dougbelshaw.com/blog

Welcome back!
#uppingyourgame: an educator's guide to productivity is now up to v0.4!
(I'm looking for people to translate it into other languages when finished - if you're interested get in touch!)

This is the first of a planned weekly series in which I reflect on what I’ve learned during the previous 7 days. As I explained in My digital reading workflow these links are culled from blogs and tweets I read.

Happy New Year! Feeling guilty because you haven’t made a New Year’s Resolution? Perhaps you could try the New Year’s Resolution Generator! (via swissmiss) It came up with ‘This year I will… declutter’ which seemed most prescient for me.  I’ve already made my Commitments for 2010 but for those who need things broken down step-by-step, they could do worse I suppose than try out mySomeday (via Mashable). Oh, and Zen Habits claims to have The Definitive Guide to Sticking to Your New Year’s Resolutions.

Before I go any further I must point you in the direction of this eye-candy:

The Known Universe by the American Museum of Natural History zooms from the Himalayas to deep space (via FlowingData)

100 Extraordinary Examples of Paper Art (via BoingBoing)

While we’re on the subject of design, swissmiss had a useful blog post on Japanese design principles. There are seven basic principles:

1. Fukinsei (imbalanced)
2. Kanso (simple)
3. Kokou (austere)
4. Shizen (natural)
5. Yugen (subtle profound)
6. Datsuzoko (unworldly)
7. Seijaku (calm)

I’d like to think that this blog has elements of 2, 5 and 7.

Not that I write much any more, but I was interested to (re-)discover that some people claim to be able to tell whether a person’s handwriting is ‘male’ or ‘female’. To be fair, if they managed to decipher mine they would only be able to tell that it was ‘messy’… In other quirky news (for which BoingBoing is an excellent source), it turns out that “there are more people currently alive in Asia, Africa and Latin America than the total number of people who died—anywhere, and for any reason—during the entire 20th century.” Wow. More at Census of the dead, in infographic form.

It’s been 5 years, apparently, since Google first started blogging. They’ve no got so many blogs that it’s difficult to keep up with them all. If you, like me, are becoming overwhelmed by the unread items in your RSS reader, why not get everything delivered by email? If you’ve got a decent system (see my How I deal with email) it can be a very efficient way of keeping up-to-date. The trouble is, of course, that some blogs don’t have an subscribe-by-email option. That’s where FeedMyInbox is useful. Enter website URL and your email address and, hey presto! If you want a quick-and-easy way of getting all of the links from your Twitter followers, try ReadTwit. It creates an RSS feed of tweets that contain links from people you follow. You can put that through FeedMyInbox too. And if all that sounds like too much effort, why not try LazyFeed? (via @heyjudeonline)

Talking of productivity, Hans de Zwart (who has recently been promoted to the cool-sounding Innovation Manager: Learning Technology) has a great post on The Influence of a Workspace on Performance. In it, Hans cites a book by Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness of which I wasn’t aware. His main thrust is highlighting the discrepancy between the exquisitely designed office space he works in, designed by David Leon, and the stupidity (his word) of being locked down to Windows 2000 and Internet Explorer 6. As Hans quotes David Leon as saying,

Innovation depends on bright people. These people cost more and are far more valuable than the buildings they occupy… but it is a proven fact that the environment in which they work has a major impact on their effectiveness.

For that reason we design workplaces and buildings round the needs of people and the business aims of their organisations.

He contends – and I agree – that should go for digital surroundings as well as physical surroundings. I recently reorganized my study, including building my own desk, to get things just right.

Motivation and productivity can be affected by surroundings, but a great deal of it comes from within. As Chris Guillebeau notes, there will always be people who say that you “can’t” do something. His reply (or rather, that of one of his readers) is:

Reading a lot of books is definitely a worthwhile thing to do, but one that takes dedication and motivation. How To Read a Book a Week in 2010 (via @chrisbrogan) is a useful reminder as to why setting yourself a definite target (e.g. one per week) is more useful than a hazy one (e.g. read more books).

And finally, some quotations I came across that I warmed to immediately. The first comes from a blog post on The Innovative Educator entitled My Top 20 Education Quotes from 2009:

Many of the most brilliant and creative people didn’t really discover what they could do and who they were until they’d left school and recovered from their education.

Minds are like parachutes – they only function when open. Thomas Dewar (via @timekord)

If you can find something everyone agrees on, it’s wrong – Mo Udall (via @russeltarr)

The only one thing I can change is myself, but sometimes that makes all of the difference. (via @Vincent_Ang)

Stuff to which I didn’t find a segue:

• 15 Incredibly Useful Wordpress Plugins to Boost your Blog [WebDesignCore]
• Channel 4’s 4oD channel on YouTube (and demandfive)
• Free books for secondaries to get pupils ‘hooked on reading’ [Guardian UK]
• herebetwitterers [map visualization of Twitter friends]
• How to Find Anything Online: Become an Internet Research Expert [Webdesigner Depot]
• in education [peer-reviewed free-access online education journal]
• Open isn’t so open any more [Connectivism blog]
• Professional Conference Video With Semi-Professional Equipment [dy/dan]
• Put a name on it [Seth's blog]
• Synchtube [via Free Technology for Teachers]
• The Essential Zen Habits of 2009 [Zen Habits]

Can’t wait until next week? See the tweets I favourite in real-time at http://twitter.com/dajbelshaw/favorites

Posted: January 3rd, 2010
Categories: Things I Learned This Week
Tags: Education, email, favourites, infographics, learning, motivation, New Year, Paper Art, Productivity, quotations, resolutions, RSS, Twitter, workspace, YouTube
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I get quite a bit of email. Even more, now that I’ve pretty much abandoned RSS and subscribed to news sources and blogs via email.* There’s various approaches to dealing with email (e.g.s - Inbox Zero, GTD, etc.) but, for what it’s worth, here’s my ’system’. I haven’t read or watched videos of the others – they may be similar, they may not. My system (if I can call it that) depends on a GMail-like ’star’ feature, so may not be useful for everyone:

* Why don’t I use an RSS feed reader much any more? Getting update via email forces me (under the system outlined above) to read new stuff at least once a week. It’s also rather depressing when you see you’ve got literally thousands of unread items in your feed reader…

Posted: December 20th, 2009
Categories: Technology
Tags: email, GMail, graphic, GTD, Inbox Zero, Productivity, RSS, star, system, visualization, workflow
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The above is my first effort at visualizing how I approach reading stuff online. You’ll notice that it all ends up back at my delicious account. That’s because it’s important that I can re-find stuff that I come across, even if only briefly.

Down the left is the information I glean from blogs and news sites. I subscribe to these by email nowadays as I realised that the problem was with having to go somewhere else to read stuff other than my inbox. It’s sent to me, I read it and then bookmark it if important.

Down the right is the stuff I read on-the-go through my iPhone and Tweetie, my Twitter client of choice. The great thing about Tweetie is that it has Instapaper integration. If you haven’t come across Instapaper yet, I really do recommend it for providing a clean, stripped down version of text you want to read later. Once I’ve read the article/information on Instapaper I bookmark if I deem it worthy.

In the centre is my Twitter favourites. It’s really easy, using Tweetdeck (my desktop Twitter client of choice) to ‘favourite’ tweets. I then go back through these at http://twitter.com/dajbelshaw/favourites periodically and bookmark most of them.

So that’s how I roll. What about you?

Posted: December 18th, 2009
Categories: Technology
Tags: blogs, bookmarking, del.icio.us, email, feeds, GMail, Instapaper, reading, RSS, TweetDeck, Tweetie, Twitter
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Image CC BY derrickkwa @ Flickr

I tried to do something very simple yesterday. Surprisingly, it caused me a bit of a headache. What was it? I just wanted to subscribe to some blogs via email.

Why would I want to subscribe to blogs via email? Well, for all I love Feedly, I have to go to a different location to access this. This involves a physical and conceptual shift. Making blog posts (or links to them) appear in my email inbox means I can’t really ignore them. In other words, I’m more likely to keep up-to-date.

However, when I went to subscribe to some blogs the option to subscribe by email wasn’t available to me (necessitating the use of xFruits) or seemed to be available but then didn’t work.

It’s trivial (and free!) to enable readers to subscribe via email to your blog. Here’s how:

1. Go to Feedburner and login using your Google account.

2. ‘Burn’ (i.e. add) your feed to Feedburner (you can find your feed URL by clicking on the RSS icon to the right in your address bar when you visit your blog):

3. Within Feedburner, click on the ‘Publicize’ tab and then on ‘Email subscriptions’ on the left-hand side:

4. Follow the (clear) instructions as to how to proceed. It shows you how you can add the option to subscribe via email to your blog’s sidebar.

5. Click on the ‘Optimize’ tab within Feedburner and then ‘BrowserFriendly’ on the left-hand side:

6. Follow the instructions, enabling the BrowserFriendly service.

7. Make sure all the links to your RSS feed on your blog point towards the new Feedburner feed. If you’ve got a self-hosted Wordpress-powered blog, the easiest way to do this is to download the relevant plugin to do this for you!

The result, if you follow these steps, will be that if users click on your RSS they should see something like this:

If you need any extra help or have some tips please use the comments section below!

Posted: October 25th, 2009
Categories: Technology
Tags: blog, feed, Feedburner, Google, guide, howto, RSS, Wordpress
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People come from far and wide to read this blog:

Source: Clustrmap

At my previous blog (teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk – back online soon!) I used to reflect monthly on blog visitors and subscribers via RSS or email. In a relentless drive to improve vistors’ experience when visiting the blog I’d analyze which browsers were being used, their screen resolution, and so on.

I haven’t really done that since moving over to blogging here at dougbelshaw.com/blog. Whilst I don’t intend to produce monthly blog posts on the matter, I thought it would be interesting and useful to reflect on the information I’ve got about blog visitors and subscribers!

The two tools I use to find out about blog visitors are both now owned and provided for free by Google: Analytics (for visitors) and Feedburner (for subscribers)

Visitors

The following graph shows how many visits were made to this blog per week between 26 February 2009 (when I installed the Google Analytics Wordpress plugin) and today:

Visits are slowly on the rise and are affected significantly by the school year! I’m slightly concerned that people spend, on average, less than two minutes here and tend to only visit one or two pages or posts.

Perhaps I need to make the blog easier to navigate and flag up related material?

So what are people looking for when they come here? The Top 10 most visited posts/pages is make interesting reading:

Unsurprisingly, stuff that was of direct practical utility – either in the form of a downloadable resource or a how-to guide – featured heavily in the Top 10. Geeky stuff also features significantly. I was, however, delighted to see that my Director of E-Learning interview presentation on How E-Learning can contribute to raising achievement was up there as well and that people, on average, spent over five minutes reading through it!

Finally on the general visitor front, I’m pleased to see plenty of people coming from referring sites:

The majority of these referring sites were social media/networking sites such as Twitter and Disqus (the comments system that I use on this blog).

Subscribers

As I expected, most subscribers use either Google (iGoogle, Google Reader) or FriendFeed to keep up-to-date with my blog posts:

At one time this would have been dominated by Bloglines. Google, as with most things, now rules the roost!

The above chart shows a combination of those who subscribe to the RSS feed via a feed reader or by email. Almost exactly 10% of the 964 people who subscribe to this blog do so by email. The great advantage of this is that I can see who they are and (potentially) contact them without having to put up a public blog post.

Subscribers act differently to general visitors. The latter might only ever view this blog once, having searched for a very specific thing on a search engine and leave after gaining that new knowledge or insight. Subscribers, on the other hand, have (presumably) made a judgement that this blog consistently produces content that they find relevant and useful.

You’d expect the Top 10 posts/pages for subscribers to be different. And it is!

I think it’s fair to say that the majority of subscribers to this blog are those related to education in some way. And that would make sense given that the tagline is Educational Technology, Leadership & Productivity!

The best indicator of which posts have been most popular, however, comes from the sidebar widget at dougbelshaw.com/blog (RSS/email readers will need to click through to see it). This is powered by the previously-mentioned Disqus and measures how much interest a post has caused based on factors such as the number of comments it generated directly, how many tweets there on Twitter link to it, the number of trackbacks it received, and the number of pageviews.

To finish off, then, here are the current Top 10:

1. HOWTO: Present using Cooliris (the basics…)
2. Why I’m trying to make myself redundant.
3. HOWTO: Present using Cooliris (advanced)
4. Assessment in UK schools: a convenient hypocrisy?
5. A Week of Divesting: an introduction
6. A (temporary) farewell to a hero.
7. Heuristical Templates (or, how to review elearning stuff in a way that benefits others)
8. On the important difference between hitchhiking and bandwagon-jumping.
9. How Wordpress-powered P2 is (hopefully) going to leave me more organized and productive!
10. Carol Dweck on ‘growth mindsets’ and motivation.

Posted: October 8th, 2009
Categories: Everything Else
Tags: blog, Bloglines, Disqus, Feedburner, FriendFeed, Google, Google Reader, iGoogle, RSS, stats, Twitter, website, Wordpress
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Before reading this, you should have gone through the steps indicated in these two posts:

• >> Podcasting: Step 1 – RSS and setting up a teacher blog
• >> Podcasting: Step 2 – Recording and editing your podcast

In this last part of the Podcasting guide, we’re going to convert our audio masterpiece to a format suitable for mobile audio players and the Internet, and make it available as a podcast! This will involve 3 steps:

1. Converting your audio to MP3

2. Sending your MP3 file to your blog

3. Getting your students/colleagues to subscribe to your podcast

To get started, follow the guide below!

Posted: February 6th, 2009
Categories: Podcasting
Tags: blog, edte.ch, educational technology, iTunes, podcast, Podcasting, RSS
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Google Sites is wonderful. Not only can anyone and everyone sign up to make a wikified website, but it’s really easy to use and very configurable. BUT it’s got one very, very major drawback. No RSS feeds! This post shows you how you can generate an RSS feed from either an ‘announcements’ or ‘recent changes’ page quickly and easily.

If you’re an educator, you might want to try Google Sites as part of Google Apps Education Edition. It’s free. I’ve configured it on my mrbelshaw.co.uk domain and it makes life very easy. Throughout the following I’m going to be using my Google Sites-powered learning.mrbelshaw.co.uk as an example.

RSS feed for ‘announcements’ page

If want to create an RSS feed for a blog-like announcements page, you’re looking for a page similar to the one below. You are given an option to create this kind of page when you click ‘Create New Page’.

You need to highlight and copy the URL of your announcements page:

…and then head over to this Yahoo! Pipe and paste the URL you just copied from your announcements page into the box:

Once you’ve done this click the ‘Run Pipe’ button and  you should see something like the screenshot below (although obviously yours will reflect the contents of your ‘announcements’ page!):

Now all that’s left to do is to discover what your RSS feed URL is by clicking on the orange RSS icon:

You should see something like the screenshot below, although it may look slightly different if you use a web browser other than Firefox – and will, of course, depend on your websites’ content:

You can now take the URL of the RSS feed that’s just been created:

…and add it to your Google Sites-powered website, along with the web-standard RSS feed icon!

RSS feed for ‘Recent site activity’

If, however, you want to create an RSS feed from updates made to the site as a whole, you need first of all to locate the ‘Recent site activity’ link at the bottom of your website:

Once you’ve located that page, simply go through the same steps as above, but use this Yahoo! Pipe instead.

Posted: January 27th, 2009
Categories: Education, Technology
Tags: generator, Google Sites, guide, howto, Mozilla Firefox, RSS, Yahoo! Pipes
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Read/act on this first: Podcasting: Step 1 – RSS and setting up a teacher blog

In the last session we set up a blog and learned what RSS was. Let’s just remind ourselves of what podcasting is, shall we?

So podcasting is when you deliver audio files to ’subscribers’ automatically using an RSS feed. This RSS feed is generated automatically by the Posterous-powered blog you set up in Step 1.

In this session we’re going to be using a program called Audacity. This is available for all platforms – Windows, Mac and Linux. It is free and Open Source software. Audacity is already installed on the computers we shall be using at school, but if you need to download it at home, you can find it here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net

Note: we will need a ‘plugin’ for Audacity to be able to export to MP3 format, but we’ll leave that for next session!

Instead of re-inventing the wheel, we’ll be making use of the excellent video guides to using Audacity that can be found here: http://www.how-to-podcast-tutorial.com/17-audacity-tutorial.htm

These are the ones you should focus on today:

1. The editing tools
2. Basic editing and trimming your audio
3. Importing audio and adding music to your podcast

When you save your audio, just save it as a WAV file. We’ll work on exporting to MP3 next time. If you’re looking for music that you can legally and safely use in your podcasts, check out the links at the bottom of the Wikipedia page for ‘Podsafe’.

Posted: January 25th, 2009
Categories: Podcasting
Tags: Audacity, edte.ch, educational technology, elearning, elearnr, MP3, Open Source, podcast, Podcasting, RSS, WAV
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Over the next three weeks, staff e-learning sessions will focus on getting started with podcasting. This first session starts off with the basics you will need as a teacher before even pressing that ‘record’ button:

1. An understanding of what RSS is.
2. A blog onto which to put MP3 files.

The easiest way to get your head around what RSS is and how it means that audio files can be delivered to interested parties automatically is by watching this excellent explanatory video prepared by CommonCraft:

A podcast differs from simply placing an audio file on the Internet because of RSS. It means that new content can be ‘pushed’ to interested parties rather than them having to manually check for updates. The process of interested parties requesting that podcasts are delivered automatically is known as ’subscribing’.

Now that you know what RSS is, you need to have a mechanism by which you can generate one. In our case, this is going to be a blog. Anything that you add to a blog post will be automagically turned into a subscribable podcast.

To learn how to set up a blog, check out the elearnr guide entitled:
Creating a homework blog in 3 simple steps using email

If you want to jump ahead and have a go podcasting before the next session, you should visit the Box of Tricks website where José Picardo has put together an excellent short presentation entitled Podcasting in Five Easy Steps.

Posted: January 19th, 2009
Categories: Podcasting
Tags: audio, CommonCraft, edte.ch, educational technology, elearning, elearnr, podcast, Podcasting, Posterous, RSS
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If the following leaves you confuzzled, the BBC have a useful guide to RSS which you should probably read!

If you’re anything like me, you read a wide range of things on t’Internet and, along the way, subscribe to a fair number of RSS feeds. On a couple of occasions I’ve just found the sheer number of blog posts ‘unread’ in my feedreader overwhelming. I ended up just unsubscribing from them all and starting again.

Now, though, I’ve found a system that enables me to keep on top of things. It’s a combination of a really useful web service and a Firefox plugin that works with Google Reader.

AideRSS

Most websites only offer one RSS feed. I have a separate RSS feed for each category, but Lifehacker, for example, goes one step further in having a ‘top posts’ feed. You can actually do this for every RSS feed you come across using AideRSS.

All you do is visit the website, give the website address and it comes up looking something like the screenshot below:

As you can see, there’s an RSS feed for the ‘Good Posts’, ‘Great Posts’, ‘Best Posts’ and ‘Top 20′ posts. The PostRank that you see on the left-hand side takes into account:

• The number of times that blog post has been bookmarked on del.icio.us
• How many comments the blog post received
• The number of other blogs and websites referencing the post
• How many times the blog post has been ‘dugg’ at Digg.com
• The number of tweets from Twitter.com linking to the post

It’s out of 10 and is only relative to that particular site, being the top 20%, etc.

If you do this for blogs that update very frequently, it’s easier to deal with the firehose…

Feedly

I’ve been using a plugin called Feedly for the last few months. It’s basically a front-end for Google Reader in that you have to have a Google account for it to work. Feeds are presented in a very good looking magazine-like format:

There’s some great social features of Feedly as well – not least, The Wall:

Although perhaps the screenshot above doesn’t do it justice, The Wall features recommendations from other Feedly users’ that you’ve ’subscribed’ to. It’s a fantastic feature.

Finally…

Don’t forget Twitter and FriendFeed. The things your friends on social networks share are likely to be of interest to you as well!

How do YOU keep on top of your unread blog posts from RSS feeds?

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Posted: October 5th, 2008
Categories: Productivity
Tags: AideRSS, FriendFeed, Google, Google Reader, RSS, Twitter.com
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