Month: February 2015

3 reasons I’ve decided to resurrect my LinkedIn account

Posted on February 24, 2015February 25, 2015 by Doug Belshaw

In June 2014 I decided to close my LinkedIn account. The reasons I gave were threefold: the spam, the desire to own my professional identity, and the growing backlash to the service.

Why then last week did I decide to create a new account?

1. Hypocrisy – this is the main reason, actually. I realised that when I come across someone new, the first thing I do is search for their name. This almost always takes me to their LinkedIn profile, which gives me an at-a-glance of what they’re about. If I’m doing it to others, why shouldn’t others be able to do it to me?

2. Google juice – this is related to the above. Apart from Wikipedia pages, LinkedIn profiles seem to be some of the highest-ranking types of results when you search for people’s names. Instead of someone else’s page that mentions me, I might as well have something I curate in the first page of search results.

3. Contactability – I really try to keep my contact list up-to-date. But, at the end of the day, people don’t always communicate that they’ve got a new job or have moved on. The good thing about LinkedIn is that you get passive updates of these things.

Do I think LinkedIn is perfect? No. I don’t even think it’s good. But then I could say the same about Twitter, Facebook, Instagram… every social network that’s run by publicly-traded companies. Shareholder value comes before everything.

One of the ways LinkedIn creates ‘value’ is by making it a social silo. Some of the stuff in there is inaccessible without a login. You don’t even think twice about this if you’ve got an account, but it’s a constant source of frustration otherwise when you haven’t.

So there we are. I’m not proud of going back on my decision from last year but, given that so many people asked, I thought it was worth explaining. It’s all about connecting with people and adding value.

Over the course of 2015 I’ll be building out my profile and connections. My ‘sniff test’ for accepting connection requests is, as before, whether I think you’d know who I was if I bumped into you at a conference or walking along the street.

View my LinkedIn profile here

I’ll be syndicating my posts into my LinkedIn feed, so it’s also another way to keep up with this blog. 🙂

Image CC BY Nan Palermo

Weeknote 07/2015

Posted on February 13, 2015February 13, 2015 by Doug Belshaw

This week I’ve been:

Mozilla

Collaborating with community members to nail down the learning objectives for the next Webmaker curriculum activity around Open Practices.
Running a Webmaker Club with Chris Wilde. It was an awkward time to run it (after school, last week before half-term) but a few came along. We did the Kraken the Code activity and a bit of remixing with the X-Ray Goggles.
Building-out more of the Wikipedia page for Web Literacy, which I started last week. We’re co-ordinating efforts in this GitHub issue.
Writing blog posts:
Drafting a new section of the upcoming Learning Pathways whitepaper. I’ve also been responding to helpful comments by colleagues.
Creating questionnaires for the Open Practices activity to be filled in before and after the sessions by learners and mentors.
Re-reading and making notes on the Pathways working doc that Chloe Varelidi, Lucas Blair, and Grainne Hamilton put together last year for the Mozilla Discover project.
Filing issues, commenting on them, and organising them in various GitHub repositories.
Sorting out my travel and accommodation for FutureFest.
Testing Eisenhower, a prototype productivity tool started by William Duyck (aka FuzzyFox) during his gap year on our team at Mozilla, and continued during his final year at university. He’s looking for feedback.
Creating an epic spreadsheet of all of the skills for the upcoming Web Literacy Map v1.5.
Hosting this week’s Web Literacy Map community call.
Meeting with representatives of a couple of organisations around partnerships.

Dynamic Skillset

Working on pricing for on-demand, one-off, and ongoing consultancy.
Dealing with enquiries from various people/organisations.

Other

Joining Ian O’Byrne and Bryan Mathers for a video podcast entitled Digitally Literacy 006 – A Picture of Literacy.
Suffering from getting out of routine. I stayed up until just after midnight on Monday night getting something (technical) sorted out for a family member. This had a knock-on effect all week.
Rescoping one of my planned e-books as The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies: worked examples after revisiting some of James Paul Gee‘s work.
Exercising
- Swimming (Monday, Thursday)
- Gym (Wednesday, Friday)
- Walk (Tuesday)

I’m going to be away on holiday from Monday 16th to Monday 23rd (inclusive) with my family in Dubai. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to that! 🙂

Image CC BY-SA Alan Levine

Wednesday Wisdom #25: Distraction

Posted on February 11, 2015February 11, 2015 by Doug Belshaw

This is from a blog post by Andy Lark that I came across serendipitously via an article linked to from Hacker News. Andy also says in the same post:

Improving the quality of decision making doesn’t require we completely banish the computer – but rather we put it to good use when and were we need it, and then recognise the conversation can’t happen with its glow present. Or at best, the quality of the conversation wont be what we want.

Wise words indeed. Choose your tool/weapon carefully!

I think that the drift towards distraction can be mitigated by mindfulness – as well as things like #ScreenFreeSunday and my #BelshawBlackOps. It’s about living intentionally, I guess.

The whole set of Wednesday Wisdom images can be found in my Creative Commons-licensed Flickr set.