dougbelshaw.com » Everything Else

Doug lives in rural isolation thanks to the Internet

Doug Belshaw — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 21:36:45 +0000

Years ago, before I saw the light and used Macs, I used to subscribe to PC Pro. There was a guy who wrote for that magazine called Davey Winder whose short bio simply read ‘lives in rural isolation thanks to the Internet’. I can remember thinking that must be great. Now I’m living the dream:

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?

The stream becomes a trickle…

Doug Belshaw — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:08:00 +0000

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

Posts imported from edte.ch

Doug Belshaw — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:31:49 +0000

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)

Gym’ll Fix It!

Doug Belshaw — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 11:43:51 +0000

(This post is mainly going to be of benefit to UK-based readers of my blog. I’m not affiliated with PruHealth in any way!)

Hannah and I are big fans of the Money Saving Expert website run by Martin Lewis. He’s a minor celebrity in England, having his own TV programme (albeit on Five). If you haven’t already signed up for his weekly newsletter, I really would.

Last year, one thing he recommended was PruHealth. It’s a private health insurance scheme which rewards you for becoming, and remaining, healthy. We looked into it but really couldn’t afford it at the time. Also, with Ben having just been born, time wasn’t really something we had in abundance. Now, however, things are different. Life with Ben is a bit more calm and structured now and with my new position next year we’ll have (slightly) more disposable income.

Just to give you some idea of how good a deal this is for us in particular, it would cost £42 each to join the gym we’ve just signed up for. With the PruHealth scheme, our premiums are £27 each per month and we get the gym free! Granted, for the first 3 months it’s slightly more whilst they assess your usage, but if you average 2 or more sessions per week, all you pay is your health insurance premium from then on. If we do the health checks every 6 months and average around 2.5 sessions per week our premiums will more than halve. Yes, that’s right: next year we’ll probably both be going to the gym and have private health insurance for less than £25!

I went for my initial PruHealth check and gym induction today. Much as Steve Dembo is doing with Wii Fit, I’m planning to post my fitness levels every so often. I used to post details of the GPS-tracked runs I did via my Nokia N95. I stopped that as soon as I realised people would be able to pinpoint exactly where I live (or used to live - we’re moving this month!)

So, what follows is my baseline. Please bear in mind that I haven’t exercised more than about once per week since Ben was born (16 months ago), that I’m mildly asthmatic, and that I had a huge cup of coffee this morning! The latter probably explains my high blood pressure reading (hopefully…)

Weight: 81.4kg (171 pounds)
BMI: 23.2 (should be 20-25)
Blood Pressure: 139/89 (should be 120/80)
Pulse (after 3-minute step activity): 106 (lower = better)
VO2* Test: 38 (should be 42+)
Cooper’s Run**: 2.51km (further = better)

There’s a selection of gym’s to choose from, but our local one is Cannons Health Club in Doncaster. Alongside the gym, there’s a studio for various classes (I like the look of Body Attack - a combination of boxing and keep-fit), and a swimming pool, sauna, steam room, jacuzzi, etc. We’re all going after church tomorrow - Ben’s going to have weekly swimming lessons from his Daddy (I used to swim for my county many years ago…)

With the advantages PruHealth gives us and with the requirement to go at least twice per week, this is a long-term deal which could just revolutionise the life of the Belshaw family!

*VO2 Test = volume of oxygen you can consume whilst exercising. This was tested by using a treadmill to walk for 3 minutes whilst measuring heart rate and taking into account age, height and weight.
**Cooper’s Run = the distance you can cover by running on a treadmill for 12 minutes.

Image: Quick Start by akeg @ Flickr

New comments section powered by Disqus

Doug Belshaw — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:12:26 +0000

Darren Draper of the excellent Drape’s Takes reminded me via a tweet that I have a Disqus account:

It looks to be a great system, and what I was really looking for instead of my ill-fated bbPress-powered forum linked to this blog. Disqus not only makes comments more user-friendly, but they can be automatically aggregated by FriendFeed and Google Reader. Visitors can also make video comments via Seesmic.

Leave me a short comment to tell me what you think!

Are you an ‘Edupunk’? I’m not.

Doug Belshaw — Fri, 30 May 2008 20:59:51 +0000

Apparently, “the concept of Edupunk has totally caught wind, spreading through the blogosphere like wildfire” according to Stephen Downes. I must have been too busy with Twitter and FriendFeed to notice.*

This may show my ignorance, but I’ve never heard of Jim Groom. Please forgive me if I’ve committed a heinous crime by saying that, but in four years of reading (lots and lots) of posts in the edublogosphere, I can’t remember him being mentioned once. Which is not to say that he’s not to be listened to or that he doesn’t have good ideas - of course not! He’s probably never heard of me. I’m just sayin’…

Here’s what Jim has to say about the concept of ‘edupunk’. His context is Blackboard’s aims to try and trademark and sue everyone else out of existence:

I don’t believe in technology, I believe in people. And that’s why I don’t think our struggle is over the future of technology, it is over the struggle for the future of our culture that is assailed from all corners by the vultures of capital. Corporations are selling us back our ideas, innovations, and visions for an exorbitant price. I want them all back, and I want them now!

Enter stage left: EDUPUNK!

My next series of posts will be about what I think EDUPUNK is and the necessity for a communal vision of EdTech to fight capital’s will to power at the expense of community. I hope others will join me.

Sorry Jim, I’m not going to be joining you. Despite the fact that I’ve set out my stall saying that the edublogosphere is (in some ways) changing for the worse, an ‘Edupunk’ movement is not the answer. Why?

It’s a group, not a network - i.e. 1.0 not 2.0 (OK, so I know you reject labels…)
It harks back to a time when either I wasn’t born or was very, very young. I have no meaningful connection with the metaphor you’re trying to use.
It makes any members of the movement sound vaguely violent.
It seems to have the assumption behind it that we (either individually or collectively) have the answers, when actually we’re learners like everyone else.
Most Web 2.0 apps are free, and I’m at liberty to pick and choose them at will and use them how I want.

I’m all for being counter-cultural, anti-capitalist and bold towards authority, but I don’t think the right essence has been captured with ‘Edupunk’. Sorry. Perhaps I’m not ‘of a certain age’…

Further reading:

Chris Lott - Edupunk or Eduhacker?
D’Arcy Norman - My Edupunk Heroes
Dave Warlick - What’s this about Edupunk?
Doug Noon - None of the Above
Leslie Madsen Brooks - Introducing Edupunk
Rob Wall - The obligatory edupunk post

*That’s not a flippant comment, by the way; it’s almost impossible to keep up with the number of decent-quality blogs in the edublogosphere these days, so I prefer ‘almost’ real-time interactions to get at what people are currently thinking. Blogs are still great.

The most amazing thing you’ll see on the Internet this year!

Doug Belshaw — Tue, 27 May 2008 07:01:15 +0000

I don’t do this often, but I make no apologies for simply presenting for your delectation the following video. It blew my mind, it really did…

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Many thanks to @iusher for sharing the link!

Some web-hosting advice, please…

Doug Belshaw — Sat, 24 May 2008 18:30:32 +0000

Last month when I opened up our credit card statement, I looked with horror at the amount I was being charged for webhosting. It said that MediaTemple, my current web hosts for this blog, learning.mrbelshaw.co.uk, edte.ch and historyshareforum.com were charging me almost £20 per month for the privilege. This, apparently, is due to the ‘amount of MySQL activity’ on my account.

Last summer, I transferred from Bluehost - with whom I’d been very happy - due to MediaTemple’s well-publicised ‘Grid Hosting’ and their ability to host domain names such as .ch (needed for edte.ch). Now, however, I find that my websites take longer to load, their customer service is below average, and they’re over-charging me.

I’d love to simply go back to Bluehost. That’s not really an option, however, due to their inability to host .ch domains. I had a look at going with HP-backed and much-advertised One.com, but they don’t allow ‘download-related’ sites - historyshareforum.com is for the sharing and downloading of resources.

So I’d like your recommendations please. My criteria are:

Good value (i.e. reasonably cheap!)
Good customer support (quick response time)
Support for a wide range of domain extensions

Ideally, I’d also like the servers to be based in the UK. It makes fast loading times of the websites for the majority of my visitors more likely, you see…

Image credit: The Web that is Us by ecstaticist @ Flickr

dougbelshaw.com redesign

Doug Belshaw — Thu, 15 May 2008 17:10:59 +0000

If you normally get content from dougbelshaw.com via the RSS feed or emails, you might want to stop by the actual site. I’ve given it a bit of a facelift:

Why did I do this? Well the reason I did it today is because I’ve been off work due to illness. I must have a bug or something as I feel rough. The reason I decided to make it look the way it does is for the following reasons:

teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk had 3 columns and I found it helpful to be able to have two sidebars - more useful content near the top of the page!
It now features the avatar I use in most places online (a South Park character I created here)
My Twitter updates are now even more prominent. That’s significant as I spend a good deal of time interacting with people in my network. Now I just need a place to integrate the conversations, rather than just my side of them…

Please do feel free to give me some feedback on the redesign. I am aware, for instance, that it takes a while to load the page. Is that a big issue?

That’s my boy!

Doug Belshaw — Mon, 12 May 2008 06:15:04 +0000

My Dad and I went to see Sunderland vs. Arsenal yesterday. I bought the new shirt, and my parents kindly bought Ben his first Sunderland strip!