It’s all about deciding what you want to do and how hard you’re prepared to work. And by ‘hard’ I don’t mean the number of hours you put in – that’s a given!

You can purchase an inexpensive copy of The Art of Worldly Wisdom book from Amazon or read it online for free via Google Books. The whole set of Wednesday Wisdom images can be found in my Creative Commons-licensed Flickr set.

*As I explain in the video, having them in audiobook format rather than MP3 allows you to ‘bookmark’ a chapter if you don’t finish it. With MP3s you would have to start from the beginning again or fast-forward…

In the extracts below (taken from the interview) I explain my belief that productivity is a learned behaviour based upon serenity, reliability and focus.

(if you’re reading this via email or in a feed reader you may need to click through!)

Image CC BY-NC Darren Hester

The biggest thing I learned this week offline was at a DriveTech Speed Awareness course after I was caught doing 36mph in a 30mph zone. It was mostly how not to use technology when teaching people stuff. There’s definitely a blog post in there somewhere…

http://delicious.com/dajbelshaw/TILTW10

Tech.

• Rapportive is a plugin for Firefox or Chrome that replaces the adverts in GMail with some contextual social media information about the people who send you email:

• beWeeVee is like Etherpad on steroids. But likes Microsoft Silverlight a bit too much for my liking.
• Picnik, the awesome browser-based image editor, has been acquired by Google. This is not a good thing: Flickr (owned by Yahoo!) allows you to use Picnik to edit your photos. I guess we can kiss that functionality goodbye.
• Second Life has never been more than a curiosity to me, but Leon Cych has put together a video showing some new features which might make it a viable proposition to do something useful:

• ManyCam (Win/Mac) allows you to add effects to your webcam videos/chats. Which could be interesting for EdTechRoundUp tonight…

Productivity & Inspiration

• Lifehacker has a great post on ‘just in case’ vs. ‘just in time’. The latter might seem like a good idea, but you’ll always miss out on opportunities to apply knowledge and skills when you don’t have them…
• ‘Spezzatura’ is an Italian word that means something like ‘doing your craft without a lot of visible effort’. It’s something I’ll be striving for in future!
• Leo Babauta at Zen Habits has produced The Little Guide to Inspiration. I like his opening quotation from Jack London: “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
• It’s a while since I’ve written a stream-of-consciousness. This post by Lifehacker shows how writing 750 words in such a way and then analysing them can lead to increased productivity.
• Dumb Little Man has an important post, I think, on the importance of tracking and writing down your achievements.

Education & Academic

• Google Apps Education Edition is all very well, but what can you actually do with it in practice? This presentation gives you some ideas:

• The Shadow Children’s Secretary, Michael Gove, of the Conservative party, has made some comments about education this week. Turns out he’s a bit of a reactionary. “Most parents would rather their children had a traditional education, with children sitting in rows, learning the kings and queens of England,” he said. Not this parent. I’ve changed my voting habits.
• As I blogged about this week, Will Richardson’s started a wiki on 10 big questions for education. I’ve volunteered to moderate the page for What does an educated person look like today? Please contribute!

Data, Design & Infographics

• This is not only a beautiful visualization, but extremely useful: Snake Oil? The Scientific Evidence For Popular Health Food Supplements

• The video below gives some stats on The State of the Internet as it currently stands. YouTube serves 1 billion videos per day(!)

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

• Tableau Public is a free, online visualization tool that I’m looking forward to playing with.
• This visualization of the potential tsunami after the Chilean earthquake I found interesting:

Misc.

• There’s a flower that blooms once every 3,000 years! It’s pretty rare. A Chinese nun found one under her washing machine.
• UEFA want more officials in some crazy positions at Europa League games. The rest of the world wants goalmouth technology. <Sigh>
• The UK Digital Economy bill could wipe out free wifi in many places due to draconian record-keeping requirements aimed to crack down on copyright infringements.
• There’s an official petition to have 10^27 (that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) be prefixes with ‘hella’. That would make for ‘hellatons’ and ‘hellawatts’. Awesome.
• “Enthusiasm is compressed expertise” – I like that idea!

Quotations

Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance. (Samuel Johnson)

I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everyone. (Bill Cosby)

Courage is being scared to death… and saddling up anyway. (John Wayne)

The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about. (Dr. Wayne Dyer)

Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do. (John Wooden)

You may recognise the middle part from My Digital Reading Workflow.

So, to summarize in bullet points:

• I use a template to make sure I lay them out in a standard way (and to make it easier for me)
• I read things via RSS (email) and ‘favorite’ things on Twitter, add to Instapaper, etc.
• Interesting stuff is bookmarked with the week’s tag on Delicious (in this case TILTW9)
• On Saturday evening and Sunday morning I choose the most interesting for each section to share in the post

Hope that helps!

I have to.

I wouldn’t know what else to do – I’d have to leave the circus.

I heard an interview with Carly Simon recently. She’s in her sixties now and most famous for stuff she did before I was born – such as the song You’re So Vain. The interviewer asked her if she would keep on making music “even into her eighties”. Her response is above.

She meant, I think, to come across as someone with a lifelong passion. To me, however, it came across as quite sad. She’s no Bob Dylan, after all.

And then I got thinking about education and about teaching in particular. I know quite a few people who just wouldn’t know what else to do if they weren’t teaching. That’s not always a positive thing. Sometimes people need to leave the circus.

(Image CC BY-NC hbp_pix)

I’ll try and keep this as brief as possible if you promise to do the background reading and try to contribute in some way.

Introduction

EduCon 2.0 is both a conversation and a conference.
And it is not a technology conference. It is an education conference. It is, hopefully, an innovation conference where we can come together, both in person and virtually, to discuss the future of schools. Every session will be an opportunity to discuss and debate ideas — from the very practical to the big dreams.

This year’s was 29th-31st of January at the Science Leadership Academy, Philadelphia, USA (which is why I wasn’t there).

Background Reading

Will Richardson blogged about what happened at Educon and the next steps required to turn conversations into action:

• Continuing the Educon conversation
• The Big Questions: Now What?
• The Big Questions: Next Steps
• Time For Action: The Big Questions

Results

Will crowdsourced 10 questions that educators need to answer effectively:

1. What is the purpose of school?
2. What is the changing role of the teacher, and how do we support that new role?
3. How do we help students discover their passions?
4. What is the essential learning that schools impart to students?
5. How do we adapt our curriculum to the technologies that kids are already using?
6. What does an educated person look like today?
7. How do we change policy to support more flexible time and place learning?
8. What are the essential practices of teachers in a system where students are learning outside of school?
9. How do we ensure those without privilege have equal access to quality education and opportunity?
10. How do we evaluate and validate the informal, self-directed learning that happens outside of school?

Actions

The next step was the creation of a wiki - 10fored.wikispaces.com. This is a place to continue the conversation and provide tangible results. Taking a step back but keeping an overview, Will has asked for volunteer moderators for each of the questions.

I volunteered for Question #6: What does an educated person look like today? I’m interested in how it relates to my thesis, the original title of which was ‘What does it mean to be ‘educated’ and ‘digitally literate’ in the 21st century’.

Help me out. Send a tweet to @dajbelshaw with the #10fored hashtag with some ideas. Or, better yet, add your thoughts to the wiki page!

• 10fored.wikispaces.com/educated

Thanks in advance!

(image CC BY CarbonNYC)

I’m not agreeing with Gracián that everyone is full of malice. But you need to be on your guard and mix things up a bit sometimes…

You can purchase an inexpensive copy of The Art of Worldly Wisdom book from Amazon or read it online for free via Google Books. The whole set of Wednesday Wisdom images can be found in my Creative Commons-licensed Flickr set.

Fortunately, my good friend Paul Lewis (@aerotwist) is a bit lot of a coding ninja. In fact, he’ll soon be packing his bags for Sweden to work for Fi, one of the foremost web design companies in the world. He took about 3.1 seconds to knock up the relevant scripts, etc.

So now, if you go to dougbelshaw.com you’ll notice that the bullet points fade in when you move the mouse. Classy.

I’ve rewritten the README file included in the zip file below to make it more understandable by mere mortals, but you’ll still need to know your way around HTML. I’ll do my best to help if you get stuck and add a comment below, but I’m making no promises!

#getthatjob: an educator’s guide to finding, applying, and interviewing for teaching-related jobs is now available free of charge. Gratis. No strings attached. Why?

Everyone who bought it has been refunded.

You can view it in its entirity and download it here

Sharing link: http://bit.ly/getthatjob