What is Hybrid Days? from Hybrid Days on Vimeo.

My presentation is entitled How to Develop Digital Literacies in Yourself and Others and I’ll be delivering it via the official Hybrid Days Livestream channel at 20:00 GMT on Saturday 26th November 2011.

Do join me if you can!

On the basis of I’d be rather interested if other people I know did this, here’s a 9-minute ramble through how I’ve got my MacBook Pro set up – including apps and web services I use. If there’s anything you see in the screencast that I forgot to mention explicitly, please do ask in the comments below.

There’s one thing I forgot to mention: I don’t use the ‘tapping’ feature on laptop trackpads as it drives me mad. That causes problems for others when they use my machines…

Tip: click the arrows to the bottom-right of the embedded YouTube video to go fullscreen!

Mobile devices in e-Learning : Doug Belshaw, JISC InfoNet from NLIAH Leaders on Vimeo.

The clip above is one of six available here:

1. Mobile Devices in e-Learning
2. Enabling Content creators in e-Learning
3. VLEs v Ease of Virtual Learning
4. Justifying a VLE
5. Quality of e-Learning Resources
6. Adding Value to e-Learning materials

The videos are for The National Leadership and Innovation Agency for Healthcare (NLIAH).

The above video shows hands with and without a book in them. Books have a defined user experience: there is a consistent and uniform way to open and ‘read’ them; they have a particular structure encourage certain familiar gestures – e.g. flicking through to the index or chapter headings.

Gestures, therefore, meet the three tests for a semiotic domain (implicitly) laid down by Gee (2003:23):

1. They allow us to experience (see, feel and operate on) the world in new ways.
2. Such gestures are shared with groups of people who carry them on as distinctive social practices.
3. They allow us to gain resources that prepare us for future learning and problem-solving in the domain (and perhaps related domains)

If gestures are semiotic domains, explains Gee, then they must have ‘design grammars’:

Each domain has an internal and an external design grammar. By an internal design grammar, I mean the principles and patterns in terms of which one can recognize what is and what is not acceptable or typical in a semiotic domain. By an external design grammar, I mean the principles and patterns in terms of which one can recognize what is and what is not an acceptable or typical social practice and identity in regard to the affinity group associated with a semiotic domain. (p.30)

The concept of ‘gestural literacy’, therefore, would seem to be somewhat of a misnomer. Grammar may be a semiotic domain and have both internal and external design grammars, but to consider it separately from the act of reading would be to miss the point. We need holistic views of literacy that take into account embodied cognition.

References

Gee, J.P. (2003) What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy (Palgrave Macmillan, New York)

This week I’m talking about productivity at conferences, but it can be generalised to any occasion in which you’re away from home with a schedule dictated by someone other than yourself.

Those reading via RSS or email will need to click through for the video!

If you like this, you may want to check out #uppingyourgame: a practical guide to personal productivity.

This week I’m talking about downtime – what it is, why it’s important, and where to find it.

Those reading via RSS or email will need to click through for the video!

If you like this, you may want to check out #uppingyourgame: a practical guide to personal productivity.

RSS and email subscribers click on the post title to view on the blog, or here to view on YouTube.

Continuing the series I started last week, this episode looks at the importance of defining your own philosophy of productivity.

This week I have been mostly…

Delivering on projects

I launched two new things yesterday:

• #uppingyourgame: a practical guide to personal productivity
• Learning and teaching upgrade to JISC infoNet’s Digital Repositories infoKit

Finding out more about mobile learning

Wednesday was a 17.5 hour working day for me, but worth it! I was down in London for the MoLeNET conference and awards ceremony because of the JISC mobile & wireless technologies review I’m currently undertaking.

Such enthusiasm! Such transformational projects and learning experiences! Awesome.

Playing around with video

After reading about the importance of online video for, well, everything, I thought it was time I played around with it a bit more. Hence:

• Doug on Productivity – Episode 1
• Things I Learned This Month – September 2010

Looking after my son

I’ve been looking after Ben for the last three Fridays as my Mam is currently visiting my Dad in the United Arab Emirates. (Happy 61st Birthday Dad!) For the first two of these that meant dropping him off and picking him up from school nursery then spending the afternoon together. However, he was running a temperature yesterday, so didn’t go in and wasn’t up to doing much active stuff apart from the inevitable ‘Calpol half-hour’ after taking some medicine…

Like this? Want it to become a regular monthly thing? Let me know in the comments below!