If you’re concerned about the amount of ink you use, try Ecofont!
• I’m rather pleased with the sparkline (mini-graph) I added to the footer of this blog. There’s a kind-of howto here, but I’ll be screencasting how to do this next week. In the course of doing this I was reminded about the Google Charts API. Lots of services provide a front-end for Google Charts, but this tool in particular makes it very quick and easy to make stunning charts!
• There’s a guy who records everything he does. He creates wonderful and interesting visualizations in his annual report. Check it out! (try Daytum or your.flowingdata.com if you’re crazy enough to do likewise!)

• When you think about it, obviously Hubble telescope photographs are false-colour. Here’s how they do it. (via kottke.org)
• Here’s a visual representation of aid to Haiti

Misc.

• Boyce Avenue became famous doing covers of famous songs on YouTube. They’ve now signed a record deal. I’m not sure that’s a good idea, for some reason.
• Men can’t put their trousers around their waist beyond the age of 39. Kill me at 38 if I’m going to end up doing this. Please. (via @jenny_wood via @mickgwyther)
• Simple election posters may be effective on one leve, but then it allws people to create online generators to mock you:

• There are 3 phases of owning a computer. Not if you buy a Mac there aren’t…(via @dougpete)
• Wow! I’ve got to drive some of these roads before I die!  (via @glassbeed)
• Small-breasted pornstar? No work for you in Australia.
• Why write a book in 2010? Seth Godin’s got some good reasons.
• Apparently, just thinking about time makes your body sway – forwards if you’re thinking about the future, backwards if you’re thinking about the past. That’s worth an experiment Chez Belshaw, methinks…
• The US Navy reckon that video games improve ‘fluid intelligence’ (via @Quinnovator)
• Snowpeople. How cute and bizarre:

• Did Mallory and Irvine beat Hillary and Norgay to the summit of Everest?
• It’s all about the [attention] economy, stupid! (via @hrheingold)
• The average Kenyan spends over 50% of their disposable income on mobile communication (via @josiefraser … via @steiny)
• Haiti’s had a troubled history – and not just because of natural disasters (via @johndavitt via @worldhum)
• I’m definitely going to be reading Houdini’s The Right Way to do Wrong: an exposé of successful criminals courtesy of Google Books! (via BoingBoing)

Quotations

Misfortune shows those who are not really friends. (Aristotle)

If change doesn’t cost you anything then it isn’t real change. (John C. Maxwell)

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. (Winston Churchill)

Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. (Natalie Goldberg)

The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language. (J. Michael Straczynski)