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Month: August 2010

Weeknote #16

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

This week I have been mostly…

Sorting out my presentation for ALT-C

I’ve never been to ALT-C, mainly because it’s:

  • Right at the start of the academic year (a difficult time to get out of schools)
  • Focused mainly on further and higher education

This year I’m presenting with a colleague on behalf of JISC Advance. I’m really looking forward to finding out more both to aid the mobile and wireless technologies review I’m currently undertaking and my Ed.D. thesis. Lots of top-notch people are going to be there! 🙂

Launching a new blog

I’ve been looking for blogs relating to mobile technologies in education and have found there’s a dearth of them. I contacted Nick Dennis who agreed to start a new tumblr-powered blog with me at http://mobilizingeducation.tumblr.com. I’m sure he’ll get around to writing a post sooner or later… :-p

Getting up early

I’ve been up before 5am twice this week (I’m usually up at 6am) to work on my thesis. I’m much better at thinking clearly in the mornings and need not to be disturbed by a certain 3 year-old! The planned regime until I finish my thesis (which wasn’t quite achieved this week) is:

  • Monday, Wednesday, Friday – work 4.30-6.30am on thesis, do weights in evening
  • Tuesday, Thursday – go for 3 mile run in morning, work on thesis during lunch break
  • Saturday – go for 3 mile run in morning, work on thesis all afternoon

Feeling like I should be on holiday

Working in the education sector during August is like being in a ghost town. There were only two of us in the office yesterday afternoon at JISC infoNet and almost everyone you email is their Out of Office autoreply on…

Let me tell you what I think ‘this’ is.

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

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!

I sync therefore I am.

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

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. 😀

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