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Month: October 2017

Weeknote 42/2017

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

This week I’ve been:

  • Sending out Thought Shrapnel, my weekly newsletter loosely structured around education, technology, and productivity. Issue #279 was entitled ‘Nothing like a nap…’ You can also try my Thought Shrapnel Live! channel on Telegram where I post links as I come across them. Thank you to valued supporters!
  • Recording and releasing Episode 90 (‘Unscripted and uncensored’) of the Today In Digital Education (TIDE) podcast, which I record with Dai Barnes. This week, we discussed the key to successful organisations, Doug’s new censorship-resistant blog, calming technology, vegetarianism, and other unscripted nonsense.
  • Finishing off my contract with Totara Learning, who I’ve been helping with their community migration project. They’re a great bunch of people, and I look forward to working with them again at some point.
  • Sorting out a mirrored will with my wife over the phone through the easy-to-use Co-op will writing service. We’ve been married 14 years and been parents for almost 11 years, so it’s a bit embarrassing that we’ve left it this long.
  • Interviewed by Education Investor magazine about the potential use of blockchain technologies in education. As I reminded them, it’s literally a distributed ledger with cryptographic proof of work that allows append-only changes. Most uses are likely to be for backend, ‘boring’ supply-side stuff, rather than anything anyone notices and pays attention to.
  • Writing a report for the International School of Geneva about their strategy around learning technologies, after my visit last week.
  • Setting up Nextcloud to sync files, photos, and contacts to my own server.
  • Booking flights to Washington D.C. for the work Bryan Mathers and I are doing for the Inter-American Development Bank in November on behalf of We Are Open co-op.
  • Helping with Scouts. We carved pumpkin, made soup, and fried sausages. Great fun!
  • Looking after my children on Friday as it was a teacher training day for them — but not for my wife, who was at work.
  • Writing:

Next week, I’m working at home on Monday, and then away for a week in Gozo with my family.

I make my living helping people and organisations become more productive in their use of technology. If you’ve got something that you think I might be able to help with, please do get in touch! Email: [email protected]

Photo of Morpeth riverside taken by me on Friday.

New blog: Doug, uncensored

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

TL;DR: Head to uncensored.dougbelshaw.com or bit.ly/doug-uncensored for my new blog about freedom and decentralised technologies.

One of the great things about the internet, and one of the things I think we’re losing is the ability to experiment. I like to experiment with my technologies, my identity, and my belief systems. This flies in the face of services like Facebook that insist on a single ‘real’ identity while slowly deskill their users.

I’ve been messing about with ZeroNet, which is something I’ve mentioned before, and which gets close to something I’ve wanted now for quite some time: an ‘untakedownable’ website. Whether it’s DDoS attacks, DNS censorship, or malicious code injection, I want a platform that, no matter what I choose to say, will stay up.

To access sites via ZeroNet, you have to be running the ZeroNet service. By default, you view a clone of the site you want to visit on your own machine, accessed in the web browser. That means it’s fast. When the site creator updates the site/blog/wiki/whatever, that’s then sent to peers to distribute. It’s all lightning-quick, and built on Bittorrent technlogy and Bitcoin cryptography.

The trouble, of course, comes when someone who isn’t yet running ZeroNet wants to visit a site. Thankfully, there’s a way around that using a ‘proxy’ or bridge. This is ZeroNet running on a public server for everyone to use. There’s several of these, but I’ve set up my own using this guide.

I encourage you to download and experiment with ZeroNet but, even if you don’t, please check out my new blog. You can access it via uncensored.dougbelshaw.com or bit.ly/doug-uncensored — the rather long and unwieldy actual IP address of the server running the public-facing copy is 165.227.167.16/1PsNi4TAkn6vtKA6n1Se9y7gmVjF4GU3uF.

Finally, if you’re thinking, “What is this?! It’ll never catch on…” then I’d like to remind  you about technologies that people didn’t ‘get’ at first (e.g. Twitter in 2007) as well as that famous Wayne Gretszky quotation, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”.

Weeknote 41/2017

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

This week I’ve been:

  • Caught up in the pro-unity, anti-separatist demonstrations in Catalonia. It was all family-friendly, and very good natured. An experience I won’t forget! My father and I also visited Gaudi’s incredible, unfinished Sagrada Família, the Nou Camp, and various other places in Barcelona over the weekend.
  • Sending out Thought Shrapnel, my weekly newsletter loosely structured around education, technology, and productivity. Issue #278 was entitled ‘Sí, Barcelona!’. Why not check out my Thought Shrapnel Live! channel on Telegram where I post links as I come across them. My  valued supporters are awesome.
  • Helping the International School of Geneva with their digital strategy. I spent two days at Campus des Nations, meeting with staff, students, and parents. I’m writing a report on suggested next steps for them, which I’ll deliver next week.
  • Recording and releasing Episode 89 (‘Hijacking Minds’) of the Today In Digital Education (TIDE) podcast, which I record with Dai Barnes. This week, we discussed barefoot walking, rubber duck debugging, lessons from the artists, the other side of innovation, how our minds can be hijacked by social media, and more!
  • Managing with a sub-optimal cheap Android smartphone as my OnePlus 5 was being repaired. That’ll teach me for prioritising style over substance in a protective case…
  • Continuing working on Phases 1 and 2 of the Totara Learning community migration strategy.
  • Working on more of the the technology-enhanced teacher professional development report I’m helping research and write for the Education Development Trust.
  • Curating Issue #19 of Badge News, a regular newsletter for the Open Badges community, published by our co-op.
  • Celebrating my wife’s birthday with her and our children. For the next 10 weeks I’m ‘a year’ younger than her. Bring on the toyboy jokes!
  • Writing:

Next week, I’m working at home for Totara for three days, rounding off my contract with them around the vision and strategy for their community migration. I’ve other bits and pieces to do for London CLC and the International School of Geneva. On Friday my son’s off school due to a teacher training day, so I’m looking after him, then it’s half-term!

I make my living helping people and organisations become more productive in their use of technology. If you’ve got something that you think I might be able to help with, please do get in touch! Email: [email protected]

Photo of the west windows of the Sagrada Família taken by me last Sunday, around 16:30.

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