Posterous, a blogging solution I’ve really enjoyed using and have advocated widely, was bought by Twitter recently. It was a talent acquisition, meaning that the future of the service is in doubt. Yesterday, I spent some time moving my Conference and FAQ blogs (previously hosted on Posterous) to subfolders of dougbelshaw.com.

The next step is to find a way to transfer Thought Shrapnel, my Tumblr-powered blog, in a satisfactory way. Truth is, Tumblr is an excellent (although painfully proprietary) platform with some really nice features. I like the defined post types and the way you can queue-up blog posts to go live.

Another thing I’d like to do is move both this blog and my e-books space from separate installations to my new WordPress ‘multisite’ installation running on the site root.

Finally, I’ve discontinued blogging at literaci.es (transferring the posts here) and moved my Ideas Garden to a public Evernote workbook.

You can find all of these spaces linked to from my profile at dougbelshaw.com.

Image CC BY-SA Fey Ilyas

In addition, you may want to check out both Martin Waller and James Michie who have also been consolidating their online presence.

I realised at the weekend that it’s been about 5 years since I started blogging properly, having got into my groove sometime in November 2005. Back then, as a classroom teacher, I wrote at teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk about education and educational technology. What got me started was reading and commenting on the high-quality blogs of a small number of international educators, the dilution of which I lamented a few years later.

In the past 5 years I’ve gone from History teacher to E-Learning Staff Tutor to Director of E-Learning to working at JISC infoNet. I’ve also cultivated increasing amounts of stubble, as this video of me as a 24 year-old demonstrates! Hopefully, as I’ve read, learned and understood more about the world, my style of writing has improved. Well, one can hope.

The following are the things that I think anyone with a blog would do well to heed. I’d be interested in your take.

1. Comment count != quality

The quality of a blog post has almost nothing to do with the number of comments you get – and everything to do with the zeitgeist, the way you phrase questions and how you structure your blog.

2. How to get more readers

To get more people visiting your blog, go and comment on other people’s and autotweet your blog posts via Twitter. This works up to a point, after which you can either keep it real or become a cynical marketing machine. I prefer content over style. Most of the time.

3. WordPress and Bluehost rock

I’ve tried lots of different blogging platforms and webhosts, but have found WordPress to consistently do what I want of it and Bluehost [affiliate link] to be cheap, feature-filled and rock-solid.

4. Have an ‘ideas garden’

I’ve blatantly appropriated this term from someone who used it in conversation with me a while ago. Sorry if that was you – I try to credit the sources of ideas I share as well as images I use. An ideas garden is simply a collection of draft blog posts that you come back to, adding pictures, further ideas, etc. until they form whole posts. It can also stop you ranting when you’re in a bad mood. :-p

5. Digital footprint

I used to have a link to my curriculum vitae on my blog but, in fact, the whole thing is a digital portfolio, with my last three positions secured to a great extent because of my online presence. SEO is important, as is attempting to control the first page of Google search results (so that they’re all positive): my digital footprint is more important to me than my credit score. Fact.

Image CC BY Michael Ruiz

This week I have been mostly…

Travelling

It was time for the annual pilgrimage to the inlaws who live in Devon. We fly the rest of the time (Newcastle –> Exeter) but once a year we go down for a bit longer with the car. This time, instead of doing the 6 hours or so in one day, we stopped off in Doncaster and then again at a National Trust property. It made for an enjoyable journey!

Updating

Whilst there was nothing particularly wrong with my portfolio page at dougbelshaw.com when I came across this free ‘personal branding’ WordPress theme I couldn’t resist updating. I like the result.

Reorganizing

I’ve decided that listening to music mainly by album on Spotify is slightly anachronistic. So I’ve been reorganizing my playlists into ‘Running’, ‘Train’, ‘Deadline’, ‘Working’, etc. I’ve kept the album-focused playlists for the moment, but situational playlists seem to be the way forward!

Considering the future

Whilst I’m only four months into my new job (and greatly enjoying it) I’ve got to think about the future. I’ve got a two-year contract with JISC infoNet. Specifically I’ve been considering:

• What (if anything) do I want to do with my Ed.D. when I finish it?
• Is Northumberland where should we bring up Ben and his sister (when she’s born)?
• Do I want to stay in the FE/HE sector, move back into schools or do something entirely different?

I haven’t made any decisions and, if past experience is any guide, things tend to come out of the blue when you least expect them… :-p

Introduction

This post is prompted by 3 things:

• Re-discovering Stammy’s Why I’m more productive on a Mac post from 2006.
• Reading Cory Doctorow’s post What I Do where he outlines the hardware and software he uses (and why).
• A discussion at EdTechRoundUp on Sunday night where I was asked to explain why the iPhone 4 is ‘better’ than the Dell Streak.

A bit of history

I’ve used Macs exclusively since mid-2006 when the first MacBooks came out. Before this I had been using Ubuntu Linux on a laptop, and before that I used various flavours of (usually modded-in-some-way) Windows whilst tinkering with different distributions of Linux. So I’ve experience of the three main operating systems in some depth.

After purchasing the MacBook, my wife eventually got one, then we’ve since picked up an Apple Time Capsule, Apple TV, iPhone (me), iPod Touch (her), iPod Shuffle (me), and eMac (for my son). Things. Just. Work.

An average day with my tech

I’ll wake up, usually as a result of the light emanating from my Lumie BodyClock, which is much better than being jolted out of bed by an alarm (and awesome if you’ve got SAD tendencies). For the times I really do need to make sure I’m up at a particular time, I’ve got an alarm clock that starts of quietly and gets louder. It also responds to voice so I can tell it to shut up.

I attempt to alternate days in which I go for a run and days I do my weights. On the days I go for a run I use my iPhone with Roadbud to track my route and speed. I record how often I do exercise, do academic work, write blog posts and comment on other people’s blogs via Joe’s Goals.

My iPhone will usually have been next to the bed, charging and on Flight mode, although I’m finding that the battery lasts a couple of days now with the iPhone 4. I switch that on and then get myself ready for work, usually checking TechMeme, BBC News, Twitter and HotUKDeals as I do so. I then quickly scan all of my emails (work, university and personal) via my iPhone. I’ve kept the ‘Sent from my iPhone’ message appended to all of my outgoing emails as I feel – rightly or wrongly – that it explains why I’m only providing a brief reply.

Whilst we’re getting ready, my son Ben will often be playing or, increasingly, he goes on his Apple eMac and plays Alphablocks, Poisson Rouge or other CBeebies games. He got the eMac for his 3rd birthday and is rather adept with it!

I used to use a Krups coffee machine, but now I favour the speed and simplicity of a cafetière for my morning caffeine. Once I’ve had breakfast – which I try to have with my family and keep technology-free – my wife and son will drop me off at the train station. Again, although sometimes we’ll have music on (provided via iPhone/iPod Touch and the AUX connector on our car) we try to actually have conversations.

On the train I’ll whip out my e-reader (previously a Sony Reader PRS-600 Touch, but now an Amazon Kindle 2) to read academic articles relating to my thesis and/or catch up with technology news and Twitter on my iPhone. During this I’ll listen to music via Spotify Premium. Once I’m off the train I’ve still got a 10-minute walk to work, so sometimes I’ll listen to podcasts such as In Our Time, Material World, Thinking Allowed, or James Clay’s e-Learning Stuff.

Although I’ve got a MacBook Pro for work, my desktop machine is a Northumbria University-provided PC running Windows XP. Annoyingly, I have to use Microsoft Outlook for email/calendar (although I do sync the latter with my Google Calendar) so I have to use the Citrix client when on my MacBook or away from my desk. Still, it’s better than nothing! I’ve just got a dual-screen setup sorted out at work, so depending on what kind of day it is I’m either going to have my email or TweetDeck on that separate window.

Most of the work I do at JISC infoNet is project-based, so I use Netvibes as a hub for these. I like the way you can embed stuff from elsewhere and use the tabs for each different project. TeuxDeux (one of the things I embed in Netvibes) is a great lightweight to-do application that everyone should be using. All of my documents are available everywhere now that I pay $9.99 per month for a 50GB Dropbox – I don’t use ‘My Documents’ (PC) or ‘Documents’ (Mac) any more. It means I can quickly send things to people on the move via the Dropbox iPhone app, and never have the problem of being unable to access a resource I’ve created.

I’m a sporadic user of Evernote. I used it way back when it first came out and the school I was in didn’t have an email system. I’d take a photo of the memos that would arrive in my pigeon-hole and then bin them. Nowadays I’m more likely to use it to ‘take notes’ in the physical books and articles that I read (Evernote has a great searchable text-recognition feature!). Another application I couldn’t do without at work is XMind, which is Open Source, cross-platform and has a web element to it. It’s absolutely fantastic for mindmaps!

I try to empty my mind of things to do with work and relax on the way back home, so I’m more likely to be listening to music on my iPhone and closing my eyes than anything else whilst I’m on the train. I usually think of my best ideas during this time or when I’m in the shower, so I’ve got a couple of Moleskine notebooks to jot ideas down. When I get back home I’ll often play with Ben on our Nintendo Wii – especially Wii Fit Plus – which is awesome for his (and my) hand-eye coordination.

Once I’ve played football/puzzles/wrestled with Ben and had dinner he’ll watch CBeebies or something prerecorded for ten minutes before bathtime and bedtime. At the moment I’m marking for Edexcel which, anachronistically, involves them writing their answers by hand, having their exam papers scanned in, and then me marking them online. I can’t help but think we’re missing a trick somewhere! Edexcel’s software only works with Internet Explorer, so I use VMware Fusion to virtualize Windows XP within one of the Spaces on my Mac OSX desktop. It actually works pretty well as a system.

If I’m not marking I’m probably writing a blog post, for which I’ll either bash it out using NoteSync (especially if I haven’t got connectivity for whatever reason) or compose using the WordPress dashboard. Quite often I’ll let ideas ‘stew’ for a while as drafts and then either reject or expand upon them. Otherwise, I’ll have some work to do on my Ed.D. thesis. I’ve got a separate installation of WordPress for that but I use Google Docs to actually write it. I back the latter up regularly via export to my GMail account and Dropbox!

Once I come back downstairs and spend some time with my wife we’ll plan stuff (usually using her MacBook) or watch a film/prerecorded TV. I watch virtually nothing ‘live’. The AppleTV is wonderful for getting stuff from your MacBook or straight from the iTunes store quickly and easily onto your television. Otherwise we’ll have used our Sony HDD/DVD recorder to have series-recorded something from Freeview. I’ll often talk to Nick Dennis either via my iPhone or Skype. :-p

I try and stay away from screens for at least 30 minutes before bedtime, but often fail in this regard, especially with my iPhone. I’m about 50/50 with reading physical as opposed to e-books at bedtime at the moment, but imagine that will shift more towards the latter as time passes.

There are some things I haven’t mentioned due to my sporadic use of them. For example, we’ve got a cinema room with a PlayStation 3, projector and surround sound which is pretty amazing and iPod speaker docks for when we’re chilling out downstairs. I use a Logitech MediaBoard Pro bluetooth keyboard (which has an inbuilt trackpad) with my MacBook Pro so I can raise the latter to eye level. I’ve already listed the Mac OSX and iPhone applications I’m most likely to use so, and I don’t even really need to mention I’m on Twitter for most of the day. So I’ll leave it there.

Conclusion

As you can see, the technology I use depends on my context. I use what I use because it lowers the amount of friction in my life. People may think that I go through different technologies at a rate of knots and am attracted by the shiny, but I’m actually after things that allow me to create stuff and then ship it. And that’s all there is to it.

Image CC BY-SA Fe Ilya

Music is my muse and I listen to it all day. There’s a lot of jazz — Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins — but I’m also a big fan of Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and Method Man… When you’re coding you really have to be in the zone so I’ll listen to a single song over and over on repeat, hundreds of times. It helps me focus.

(my emphasis)

Music can have a massive effect on your productivity and it’s really important to find music that puts you in the zone that Matt talks about. I can only speak of what works for me, and what is currently my ‘productive song’, but I don’t think you’ll got too far wrong if you follow the suggestions below! :-p

1. Long

The track needs to be fairly long. Not your 3 minute pop song. You’ll get sick of that very quickly.

2. Repetitive

It needs to have a steady beat that’s not too fast and not too slow. I can’t tell you how fast that is (I think it probably varies between people). It’s probably about 100-120bpm for most of us, though.

3. Minimal lyrics

If you’re doing anything that involves writing words then you want as few lyrics as possible. Some lyrics are OK so long as it’s easy not to focus on them.

In addition, I’d suggest that even if one of your favourite songs of all time meets the above criteria that you don’t use it as your ‘productive song’. Why? The association it will carry will displace the original reason you liked it…

You may find that you wear out your productive song after a while and my need to find another one. What’s my ‘productive song’ at the moment? Slightly randomly it’s a track by Apparat called Arcadia (Telefon Tel Aviv Remix) <–Spotify link. Don’t ask how I came across it – serendipity!

Image CC BY skippyjon

Introduction

I’ve been studying towards my Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) qualification for almost 6 years now. My PGCE (teacher training qualification) at Durham University was the equivalent of the first year of an MA in Education. I thought it a waste not to continue with that on a part-time basis whilst I was teaching.

When it came to write the dissertation for my MA it wasn’t the greatest period in my life. I was told by my MA supervisor that I had the grades required to transfer to the Ed.D. if I wanted. At first I couldn’t see her logic; if I wasn’t in a position to complete my MA how would I be in a position to move up to a doctorate? But then she explained. If I transferred, I’d be able to take higher-level modules the next academic year rather than having to churn out a dissertation that academic year. I’d always had at the back of my mind that I’d like to do a PhD and so this made sense!

Tool choice: wiki

All of a sudden, then, I was a doctoral student. I didn’t quite fall into it, but even so it was going to take a step-change in attitude and organization. Going to get my Durham University student card replaced I laughed at it’s new expiration date: July 2012. That seemed a very long way off!

Up until starting my Ed.D. I’d had a fairly ad-hoc way of organizing my academic work. After all, although I’d written 20,000 words for my MA in Modern History in 2003, I’d organized my notes chiefly on paper – using my chunky (although at the time, stylish) laptop merely to write. I could see that this approach was going to change. Thankfully, when in 2006 I wanted to change programme, blogs, wikis and podcasts had just become all the rage.

I’ve used a wiki and a blog with my Ed.D. from the start. After toying with various wikis courtesy of the comparison at wikimatrix.org I decided it was important that I owned my own data. In effect, I sacrificed a little bit of ease-of-use and prettiness for speed, functionality and full control of my data. Whilst services such as Wikispaces, PBwiki and Wetpaint would have done the job admirably, they didn’t quite fit the bill.

I came across TiddlyWiki via Lifehacker. It’s an extremely lightweight wiki designed primarily for personal use. There’s a learning curve in terms of the syntax used to create, for example, things in bold and italics but once you’ve got used to this it’s second-nature. The standard version of Tiddlywiki is merely an HTML file. The massive advantage of this is that you can put it anywhere and it ‘just works’. Put it on a USB flash drive and you can work on it from any machine; put it on your website and you can read it from anywhere.

Although you could download the HTML file, work on it, and then re-upload it, I found this a little clunky in practice. After all, I wasn’t always in a position to fire up an FTP client to do so. On top of that, sometimes I would forget and/or have multiple versions of my wiki. Looking around, I came across ccTiddly, a server-side implementation of TiddlyWiki. In layman’s terms this meant that, upon installing it on my webhost’s server, I could not only access it from anywhere, but edit it from anywhere. In addition, clicking on a link means I can take it all offline quickly-and-easily when I want to.

Tool choice: blog

It’s amazing how quickly things change. At one time, the obvious choice for anyone creating an education-focused blog was Eduspaces. This aimed – and succeeded, to a degree – in creating a ‘community’ feel to blogs surrounding educational practice and research. You can still see the original blog I created there at eduspaces.net/dougbelshaw/weblog although when the owners announced it was shutting down, I transferred the posts first to teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk and ultimately to here, dougbelshaw.com/blog.

I enjoy the amount of control that WordPress, my blogging software of choice, gives me over what I do with my thesis. More recently, I decided that having a separate category for my thesis-related posts here wasn’t enough; I went ahead and created another blog at dougbelshaw.com/thesis. WordPress is easy to extend and customise through the use of themes and plugins. One extremely useful plugin is digress.it (formerly CommentPress) which allows commenters to easily comment on particular paragraphs in addition to the whole post.

Tool choice: mindmap

After doing a great deal of reading on the ‘literacy’ aspect of digital literacy (the construct which I’m analysing in my thesis) I realised that I had no real idea how to start to put it all together. I needed a visual way to represent what I’d learned and to plan out what I was going to say. I looked at various options for mindmaps but found the online ones (such as Bubbl.us) a little clunky and the offline ones inflexible.

I was delighted, therefore, when I came across XMind. The beauty of XMind is that not only is it free and Open Source, but the offline program allows you to put your mindmap online in an embeddable, zoomable way. Perfect! You can view the mindmap I created for that digital literacy overview here.

Workflow

My studying, then, tends to go something like this:

1. Skim-read article or chapter in book. Attempt to the main arguments to myself.
2. Go back through article or chapter with sticky notes, adding them at quotable/important parts.
3. Add relevant sections (highlighted with sticky notes) to my Ed.D. wiki, commenting on them as I go.
4. Come up with idea for synthesis/analysis of what I’ve been studying.
5. Create mindmap.
6. Write section/blog post.

It seems to work fairly well for me, but I’m always looking to improve! Recently, I’ve stuck a pinboard to the wall next to my desk. It allows me to keep those important, but sometimes fleeting, ideas buzzing around.

How do you organise YOUR studies? :-p

(Image CC BY Tom Coates)

The only slightly tricky bit is replacing:

http://www.google.com/xxxxxxxxxx

with

http://chart.apis.google.com/xxxxxxxxxx

It shows you how to do it here, but it over-complicates things and is slightly out-of-date.

If you want to brush up on your HTML, you could do worse than this guide!

I’ve been using the excellent What Would Seth Godin Do? plugin for WordPress (which powers this blog) for a while now. It’s a great way to get a message across to readers, differentiated for new and return visitors. New visitors to this blog get a message giving them information on how to subscribe and/or get in contact with me.

Return visitors, on the other hand, get a different message. Recently, I’ve been asking for feedback on the question posed in the title of this post, namely: If I wrote a book, would you buy it? The answers are in the above graph. Interestingly, no-one responded that the price was an issue, nor did anyone state that they would buy anything that I wrote.

Good. That’s as it should be.

There’s enough people, I reckon, interested in buying something that I write that’s education-related for it to be a worthwhile proposition. I’ve got an interesting publishing model and pricing structure in mind. Subscribe so you don’t miss a post – I’ll be revealing more soon!

PS For those interested in what those ‘other’ answers were, they mainly wanted to know more about the subject before they would decide either way!

CC-BY-SA mrhayata

I’ve banged on long enough about my opposition to the Edublog Awards. So I’m turning a negative into a positive. Here’s how it goes:

1. Consider the blogs you’ve come across in 2009 that you like.
2. Write about why you like them on your blog.
3. Tag your blog post blogsilike and publish it.
4. Link to your blog post on Twitter using the hashtag #blogsilike

Here’s my contribution:

• I really like Harold Jarche’s blog (http://www.jarche.com) and his work on the Sackville Commons. Inspirational stuff.
• I’ve been impressed at the way Tom Barrett moved effortlessly into his new home at http://edte.ch and has set up a really engaging blog. He’s also adapted his blog writing style to be even more relevant and collaborative.
• After reading Seth Godin’s book Tribes I subscribed to his blog (http://sethgodin.typepad.com) via email. He is full of good ideas, that man!
• Some people who attend EdTechRoundUp regularly have begun to blog – people like Zoe Ross (http://www.zoeross.com), Nick Dennis (http://nickdennis.com/blog)and Kerry Turner (http://kerryjturner.com). Not have these three begun to blog to reflect on their own practice as educators, but are self-hosting their (WordPress-powered) blogs. Great stuff! If you want to do likewise, I highly recommend Bluehost to make it a simple, one-click process!

Why not help this become a meme and contribute your own?

Earlier this year I changed the theme on this site. I was reasonably pleased with it. It was faster-loading than the previous iteration. However, as I kept adding stuff to it the site became slower to load. As @MoodleDan pointed out, I had lots of images being loaded from external sites.

So I’ve stripped it down to look a bit like the default theme on Posterous. It’s a WordPress theme called Minimous. I like it, although I’ve got a plan to strip it down even further…

What do you think?