No, I’m now a firm believer in evolution over revolution. That doesn’t mean that I’m happy to leave the profession at the end of my career pretty much in the state I found it. Not at all. Just because I’m focusing on evolution doesn’t mean it can’t be a speedy process.

The reason for my change of heart is my family. Before I was a father I could afford to spend hours in the evening planning radically different lessons, putting together projects and writing proposals that would aid the rapid change of the focus of my school. Now, it’s my family I want to spend time with. Whilst teaching will never be ‘just a job’ to me, I very much more sharply demarcate time spent working towards education-related ends and that set aside for my family. Perhaps that’s why, on a poster which reproduces 19th century ‘rules for teachers’ in our staff room (put up for humorous effect) it says that women who marry will be dismissed instantly. Perhaps we need a profession of driven, single people?

But I think not. We need diversity in the profession. We need young people to come into contact with as many different types of people from different backgrounds as possible. Teachers, although they necessarily come from a smaller pool than that which reflects the world’s population, can still give students a taste of different perspectives. Instead, what we should be doing - which has been called for time and again - is give teachers more time and smaller class sizes so they can really make a difference. I’ve said this many times over the last few weeks, but it’s only since my Year 11s have left that I’ve had time to cope and keep up with the multitude of tasks I’m expected to perform in my daily life as a teacher. Given that ‘changing the educational landscape’ comes over and above that, there’s been some things that have suffered this year. Marking, especially of classwork, springs to mind immediately!

So, to return to the beginning of this post, schools need to change. We all know that. But we need to bring along all stakeholders with us, not just leave them behind. To some extent this involves ‘digital literacy’ (the subject of my thesis), but mainly it involves demonstrating by example how we can do things differently. And to do that, we need time. I, for one, am going to be looking to the future when allocating my education-related time next academic year…

Image credit: Seat by Ti.mo @ Flickr

Obviously I’m not going to link to a Google Map showing exactly where we live. I don’t want to give the SWAT teams too easy a time…

Home broadband will be installed in a few weeks’ time due to issues I won’t go into, but for the meantime I’m very happy with mobile broadband access on a pay-as-you-go basis via the 3 network. I’m sharing the connection obtained through HSDPA with Hannah courtesy of our Macbooks’ Airport feature.

Life Chez Belshaw is peachy. No non-human/animal/bird created noise. Rolling fields. A 19th century mill within our grounds. What more could I ask for?

Then, in a post which referenced my recent issues with a certain VLE provider, Will Richardson linked to a presentation by Clay Shirky. For those of you who haven’t heard of Shirky, he’s the Next Big Thing™ after Thomas Friedman. He’s written a book called Here Comes Everybody that I feel I should read this year. Within the first couple of minutes of the presentation, Shirky said something that made me lose track of everything which followed:

Absolutely! I don’t mean by the title of this post that I want educational technology to be ‘boring’ in the sense of it being tedious. No, I mean ‘boring’ in the sense of it being so commonplace and ubiquitous that it isn’t thought about. I want us to get to a stage with all of this Web 2.0 stuff¹ where we’re constantly focused on what we can do with the technology. A bit like wireless networking - at least for most of us…

¹ Tom Barrett’s getting there with his pupils and Google Docs

Stylish

Stylish enables you to view a website with custom CSS. Saying it in technical language like that doesn’t make it sound too impressive, does it? But just look at some of the things I was able to do with about two clicks via userstyles.org!

In addition to this, and perhaps more useful (rather than just being eye candy) are those that change small things in your user experience. Take, for example, the one for Twitter that simply changes the list of people in the right sidebar from a small list of photos to photo + name:

I love this sort of thing - users being put in control of their browsing/Internet usage experience. Go and check it out and see if your favourite sites/web apps have been customized yet!

Feedly

The second Firefox extension I’m even more excited about. It’s called Feedly (see screenshot above) and I came across it via @derrallg on Twitter:

Feedly is a Firefox extension that, like the Stylish extension, needs to be experienced to be understood. It aggregates not only the RSS feeds in your Google Reader account, but those who are in your Twitter and FriendFeed networks. It calculates which are your ‘favourite’ RSS feeds (presumably from % read stats from Google Reader) and adds extra weight to them. Everything is presented in a very nice magazine-like format on the click of this button:

Here’s how easy it is to share stuff you think those in your network should know about:

I’m seriously considering ditching Google Reader for the majority of my feed reading now. Feedly allows you to annotate and save items for later - and to email the post directly to others or via your Twitter account. Marvellous!

Further reading: Firefox 3 Power User’s Guide (Lifehacker)

In May 2008 I wrote a post entitled What is a VLE? In it, I discussed the ins and outs of various VLEs and linked it to an EdTechRoundup podcast in which I was a participant. I made a passing comment that compared one type of VLE to another. The company whose VLE product I did’t rate very well threatened me (via my school) with legal proceedings.

The upshot was that I felt it was in my best interests to remove the ‘offending’ paragraph so as to not cause difficulties within my school. I replaced it with one that, in my eyes, was more damaging to the VLE vendor: that they’d almost forced me to remove any criticism (however slight) by referring to ‘legal proceedings’ in their communication with my school.

I’ve now added a disclaimer to my blog, saying that my opinions are not that of my employer (school or Local Authority). It does, however, bring up the issue of where the personal ends and the professional begins - and vice-versa…

Have you any experience of this? What was the outcome?

Twitter’s great. It allows you to not only network in semi-realtime, but also to have access to a network of experts and engage in borderless conversations. Usually, these are people with which you share something major in common. In my case, almost all of my Twitter friends are educators.

That’s all well-and-good, but there’s really nothing like meeting up face-to-face to discuss things. That’s why conferences still thrive in this Web 2.0 world. To facilitate Twitter meet-ups - or ‘TweetMeets’ - I’ve set up a new website:

http://tweetmeet.eu

Why .eu? Well, the domain name was cheap… (feel free to use it worldwide!)

Head on over! I’m not allowing just anyone to edit the whole thing as I don’t want it taken over by non-educators. If you’d like a login to be able to organize TweetMeets, send me your email address via direct message on Twitter. (d dajbelshaw Hi…)

If you want to discuss TweetMeet, can I suggest that you use the global hashtag #tweetmeet please? (# is ALT-3 on UK Mac keyboards) You can then track the conversations at Twemes.com

Edit: Inugural TweetMeet planned for Saturday in August - either 2nd or 9th. Tweet @dajbelshaw with your preferences for meeting up in the Peak District, England!

You’ll have to excuse me. Over the next couple of weeks (until the end of June, to be precise) you’ll find fewer blog posts at dougbelshaw.com. Why? Well, it’s not laziness:

• I’ve a workshop to co-prepare with Nick Dennis for the Schools History Project Conference
• There’s 240 AS-Level History exam scripts waiting for me to mark them (for EdExcel)
• We’re finally moving house!

Added to my usual teaching duties, getting things in place for my new E-Learning Tutor position, attending a couple of meetings, going to the gym and playing with my overly-energetic and inquistive 16-month old son, Ben.

So please accept my apologies - I’m sure you understand. Normal service will be resumed as soon as I’ve got broadband sorted out in the new house (I’m thinking of getting mobile broadband anyway…)

If you need your Belshaw fix, I’ll still be Twittering away - but better still, get started with, and follow me on, FriendFeed. It’s great!

Image credit: Chorrillo - Trickle by Antonio Martinez @ Flickr

I’ve been contacted by four different postgraduate researchers in the last two weeks. It’s getting to the stage where I’m considering setting up a new website/discussion space! A couple of them just wanted permission to use some of my stuff in their theses, one is already a member of the Edublogosphere, but one asked a very pertinent question:

My stumbling across some of your postings last night was my first trip in the edublogosphere. What else is going on out there?

As you can imagine, I hardly knew where to start! As I like to reply to emails ASAP, I replied thus:

• Find some blogs to read. My Google Reader shared items might be a good place to start. Also try the big names in the edublogosphere - search for Stephen Downes, Will Richardson, Vicki Davis, Ewan McIntosh, and Dave Warlick.
• Get yourself a Google account and use Google Reader to subscribe to the RSS feeds of blogs (don’t know how? click here)
• Start using Twitter. At first you’ll think “What on earth…?”. After a while you’ll find it indispensible.
• Start blogging yourself. Doesn’t matter what, but start making links with people. It’s the conversation that counts! Try edublogs to get you started.

There’s a Hebrew proverb that I’m sure almost every educator will have heard before: “Do not confine your children to your learning, for they were born in a different time.” The same could be said of the Edublogosphere. I can hardly recommend that people start by using the same tools I did when things have moved on so much in the last 3-4 years! What would YOU recommend?

This Sunday, EdTechRoundup will be discussing just this issue - how to get started in the Edublogosphere - from 7.45pm onwards. Please do join us and give your input. The session will be recorded and go out as a podcast.

If you can’t make it, or just want to get the conversation going before then, please add your comment below!

I’ve got new plans for edte.ch - linked, as you can imagine, to my position as E-Learning Staff Tutor next academic year (2008/9). I’ll unveil it when it’s ready, but for now I’ve blown up the existing site (see screenshot) and imported the posts to this blog (dougbelshaw.com)

Oh, wait, you didn’t think it was a book, did you? Come on… this is 2008 - it’s digital, baby!

*Nick’s finally started his blogging journey. Spur him on by commenting on his first post, please!