Month: March 2015

Wednesday Wisdom #29: Completion

Posted on March 18, 2015 by Doug Belshaw

One of the most pernicious things that young people learn when they’re younger is a ‘fixed’ mindset. Carol Dweck defines this in the following way:

In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb.

Instead, we should all realise that we’re a work in progress:

In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it.

If I do one thing with my children (other than show them unconditional love) it will be to develop this growth mindset in them. In the other direction lies a dangerous form of conservatism.

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

Weeknote 11/2015

Posted on March 14, 2015March 14, 2015 by Doug Belshaw

This week I’ve been:

Mozilla

Reading and making notes on Nesta’s Young Digital Makers report, written by Oliver Quinlan.
Triaging, commenting on, and resolving GitHub issues relating to the Learning Pathways whitepaper and Web Literacy Map v1.5.
Investigating how closely aligned a potential iRights curriculum is with the Web Literacy Map.
Planning for this week’s Web Literacy Map community call. It was hosted by Ian O’Byrne and Greg McVerry as I took a day’s holiday on Thursday.
Travelling to and attending Nesta’s FutureFest event over the weekend.

Dynamic Skillset

Setting up a new bank account. I decided to go with Santander in the end as TSB seemed to want far too much information about me and my business.
Travelling to Northern Ireland to speak at the Future Classrooms event in Armagh. I wrote it up (briefly) here.
Updating the look of dynamicskillset.com

Other

Catching up (separately) with Steve Higgins, Zoe Ross, Will Richardson, and Dan Martin.
Getting my eyes tested. They’ve actually improved slightly and I’ve decided to start wearing the best contact lenses you can buy. It really did make a difference when I tried them out!
Recording a new podcast with Dai Barnes called Today In Digital Education (TIDE).

Image CC BY-NC-SA Stephen Coles

Wednesday Wisdom #28: Influence

Posted on March 11, 2015March 18, 2015 by Doug Belshaw

I’m not sure when this video was created, but it’s certainly a younger Steve Jobs. It includes the above quotation, which I think is so powerful – especially if you come across it as a young person.

I’d love to get a poster of it for my kids’ bedrooms. Perhaps I’ll create one.

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