![[INCOMING] #BelshawBlackOps16 Pt.1](https://dougbelshaw.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/img_0977.jpg)
Since 2010, I’ve taken a personal digital hiatus for a least one month each year. This involves abstaining from social networks, personal email, and blogging in an attempt to be more mindful about my existence in the world.
This is a quick note to say that I’ll be away for the entire month of August. I’ll be spending all (or nearly all) of it camping around Europe with my family. The plan is to spend lots of time with my wife and two children, slow down, read, play, and be a different kind of person than I am for the rest of the year.
I’ll take the second part of my digital hiatus in December, after experimenting with the August/December approach last year and it working well. Taking two months together is a little too much, I’ve found. A month in the summer (sunshine! family!) is great, and a month in the winter (Christmas! Seasonal Affective Disorder!) is regenerative.
On our camping trip I’ll be taking minimal tech, but I will be taking my iPad and smartphone, so I’ll still have access to my work emails. Get in touch if you want to discuss working with me in September and beyond! I’m spending the next couple of weeks finishing up existing work for clients, travelling to California for some work with the Corona-Norco schools district, and tying off other loose ends.
Email: [email protected]
Image CC BY-NC-SA Tim Britton
Dai Barnes reminded me on the latest episode of TIDE just how annoying pop-ups are. That led to me thinking more generally about my blog and how I wasn’t happy with the theme I’ve used here for the last six months.
As a result, I searched for a new, clean theme. I think I’ve found it in a lightly customised version of Rams. I ensured the sidebar was the same colour as my consultancy website, and that I used the same fonts.
I think it’s looking pretty good!
This week I’ve been:
- Sending out Issue #222 of Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel, my weekly newsletter loosely focused on education, technology, and productivity.
- Recording and releasing Episode 56 (‘Brave Metaphors’) of Today In Digital Education, my weekly podcast with co-host Dai Barnes. We discussed positive news, metaphors, badges, exercise, credentialing, Evernote, Douglas Rushkoff, Brave, Ecosia, Codemoji, Obama, cognitive potential, and more! You can discuss TIDE in our Slack channel.
- Suffering from delayed jet lag. I was fine last week, and then ended up going back to bed on Monday morning after getting breakfast for the kids. Funny how these things work…
- Chilling out on Tuesday and spending time with the family. I read things I’d been queuing up to read, and did some admin I’d been putting off for a while.
- Buying a roof box for our upcoming family camping trip around Europe. I’ve planned out a rough route that takes us down past Lyon, into Italy and Lake Como, down past Nice and into Spain, visiting Barcelona and San Sebastián, and then back home via the west coast of France. Fortunately, we’ve got the whole of August to do that…
- Working with City & Guilds from their London office on Wednesday. I also got to have a pleasant drink and a chat in the sunshine outside the British Library with John Potter from UCL.
- Getting the DNS sorted out so that the We Are Open Co-op site could go live. Many thanks to Laura Hilliger for doing the majority of work on that!
- Speaking at the Festival of Skills event on Thursday and Friday. I think it’s fair to say that there were less people there than expected. Still, I got a bit of a tan, got to hang out with the Digitalme guys, and got to talk about both Open Badges and the work Bryan Mathers and I have done with London CLC!
- Honoured to be mentioned in the same bracket as Audrey Watters in this glowing post from Ben Wilkoff. I was particularly enamoured with this paragraph:
- “They are philosophers in the best sense of the word: they offer a distinct viewpoint on learning that sets them apart from many of those around them. Although they are part of a broader blogging and academic community, they are not of it. They are both reaching further and creating more. And it is in this act of creation that I am most inspired.”
- Writing:
Next week I’m working from home on Monday, down in London on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then back home on Thursday and Friday. The latter are the only days I’ve got any capacity until September, really — unless I re-jig things around my trip to California in a couple of weeks’ time.
