As I’ve mentioned, I’m dipping into P2PU’s School of Webcraft. I actually know how to do most of the stuff so far asked of me in the tasks, but I really value four things involved in the process.
- The social element (you don’t seem to get this at, for example, Codecademy)
- Filling in gaps in my knowledge (I didn’t learn any of this sequentially; sometimes I’m missing some building blocks)
- Reviewing other people’s work (some people obviously do the bare minimum, others are super-dedicated)
- The opportunity to become a mentor (once you’ve learned something, there’s the opportunity to then teach it)
An example of the second item on my list is the P2PU task Some Tags for You to Meet. I learned about the <time> and the <q> HTML tags, the former being used to provide a machine-readable way of parsing the start of, for example, an event. The latter is used for short quotations that are included within a paragraph of text. Handy.
There’s plenty more of these on the Mozilla Developer Network but, for the time being that’s enough. 🙂
If you’re an educator you should be all over P2PU like a rash. Seriously.
Last month Seth Godin posted 9 ideas in search of a blog post. Here’s my version:
- Formal education should probably be free up to whatever level you want (and perhaps only compulsory up to age 11).
- 99% Invisible is the podcast that most often makes me see the world in new ways.
- I still haven’t figured out how to balance my photophobia and SAD. Thank goodness for Spring (and f.lux)
- Tools are constraining. This is both good and bad.
- Learning to touch-type at a young age (I think I was about 12) is possibly one of the best things I’ve ever done.
- Things I Learned This Week is back, phoenix-like, as a free weekly newsletter.
- There are no absolutes, only contrasts.
- People tend to be skeptical about non-physically-obvious medical symptoms.
- E-Prime blows my mind (via Simon Bostock)
Feel free to hit me up in the comments if you’d like me to expand upon any of these.
Image CC BY smlp.co.uk
I’m ill at the moment: I can’t seem to shake ‘flu-like symptoms that struck last Wednesday. On the plus side, not being able to do ‘productive’ work means I’ve got done some stuff I haven’t been in a position to prioritise for a while.
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.
