I’m out of a comfort zone I didn’t even realise mattered to me. I thought I already was location independent really. I work on a laptop and I have for the last 6 years. It travelled up and down the country twice a month all the way through the degree and I worked at both houses, no desk at either, and on the trains.
Now I live in one place but I don’t have a desk so I just perch where ever I can in the house. Occasionally I even stick the laptop in it’s bag and take it somewhere else to work. So I didn’t feel particularly tied to one place, till now.

This latest trip is a bit of a try out for more extended absences from base. Instead of taking ordinary holidays this year the idea is to take extended trips and work for parts of each day. And I’ve been surprised to discover it’s really not that easy.

Mobile Broadband

This is great when it works well but seems strangely intermittent. It may even be affected by the weather! I can get 2G connection some of the time but it’s too slow to do much of what I need to do. The 3G connection is faster but rare.

Location

This leads directly to the issue of where in the house I can work. Some rooms are better than others for comfort or convenience and some for the connection. Everything is compromise. There isn’t an ideal solution.

Work

• Email is fine, reliable but a bit slow to open.
• Multi-tasking with lots of tabs open is not possible
• Blogging’s hard, but not impossible thanks to MarsEdit. I can create drafts and upload them when I’ve got a good connection.
• I can’t add photos very easily, upload takes too long & connection gets lost. Hence no photo in this post, gave up on the 3rd attempt.
• Quickly checking facts and adding links is a bit of a challenge.
• Research for new posts is out of the question

Time Travel

It’s really a bit like time travelling back to a world before broadband and always on internet.

It’s not like coming away and knowing you’ll have no connection. Then there’s not temptation to do any of the ‘normal’ routine of things and the online world is soon forgotten.

The Up Side

On the plus side, like having no internet, it makes it easier to concentrate on a single task, like a piece of writing. On the first day I finally got round to writing a short e-booklet about Classroom Displays I’ve had rattling round my head for months.

Not to mention the walks by the creek, little egrets, the wind in my hair, charming Cornish pubs, watching the surf, green everywhere, birdsong, rabbits in the hedgerows and the pot, and dark nights with no light pollution, no traffic noise, no tubes, no hoards of people.

All of which I would illustrate with a photo, if only I could upload one!

Better preparation

Trouble is that I ran out of well researched things to work on. That’s got to be the major learning from this.

I can work on stuff in draft and upload in a batch, things can get done but I need to do far more preparation and research in advance.

This is a challenge as it’s not my usual way of working. I expect there will be lots of creaking, groaning and moaning till I get used to it.

Why bother?

I’m a bit of a nomad at heart. I’ve never lived in one place for a huge amount of time and I don’t really feel the need to put down roots. I like not having much stuff and being able to just pick up and go. I always wanted to own a yurt (ger) from being very young. (I blame a project I did about Mongolia when I was in junior school !). I love to travel, love the feel of being in different places.

When we work out how make it work we’ll be able to combine work with longer trips and travel more. It’s bumpy just now but it’s got to be worth exploring.

Now to see if I can post this, wish me luck!

Update  – comments now open

Wordpress for Beginners

Wordpress for Beginners – why should you use it?

Wordpress is ideal for anyone starting out on line. It is so easy to use. The interface is as simple as Word or writing an email. I’m not really very techie but I edit Wordpress sites, like this one (!), all the time.
Have a look at this screenshot of the blog interface to get the idea.

See how easy it is?

• No complicated code to learn, (no need to use html)
• Easy to change the look and feel just by changing the theme with a single click
• You can easily add images and video

Wordpress for Beginners – where to start?

There are 2 kinds of Wordpress sites. The ones you pay to host on an independent web host (I tend to use Bluehost) and the kind that are hosted for free on Wordpress.com.

Rather than going straight into setting up an independent Wordpress site you could try setting up a free one on Wordpress.com (http://wordpress.com/).
Try to register http:/replacewithyourkeyphrase.wordpress.com/. Note – your key phrase is likely to be something people would naturally type into a search engine like google when looking for a site on your subject.

You can use the Wordpress.com site to play around with the Wordpress software to see if you like it and then if you do decide to go the independent hosting route link to your main site from it. This will then also give you a valuable link back.

Wordpress for more advanced users

Although it is often used for blogs Wordpress can be used as a content management system (CMS) giving you a complete, complex, professional standard site that you can easily edit and update. Not only that, the search engines like Wordpress giving you a SEO (search engine optimisation) advantage straight away.

Joanna’s got an interesting post about poetry over on Confident Writing. I like the suggested method for unlocking your creative juices and finding your poem.

Put your pen to paper and keep it moving for ten minutes without stopping. Then put your notebook away without looking at it.

The next day, pick up your freewriting and underline every word or phrase that looks interesting or surprising to you. Choose one, and write that down as your first line. Maybe you want to also include a few other phrases from your freewriting too…

It reminds me a lot of the ‘reflective splurge’ method of reflection that I used such a lot during the degree. (Gillie Botton)I’d almost forgotten that this same way of working could be used to tap into a more artistic form creative writing. (Another unexpected cost of the degree).

I used to really enjoy writing poetry, especially the discipline  of fitting words to my chosen form. I was quite keen on sonnets and haiku. I’m going to have a play with this idea now. I might post the results of my experiment tomorrow.

The Dengie Hundreds

The Dengie Hundreds in 1610

Thanks to a Flickr group for the area I knew that it forms part of the Dengie Hundreds. I didn’t know much about what this meant and I became quite intrigued.

After a little research I found out that a Hundred was a region of administration in some parts of England. They were smaller than counties and bigger than manors. According to wikipedia:

a hundred had enough land to sustain approximately one hundred households headed by a hundred-man or hundred eolder. He was responsible for administration, justice, and supplying military troops, as well as leading its forces. The office was not hereditary, but by the 10th century the office was selected from among a few outstanding families. In England, specifically, it has been suggested that ‘hundred’ referred to the amount of land sufficient to sustain one hundred families, defined as the land covered by one hundred “hides”.

Andy was interested as it turns out they originally held sort of parliaments that met under a tree, just like the Basque ones and one we saw in Asturias. (See Andy’s Gernkia blog post for more details)

In fact the area we live in was once part of such a Hundred known as Beacontree Hundred, what was once the Beacon tree now being somewhere under Barking bus station!

Other Hundreds

So we began to wonder how universal the idea of the Hundreds and their regional parliaments was. My hunch was they were probably Anglo Saxon in origin as at first I thought I’d never heard of this idea in Scotland. Then I remembered a place in Dumfriesshire called The Isles of Tinwald and that the Manx parliament is called the Tinwald so that might suggest something similar.
A bit of digging later I’ve discovered that the Hundreds were indeed Saxon in origin and were established in the Saxon controlled areas of what became England from around 600 AD and were later imposed in some parts of Wales. They met under a tree partly because trees  were  hugely symbolic to the forest dwelling Saxons and had religious connotations even after the introduction of Christianity.

In the North Lands…

(Excuse the Noggin the Nog reference!)
Further north in the Danelaw similar demarcations were introduced. These were called wapentake and tended to meet at a fork in a major river rather than under a tree. Later some of these, though not all, became Hundreds such as the Salford Hundred.

Some parts of the south of Scotland were under Norse rule in the early Middle Ages, hence the Tinwald and place names such as Torthorwald, and quite possible Applegarth from which some of my ancestors hail.

And the Point?

Learning about something just for the joy of discovery and knowing not because there’s any ‘need’ but just for pleasure. Work based learning might be important and valid but it isn’t everything. Sometimes learning is just an end in itself.

There’s a couple of good reasons why my reaction might not be the same as that of the panel (or a couple of million youtube watchers).

First up I live with a very talented but certainly not famous singer songwriter (Andy Roberts) so live music is a regular part of my day.

Second I have attended folk clubs (like Havering Folk Club) all my adult life and occasionally seen the most unlikely people burst into song with voices that are as good as anything on the professional stage.

Finally I grew up in a Scots family where people of all ages, sizes and shapes sang, were expected to get up on any occasion and sing well, and there was nothing surprising about that. (I was the surprise, as I alone in my family don’t have a good singing voice. I learned poems instead!)

I think that it’s great that Susan Boyle is having her moment but something she is supposed to have said troubled me. She wants to be like Elaine Paige, but no one ever gave her the chance. Well, I’m not sure anyone ever ‘gave’ Elaine Paige the chance either. I think she had to take all the chances she could, work very hard, learn to sing in a way that protects her voice so she can sing 8 shows a week, learn to act, and create the Elaine Paige we know today. For every Elaine there are hundreds of talented singers, with wonderful voices who did all that, who took their chances and who didn’t make it. There are also thousands who have amazing voices and aren’t famous at all. They can’t all be West End stars and many of them wouldn’t want to be.

I suppose my point is that it’s not really about having talent. It’s about what you choose do do with it. Susan Boyle made a set of choices which led her to one life, she may now have changed direction (or not) but it’s not her singing talent which will decide that. It is everything else that goes with that choice.

Timeout gradually blanks out your screen and forces you to take a very short nanobreak (10 seconds – just time to blink and stretch) every 10 minutes and a 10 minute break every 50 minutes. You can choose to delay the break or change the transparency of the grey out so you can carry on reading.

I decided it might be an idea to impose a software solution on the problem of eye tiredness after my visit to the optician last week. I got new stronger glasses and a short lecture on eye strain and computer use.

I’ve only been using Timeout for a few hours but I’ve already learned something. Here’s my good advice for you – stop reading this and go to the loo, your bladder will thank you and I’ll still be here when you get back!

These are the services I’ve looked at so far:

Twitter

If you follow me on Twitter don’t be surprised if I’m around a lot less in the next few weeks. I’ve decided I need to move my attention away from my regular comfort zones and to concentrate much more on actions which maximise cash flow.
I know that there’s a lot of talk about how this is exactly what you can do with twitter but I’m not convinced. To me it’s far too seductive and I tend to be too scattered in my approach to gain much traction from it.
I may try again at some point but for now twitter is off limits except for autoposts.

RSS

I just reduced my feed reader by more than 70% All that is in there now are feeds that are likely to produce actions, be that blog posts or comments. I’ve also sorted out MarsEdit so that I can post straight to various blogs via NetNewsWire.

MarsEdits

Although I’d paid for MarsEdit I’d fallen out of the habit of using it. I am now resolved to do all my blogging via Mars Edits rather than through the Wordpress interface. I just don’t like the 2.7 interface much so the simple set up in Mars Edits will encourage me to blog more often and more efficiently.

Flickr

I’m such a visual person I find it easy to spend far too much unproductive time on Flickr. This connects with my RSS use too as I was following many tag searches which were not directly relevant to my business interests. I also continued to spend time growing groups that are actually now self-sustaining.
I’d like to spend more time actually improving my own photography skills so hopefully I’ll post more and browse less.

Time tracking software

I’m going to try out some software solutions to time management. I need to see how I’m spending time and where.

Treated myself to this book on a whim in Ilford yesterday. So far I’m quite taken with it. The author has obviously been advised that she needs to blog and even twitter to help promote the book. I even got time limited (45 days) access to an online version of the book via Safari Books. So this is book 2.0 I suppose.

I intend exploring some of my reactions and responses to the book here on the blog as I try to tease out my significant learning. Time I got back to using this blog as a learning journal and stopped pretending that I’m not learning anything these days!

“I’d wike a horse

One take-away from the book is the notion that you can get what you want by if you first ask for more than you really want and when that’s denied follow it up by requesting the thing you wanted in the first place. Susan argues that this works because you’ve accepted the ‘no’ you’ve induced a feeling of indebtedness in the other party. This leaves them

with a need to give you something in return. So when you ask for what you really wanted it seems quite reasonable for them to let you have it. Now I know this isn’t rocket science, as this tweet suggests kids, and advertisers, have known this for years.

What interests me is what this means on the web. The book suggests that all humans have an inbuilt need to ‘even the score’ and not to be indebted to each other. It is suggested that this need is hard wired and operates at the unconscious level. She looks at how ‘giving gifts’ like free information can leave readers with this sense of indebtedness. She then suggests that higher levels of indebtedness can be induced by giving something that’s perceived to have even a token monetary value. You can then use this sense of indebtedness to get the reader to do something for you, perhaps fill in a form, give up their email address, join a mailing list. So far so good.

My problem with this interpretation is that I’m not sure it’s universal. I am not sure that this is how UK web users feel or behave. Web users here seem to have an innate sense that information online should be free. If it’s been put online it is available for them to read and they don’t feel obliged to whoever put it there. I include myself in this interpretation. I’m always amazed by US bloggers who ask readers to buy them a cup of coffee or even a beer and claim they make money that way.

I explored this in some depth with members of ukcider in some research I did about the free model for online communities of practice. It was very clear that this feeling of indebtedness, although it did to a small extent exist, did not make them willing open their wallets. The feelings of obligation were to the community, or to the individual responsible for adding specific items of information. Whilst all the participants valued the efforts of their facilitator to provide the community with resources and web space there was little sense of a need to repay any indebtedness.

I thought it was probably a cultural difference with UK and US audiences. I’m intrigued by the idea that I’m wrong (shock horror!) and I need to re-examine my assumptions about this.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Procrastination and I are old friends. I love this video (via  @jcleary )but I’m currently trying to change how I see the procrastination monster. I’m trying to take some advice from Havi and learn that there might be reasons for my willingness to be distracted.  Not sure it’s working but at least I feel a bit less guilty.

Now -time for  a cup of tea anyone?

Using Diigo for Bookmarking

Web 2.0 services sometimes desert us when we’ve taken them for granted. I was a long term user of a service called Furl which recently closed & I had to transfer all my bookmarks to diigo with very little warning. I’ve used diigo spasmodically for bookmarking and I decided to use this as an opportunity to explore some of diigo’s more powerful features.

AutoBlogging with Diigo

It’s easy to set up diigo to post bookmarks and their annotation directly to your blog. You add your blog and then set up a ‘job’ to post bookmarks for a specific tag. You can choose how frequently to post them but for my purposes once a week should be sufficient.

I’ve created a designated author with it’s own user name and password on my wordpress blog here to use for this service. This means I’ve given this user limited rights and not revealed my admin password to an external service. I feel a little more secure this way! I’m not crazy about auto-posting but this is at least my own content & not at all spammy.

Diigo Bookmarklet

I was slightly put off diigo at first as I thought you had to use their installed toolbar. However I’ve since discovered there’s a very easy to use bookmarklet you can drag to your tool bar to make bookmarking easy. It gives you many more options than is usual with social bookmarking sites. You can highlight text, add sticky notes and annotate. All of these are public and can be seen even by those not logged in to diigo, so long as they followed your diigo link to get there. (Jose wrote a very detailed post about using this feature with students – must remember to bookmark it and claim the cpd time!)

Convert to PDF

As needed I can use this convert to pdf service to produce a hard copy of my evidence of continuing professional development.

Time spent

About 40 mins, 20 mins reading, 20 mins writing this post.

Benefit to students

Realised I can use this bookmark collection technique with my next class to provide more detailed guidance when viewing online content. Need to be careful to just provide guidance and leave room for their own discoveries. Wish I’d time to actually show them how to use it but we are too pushed already!