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Posts Tagged ‘Technology’

Things I Learned This Week – #35

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Offline this week I learned how dead the world of Higher education is over the summer, that there was a reason I was heavily discouraged to take GCSE Art, and that trying to run after a takeaway curry the night before is a non-starter… :-p
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Let me tell you what I think ‘this’ is.

Last week I wrote a post entitled What’s this? which included the following diagram:

Answers from the comments:

  • DEPTh
  • A planned presentation
  • Apple
  • Nirvana
  • A 21st century educator
  • The future
  • dougbelshaw.com/blog
  • Trust
  • Innovation

Good answers all. :-)

My answer? The user experience. User outcomes*

Think about it.

It’s what designers, teachers, productivity gurus and technology enthusiasts all strive to improve. And it’s what Kathy Sierra used to blog about. I think it’s time to take up that mantle. :-p

*Thanks to Neil Adam for the pointer!

Posted: August 27th, 2010
Categories: Education, Productivity, Technology, design
Tags: , , , ,
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I sync therefore I am.

I use a MacBook Pro. Which I like. A lot.

Increasingly, however, it’s a very powerful thin client. A ‘fat’ client, as it were. Pretty much everything I use now syncs with a cloud-based service:

  • Documents, presentations, etc. are saved to a well-ordered Dropbox folder (automatically syncs with my Windows machine at work and my iPhone). I’ve gone with the 50GB for $9.99/month option.
  • Spotify provides all of my music. This is £9.99/month and, to my mind, worth every penny. I sync offline playlists to my iPhone via wifi but can access almost anything I want over 3G.
  • As Evernote recognises text in images and allows you to search through notes, I’m now using it to ‘take notes’ in books I read for my thesis and pleasure. I currently doing ‘pay as you go’ to upgrade storage as and when I need it through the iPhone app (£2.99/month). At the moment that seems to be most months!

The system works so well that I recently sold our Apple Time Capsule. I’ve got a 1TB external hard disk, but to be honest very rarely use or need it. :-D

Posted: August 27th, 2010
Categories: Technology
Tags: , , , , , ,
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Things I Learned This Week – #34

This week I learned that seagulls are carnivorous (I saw one eating a pigeon), that trying to escape via a nettle-strewn path when playing ‘capture the flag’ is foolish, and that this season is going to be pretty much the same as the last for Sunderland…
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Things I Learned This Week – #33

Offline this week I learned not to go and see films on the basis of who’s in them, not to sit next to large cheese plants at doctors surgeries, and that listening to audiobooks before bed almost guarantees some form of lucid dreaming. :-p
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Things I Learned This Week – #32

Offline this week I learned that games-based learning is the future for my son, Ben (he loves Big Brain Academy on the Wii!), that nothing beats a whiteboard and coloured pens for mindmaps, and that there are, apparently, spouse-imposed laws about what you can and can’t do in en-suites between certain hours of the day… :-p (more…)

The freeze-thaw method of technology integration.

This post springs from 3 things:

  • My experiences as Director of E-Learning
  • Discussions I’ve had with James Michie and Nick Dennis about #edjournal
  • A conversation I’ve just had with colleague Steve Bailey about ‘cloud’ apps from a records management perspective

The further down the rabbit-hole I go, the more reports I read, and as I talk to increasing numbers of educational technology leaders, I’m realising how problematic my actions as a standard classroom teacher actually were. Why? Well as a ‘maverick’ my actions on a small scale could potentially have undermined the larger-scale roll-out of technology in that institution. I acted in a somewhat cavalier manner to legal issues and could potentially have affected cultural acceptance of educational technology writ large.

I’m going to propose a 10-stage ‘freeze-thaw model’ of technology integration. It goes something like this:

  1. Draw up a list of minimum specifications.
  2. Explore the app/service/solution that has most traction.
  3. Talk to people who can do ‘due diligence’ regarding the legal side of things (especially terms & conditions, service level agreements)
  4. Do some small-scale testing with a pilot group.
  5. Agree upon how the technology is going to be used.
  6. ‘Freeze’ it – i.e. no more new features for a given amount of time (e.g. a term or academic year)
  7. Discuss new features and have pilot groups.
  8. ‘Thaw’ it – let people play about with a sandbox and go through due diligence again.
  9. ‘Re-freeze’ – i.e. add features and then freeze for a given amount of time.
  10. Repeat.

I’m aware that this goes against almost everything I’ve done before. For example, at the Academy I just opened up all of the tools available with Google Apps Education Edition to see what people did with them. I was pleasantly surprised. But, leaving after a year I didn’t have to deal with the data security, workflow or sustainability aspects of this.

Any type of project that is successful is sustainable in some way. I see the freeze-thaw model as a way of encouraging responsible experimentation. :-)

Image CC BY jenny downing

Posted: August 4th, 2010
Categories: Education, Technology
Tags: , , , ,
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Things I Learned This Week – #31

You’re expecting me, I know, to talk about Google Teacher Academy UK. I learned so much in my time in London that to try and shoehorn it into this post would be foolish. Instead, I’m going to write a series of five (or so) blog posts over the next couple of weeks. I’ll stick to the usual format with this post! :-) (more…)

Things I Learned This Week – #30

Offline this week I learned that 3 year-old boys’ nostrils can accommodate quite large chickpeas, what amniocentisis means, and that objects in your wing mirrors may appear more distant that they actually are… :-p (more…)

Intention vs. Effect

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.

Posted: July 21st, 2010
Categories: Technology
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