Open Thinkering

Menu

Tag: blog

The 10 most popular posts of the first half of 2012 are…

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

36,000 unique visitors* have stopped by this blog since the beginning of 2012. Nice.

What are you all looking at? Not what I would have thought.

Shipping containers

1. This is why teachers leave teaching.

Effectively just a commentary on Mark Clarkson’s stellar post. Almost 4,000 unique visitors to that one.

2. Announcing my new e-book: ‘The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies’ (#digilit)

Pleasing, but subscribers have tailed off since the initial flurry. Around 150 now signed up.

3. My TEDx talk on ‘The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies’

To be fair, Iwas expecting this to be popular, as TED-related stuff gets huge amounts of traction. Almost 2,500 people have now watched me pontificate about pictures of cats.

4. Journals, academia and the ivory tower.

I didn’t expect many people to want to engage with the open access journal debate but it seems that the post was timely.

5. Why I’m becoming a MoFo(er).

People seemed genuinely delighted when I announced I was joining the Mozilla Foundation. Which was nice.

6. How to create searchable notes from books using Evernote and your smartphone.

I thought this was obvious, but was asked to write it up. Perhaps it is obvious and people just came to check…

7. Web literacy? (v0.1)

It’s good to see that my work around web literac(ies) is popular – given that I’ll be splitting my time between working on it and evangelising Open Badges from now on!

8. Why the knowledge vs. skills debate in education is wrong-headed.

Wow! I only wrote this last week. I must have touched a nerve.

9. Digital literacy, digital natives, and the continuum of ambiguity (#openpeerreview)

I got many more comments than I expected with my Open Peer Review experiment. Amended article forthcoming.

10. You need us more than we need you.

This was the precursor to Journals, academia and the ivory tower (number 4 on the list)

Of course, posts I’ve written in previous years also remain popular. It would seem, for instance, that I should write more on procedural stuff around Google Apps (yawn!), explore further the links between leadership and emotional intelligence (possible!) and suggest yet more ways to make ‘textbook lessons’ more interesting (unlikely!)

Image CC BY-NC-SA Lightmash

*For some reason (probably user error) Google Analytics wasn’t tracking visits between April 10th and May 6th. So you can probably add another 6,000 to that number.

Surfacing stuff you may not have seen.

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Every now and again I look at the Google Analytics profile of this blog. I’m usually pretty surprised by what I find.

Google Analytics

I write predominantly about education, technology and productivity. With a little bit of other random stuff thrown in. So guess which blog posts have been consistently in my top twenty most accessed?

These ones:

Notice that these were all written in 2008 or 2009, a time when I was first E-Learning Staff Tutor at at school in Doncaster, and then Director of E-Learning at an Academy in the North East.

So it turns out that people like practical, research-based stuff they can apply immediately. My inaugural reader survey told a similar story. Perhaps I need to re-focus my efforts. Which is difficult when I’m an office-based researcher…

You need us more than we need you.

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

I’ve exhorted readers of this blog more than once to subscribe to Dan Meyer’s blog. It’s ostensibly about the teaching of mathematics, but the tangents are just fantastic.

Read the following, taken from a panel session Dan took part in (he’s now a PhD student):

I’m a grad student in my second year and I’ve never shared this with anybody here, least of all my adviser, who’s in attendance, but I don’t understand the incentive structure for what you do and what I may do someday. You write amazing things and you study amazing things and you write them compellingly in journals that are not read by practitioners very often. They affect a lot of policy, which I think is a really good, top-down approach. But then I’m over here and I can post something that’s seen by 10,000 people overnight. That’s the number of subscribers I have to my blog right now. Or any number of these things. So the incentive seems strange to me. Like I don’t understand this brass ring I’m chasing. It seems like a strange prize at the end of a finish line of grad school. So there’s the question and then there’s also the encouragement. You have so many soapboxes available to you. Find a kid like me and ask him how to do a webcast or something. You have so many — and to restrict yourself to peer review, I don’t know. There’s very little upside to me, it seems.

I feel this, and so do many others my age and with similar higher level qualifications.

So what are you (the academy) going to do about it?

css.php