You’ll have to excuse me. Over the next couple of weeks (until the end of June, to be precise) you’ll find fewer blog posts at dougbelshaw.com. Why? Well, it’s not laziness:

• I’ve a workshop to co-prepare with Nick Dennis for the Schools History Project Conference
• There’s 240 AS-Level History exam scripts waiting for me to mark them (for EdExcel)
• We’re finally moving house!

Added to my usual teaching duties, getting things in place for my new E-Learning Tutor position, attending a couple of meetings, going to the gym and playing with my overly-energetic and inquistive 16-month old son, Ben.

So please accept my apologies – I’m sure you understand. Normal service will be resumed as soon as I’ve got broadband sorted out in the new house (I’m thinking of getting mobile broadband anyway…)

If you need your Belshaw fix, I’ll still be Twittering away – but better still, get started with, and follow me on, FriendFeed. It’s great!

Image credit: Chorrillo – Trickle by Antonio Martinez @ Flickr

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)

You can now be automatically notified if someone posts a follow-up comment to what you’ve said on a blog post at dougbelshaw.com. Just tick the ‘Notify me of followup comments via email’ box underneath the comment area. You know it makes sense.

I’ve added this to my Plugins Used page.

You may have noticed that next to the title of this blog there’s a little section where it tells you what I’m currently doing. This is powered by Twitter, a site which exists to answer the question ‘What are you doing?’. You can update your account as often as you wish by going to twitter.com, texting a phone number, or sending a message via your IM account (MSN Messenger, AIM, GTalk, etc.)

At first I thought this was a bit frivolous, however not only is it addictive, but it keeps people up-to-date with what you’re doing, and you can also look back to see what you’ve been doing in a week (useful if you keep a semi-regular diary/journal).

Finally, you can ‘follow’ other members (i.e. see what they’re up to) or – with their permission – add them as ‘friends’. You can then get updates (via phone, IM or web) as to what they’re doing. I notice that the BBC have started using Twitter with short updates which you can get via the 3 methods mentioned above. Innovative use of new technologies? I like it…