Sheffield – Open Thinkering

Weeknote 26/2013

Posted on June 29, 2013September 14, 2013 by Doug Belshaw

We’re half-way through 2013 already! Wow.

This week I’ve been:

Presenting and running a workshop on Open Badges at the White Rose Learning Technologists Forum in Sheffield on Monday (slides here).
Presenting on Open Badges at an Innovations in Assessment for Schools event held by the SQA in Glasgow on Tuesday (slides here)
Presenting on Mozilla, Open Badges and the Web Literacy Standard at IWMW13 in Bath on Wednesday (slides here)
Talking to people about aligning with the Web Literacy Standard.
Responding to daily email enquiries about using Open Badges.
Identifying projects (with Vinay Gupta) relating to Firecloud and talking to some of them about the project.
Booking a space at the Centre for Life in Newcastle for a Mozilla Maker Party on Saturday 17th August.
Using and writing about my experiences with a Firefox OS phone.
Organising with Pearson(!) to run a workshop on Open Badges as part of their ‘Go Digital’ month in September. I’m planning to be the Trojan Horse of Openness. 😉
Meeting with the comms team to discuss the beta launch of the Web Literacy Standard on July 26th.
Catching up with the recording of this week’s Web Literacy Standard call.
Recording, editing and uploading a video for Mark Berthelemy on the benefits of using Open Source Software.
Writing about the relationship between literacy and identity on the Web.
Discussing the agenda for next week’s Badge the UK launch with Tim Riches.
Hanging out with my colleagues for a ‘virtual beer’.

This week’s been a fairly heavy week, travel-wise. Next week I’m running a workshop at the University of Hull on Wednesday and then I’m in London on Thursday for the Badge the UK launch. Although I’ll be running a workshop for CoderDojo in Glasgow next Saturday, that’s mixing work with pleasure as my wife and I are making a bit of a weekend of it. 🙂

Embracing the future: why I’ve ditched MP3s and signed up to Spotify Premium

Posted on October 10, 2009 by Doug Belshaw

Spotify logo

Image BY-NC Rsms @ Flickr

I like music. A lot. I listen to as much as I can as I believe it makes me more productive.* As a student I worked in HMV at Meadowhall in Sheffield and bought a prodigious amount of CDs. When I did my MA in Modern History I sold many of them to fund my living expenses, but still many remained. I hadn’t ripped them all to MP3 but still had around 100GB of my 250GB taken up with MP3s. I deleted all of that today, leaving only my downloaded podcasts:

iTunes data

After my week of divesting the only CDs that aren’t in boxes ready to be sent off to Music Magpie or Amazon customers are those (nine) that I’ve decided to keep as artwork.** I signed up for a Spotify Premium account the day after their iPhone app became available. It costs £9.99 per month to upgrade from the Free account. For that you get, amongst other things, the usage of their iPhone app (which doesn’t work with a Free account), a higher streaming bitrate and no advertisements.

That’s not to say that Spotify features every album and every piece of music that I’ve ever listened to. But I reckon that they’ve got about 90% of the stuff I search for. That’s good enough for me, especially given my eclectic, ever-changing taste in music and the fact they add thousands more track to their library every week – check out their blog!

The streaming model makes sense. Now that a decently-fast internet connection is available to me pretty much everywhere I go, there’s no need for me to manually sync and carry around with me a partial collection of music I like. Much better to have access to a much bigger collection everywhere I am. 🙂

Of course, there are times when your internet connection isn’t so good (or even non-existent). It’s for these times that Spotify has made playlists that you create available offline. Up to 3,333 tracks can be cached for offline play at any one time. That’s certainly enough for me!

Finally, then, there’s the problem of making Spotify’s vast library user-friendly. A start has been made via SpotifiTunes (see my library here) which takes your iTunes XML file and creates a list of Spotify links. Wanting an up-to-date version of this, I’ve created a workspace on my wiki dedicated to this. To access this, click on the ‘Music’ link at the top of this blog or click here!

What do YOU think about Spotify and the like? Will you be signing up any time soon? 😀

* I recommend you read Lifehacker’s The Best Sounds for Getting Work Done

** See CD wall tiles @ IWOOT)