Open Thinkering

Menu

Month: January 2014

Where I’ll be at BETT (#bett2014)

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

After a few years of absence, I’ll be at BETT again this year. I’m arriving at lunchtime on Thursday and speaking three times on Friday. However, given my busy schedule over the coming weeks, I can’t stay for the (usually excellent) TeachMeet on the Friday evening.

Where I’ll be and when on Friday (24th January 2014):

If you want to say hello, ping me on Twitter (@dajbelshaw). Want to discuss something specific? Email me and we can have coffee ([email protected]).

(N.B. I’m not interested in promoting products via my blog/social media and I don’t currently have access to pots of funding!)

Image CC BY-NC-SA Ian Usher

Weeknote 03/2014

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

This week I’ve been:

  • Confirming with the Mozilla Web Literacy community that we’re moving to calling what we’ve created a ‘Map’ instead of a ‘Standard. More here.
  • Meeting for an inaugural (virtual) huddle with my new Mozilla #teachtheweb sub-team mates Michelle Thorne, Laura Hilliger, Kat Braybrooke and William Duyck (aka ‘FuzzyFox’)
  • Sorting out my travel/accommodation for BETT (I’m speaking three times there next Friday!)
  • Hosting the Web Literacy community call. You can listen to the recording here.
  • Proposing and writing about merging the Mozilla Web Literacy call with the Webmaker Mentor call.
  • Sorting out my expenses from the recent CE21 meeting in Orlando. It was a surprisingly involved process.
  • Talking to various people about Mozilla process-related stuff.
  • Meeting with Laura Hilliger to discuss Mozilla’s presence at the Oppi Festival in Helsinki (11th/12th April – I’m not going)
  • Planning out my slides for my BETT presentations.
  • Meeting with colleagues to discuss a refocus of an upcoming Webmaker whitepaper.
  • Taking PTO (i.e. a day off) on Friday as I had too much non-Mozilla stuff to do! I took my (nearly) seven year-old son to Kielder Observatory for part of his birthday present.

Next week I’ll be with my wife in Gozo on Monday and Tuesday trying to find somewhere for us to move to for six months. I’ll also be celebrating my son’s birthday and then travelling down for BETT on Thursday and Friday.

Image CC BY-NC-SA Murray Head

A Hacker News for education?

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

I visit Hacker News every day. It’s a great resource of technie-related things – not just code stuff but things that people who work in that kind of area are likely to be interested in.

I’ve created something similar: http://ednews.meteor.com

Eight years ago, Will Richardson tried to create a ‘Digg-like site’. For whatever reason, it didn’t work in the medium to long-term. But his reasoning still stands:

[Th]is is all stemming from a bigger burr in my brain of late that has to do with the seeming randomness of all of the really great work that people in this community are starting to create. It’s just feeling like it’s all over the place, and that if we could in some way get our collective act together, we could start creating an incredibly valuable resource. I know it’s all about small pieces loosely joined, but wouldn’t it be great to point the newcomers to one spot that was a clearinghouse for all of this work? Not to mention the value it would have to us old timers in terms of bringing people in. I mean all of a sudden, it seems like everyone has a wiki, and most all of them have great intent and good content. But there’s also a lot of duplication of effort, and more importantly, dis-connection, at least that what it feels like to me.

Yes, these days we have Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and many other social networks. But if the tech community find value in Hacker News (and they do!) why not one for education? I know there’s sites like Spigot but, while I find them useful, they’re not community-contributed links.

If there’s interest and it gains some traction, then I’ll work together with a few folks to deploy it to its own server/domain. 🙂

Try it! Add some links of your own: http://ednews.meteor.com

PS Let me know in the comments what you think (and if you have any problems with it!) I came up with the idea literally just now and did a quick search to see how I could deploy something today!

css.php