2. Sync highlights and comments to Evernote.

3. Search for a quotation or section in a book.

4. Look up a word in the built-in dictionary or a concept at Wikipedia.

5. Use the built-in 3G to navigate Google Maps via the browser.

I’m all for Free Schools in principle. The idea of community involvement in setting up a school is exactly what should happen in my book. I’m not so sure about the ‘parent-led’ part of it, but a school as reflecting community values and being responsive to context is highly in tune with my own political and educational thinking. That’s the good.

The Bad

But I’m not in favour of Free Schools if they’re all going to be along the lines of the West London Free School. It states proudly that it’s going to have a ‘narrow, academic’ curriculum focused on the Classics. Yes, that includes Latin.

I can remember reading for my MA in Modern History the debate between T.H. Huxley and Matthew Arnold (see here). The latter had a tough time defending the idea of a Liberal education based on the Classics in the 19th century, never mind the 21st. To say that “a classical education forms the bedrock of Britain’s most successful independent schools” is to commit the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc* – i.e. that there is a causal connection between the content of the curriculum and the success of the current elite maintaining their hegemonic power.

The Ugly

Toby Young, the son of a peer in the House of Lords and author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is leading the project for the West London Free School, linked to above. I’m not sure who’s doing his PR but I really wouldn’t be using the video featured on the site (and below) as promotional material. Given the title of his book, perhaps he’s taking his own advice. I have never come across such a perfect example of a smug, inconsiderate and xenophobic story as the one he recounts with narrowly-contained glee towards the end of this interview:

Conclusion

So, schools free of Local Authority control, with the power to adapt their curriculum to the needs of their local community? Yes please!

What I don’t want to see, and what I think the school Toby Young is helping set up is a prime example of, is the perpetuation of middle class cultural capital masquerading as parental choice. Unfortunately ‘answering’ the question about the middle classes in your FAQ doesn’t make an iota of difference in practice.

*See, I can do Latin too and I just went to the local comprehensive.

That’s fine.

I actively prefer the former over the latter, so I do mind your Luddite-style arguments attempting to castigate others whilst appealing to some kind of external, objective value. If you’re in a position of influence within an organization, then your reactionary stance on ebooks makes you a barrier.

These are the 3 types arguments I hear most often:

1. I like sharing books

That’s great! Good for you. My liking ebooks obviously makes me A Bad Person.

2. There’s just something about…

…the smell, the cracking of the spine, etc. Erm, that’s a fetish.

3. Ebooks strain my eyes

I completely take onboard your point about reading anything of any length on a backlit screen. But that argument just doesn’t stand up with e-ink screens as featured on the Amazon Kindle.

Got a different anti-ebook argument? I’d love to hear it in the comments below!

***Update*** Many thanks to ‘atw’ in the comments below who adds a fourth argument I hear often:

I like paper books because I can stick them in my purse and they never run out of batteries!

Offline this week I learned the proper way to put up and take down a tent (more trial and error and observing others than anything else), that 3 year olds, Talking Carl and public spaces don’t mix, and not to take my iPhone or my contact lens case to the beach (will I ever learn?!)

http://delicious.com/dajbelshaw/TILTW36

Tech.

• I signed up for, and blogged about Greplin this week – ‘the other half of search’. Huge potential!
• The Pew ‘Imagining the Internet’ reports surveyed leading figures to give predictions about the future of digital stuff. Makes for an interesting read!
• The Royal Mail has started selling ‘intelligent stamps’ which make use of augmented reality apps. Useful or fad?
• There is now Geek Mom to counterbalance Geek Dad over at Wired. I wonder if @hbelshaw will like it?
• So Google Wave died. Thankfully, Google have Open Sourced it and announced ‘Wave in a Box’. Gotta love Google.

Productivity & Inspiration

• Quotations inspire me, hence the section below every week where I share some new ones I’ve come across. Imagine when my delight when I came across quotabl.es – a place for quotes to live online. Wonderful.
• Some great advice on the 37 Signals blog about just getting started. Did you know that Van Gogh didn’t start painting until he was 27?
• Spend four minutes with your significant other to improve relationships. Good advice!
• Seth Godin reminds us that the way we do our work is just as important as what we produce these days.
• Lifehack’s got 20 quick tips for better time management. Number 19 is definitely a winner. Be ruthless!

Education & Academic

• Still looking for a free Ning replacement to use with your students? Try Wall.fm!
• The politics of education through a cartoon metaphor. Sadly true.

• The idea of Microlectures looks like an interesting one. It’s just a shame that it will undoubtedly be the lecturers who are so interesting that they don’t need to do this that will actually do it. Gah.
• I’m writing the methodology section of my Ed.D. thesis at the moment, so found this Wikipedia list of Social Science methodologies useful by way of comparison!
• The outgoing Chair of Ofsted thinks that virtual monitoring of UK schools is ‘inevitable’. The phrase “just because you can doesn’t mean you should” has never been more applicable.

Data, Design & Infographics

• Juxio is a really nice way to juxtapose images and text to create meaning. I’ll definitely be trying it out for a presentation soon!
• This tube map shows the history of the last 500 years of ‘modern science, reason and critical thinking’. Whilst impressive, I can’t help but think that a tube map wasn’t the best metaphor to use…

• Font Squirrel provides ‘handpicked free fonts for graphic designers with commercial-use licenses. Awesome.
• NASA joined Flickr Commons this week. Launch photos FTW!
• In 2007, xkcd produced a map of social networks. It’s been updated for 2010 by Flowtown (possibly a little prematurely given the launch of Apple’s new Ping social network this week…)

Misc.

• The sheer sincerity of this video made me laugh – which goes to show that people can be very convincing yet very wrong!

• I’d never heard of the term ‘brandalism’ before reading Graham Brown-Martin’s post about what’s going on in Ghana. Shocking, but definitely worth a read.
• Ghostly Discovery is a really interesting way (using sliders) of finding electronic music to suit your mood.
• Did Americans have British accents in 1776? The answer is surprising and involves ‘rhotics’.
• Many buttons we press are ‘placebo buttons’. I hadn’t thought about it until reading the article, but now it all makes sense…

Quotations

This world is but a canvas to our imagination. — Henry David Thoreau

A mediocre idea that generates enthusiasm will go further than a great idea that inspires no one. – Mary Kay Ash

Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. – Neal Donald Walsch

Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies. Mother Teresa

Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great. Niccolò Machiavelli

Main image CC BY-NC wili_hybrid

This week I have been mostly…

Recovering from a migraine

I know that my migraines are caused by stress, atmospheric pressure, dehydration, blood sugar and (chiefly) the food colouring Annatto. A combination of these factors, especially when it’s overcast, precipitates a migraine for me. I had one on Tuesday evening so had to take Wednesday off work to recover. Horrible.

Working on my Ed.D. thesis

I wrote 5,000 words of the Pragmatic methodology section of my Ed.D. thesis on Bank Holiday Monday. I’m using Scrivener now, so changes aren’t reflected at dougbelshaw.com/thesis (yet!)

Finishing #uppingyourgame

I’ve been working on a productivity-focused ebook called #uppingyourgame since the start of the year, using the OpenBeta method I devised. It’s now finished and has been sent to the 49 people who bought into the book whilst it was being written.

Everyone else will be able to purchase it from October 1st when feedback has been received and preparations made!

5 big reasons

1. I can carry hundreds – if not thousands of books around with me. Which means reference library everywhere I go, and the ability to have several books (e.g. novel/business/academic) on the go at once.

2. Finding out the meaning of an obscure word takes about two seconds.

3. I’ve got instant access to pretty much any book I want.

4. Highlighting is portable, either via the Amazon website (if one of their titles) or a text file (if one you put on the device).

5. Weight. Many of the books I read for work, pleasure and study would be fairly weighty tomes. It’s easier on my arms – and my luggage!

5 small reasons

1. It’s virtually impossible to ‘lose your place’ in an ebook.

2. No-one can see the cover of the book you’re reading (and therefore make implicit judgements)

3. You can change the font size – or even the font type in some cases. Some paper books are set in tiny, horrible fonts.

4. I love 19th-century fiction (especially Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Gogol) which means many books I want to read are completely free.

5. Speed. It’s only anecdotal, but I’m positive I can read faster on my Kindle.

Bonus 11th reason

Audiobooks. I love being able to decide to listen to a book instead of reading it when my eyes are tired from work.

* I’ve got the previous generation, but with a cool, limited-edition Moleskine cover. Awesome.

What I mean is that I don’t have enough followers on Twitter for each of them to realise that I can’t keep up with them all. At the time of writing this post, I’ve 3,615 Twitter followers – 3,465 more than Dunbar’s number. In other words, people expect me to be able to remember my conversations with them when I can’t even remember who they are.

This is potentially embarrassing within the increasingly business-focused world I’m operating. I need a quick way to find out if I’ve spoken/tweeted/emailed/shared a doc with someone very quickly.

Enter Greplin. When I read about it on TechCrunch yesterday, it was a bit of a eureka moment:

It’s a personal search engine for all that data you keep locked away in the cloud. If you’ve used desktop search like spotlight, you’ll get Greplin right away. It’s like spotlight for your cloud data.

After you use it for the first time you’ll understand that you’ll never not use it again. And there are nice touches like showing real time results as you type. And Greplin only uses OAuth and other APIs for authorization, so they never see your third party site credentials.

I’ve signed up and added the services (GMail, Twitter, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Google Calendar, Google Docs) that I want Greplin to index. If it’s as good as it look in the video below, I may just drop the $45/year required to ‘go Pro’ and unlock indexing of Evernote and email attachments…

In terms of user outcomes, this is awesome. It provides ‘just-in-time’ data to allow you to make decisions, have meaningful conversations, and (perhaps most importantly) prevent social awkwardness.

Before entering the realm with JISC infoNet, I really didn’t understand why there were so many conferences in Further and Higher Education . Now I understand:

• The whole academic system is predicated upon papers, which need to be presented somewhere.
• Lots of (usually JISC-funded) projects have to disseminate their outputs.
• Some subject disciplines/specialisms can be narrow. People need to meet to discuss things.

Hence, conferences.

The Problem

There’s many conferences that may be useful to your research interests and specialism(s) but you may not hear about them until it’s too late. That’s particularly true if, like me, you’re given a brief in a topic to which you’re fairly new.

Up to now, I’ve been following influential people on Twitter, reading blogs and generally scouting around for a place I can find information about relevant conferences.

It’s far from ideal.

The Solution

I was delighted, therefore, when James Clay alerted me to a website that is focused on solving exactly the above problem. Lanyrd describes itself as ‘the social conference directory’ and works very well.

The idea is simple:

1. You sign in using Twitter’s OAuth mechanism (so you can revoke access at any time)
2. It finds out which conferences your friends are attending (you can indicate that other people are attending or speaking, you see…)
3. You add yourself to conferences you’re attending or speaking at. There’s also the option to ‘track’ a conference.
4. The (conference) world becomes a better place.

The thing about it is that, like Academia.edu, it’s a great idea that needs to gain traction through use. So please do have a look at it!

Feel free to check out my profile and follow me:

The essence of Pragmatism is that there exists no standpoint from which to judge the objective truth or falsity of a statement or belief:

There is no absolute standpoint, and there is no exemption from standpoints; there are only and always relative standpoints… I can in reality think of no absolute whatever; I always tacitly place myself upon the scene as the observer who is beholding things in their relation to himself. (Lovejoy, 1930:81, quoted in Mounce, 1997:159)

Instead of being able to distinguish between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ qualities in the world, therefore, we are left with only secondary qualities of which we can speak. The grass is not objectively green, it is only green to me. Pragmatism is a philosophy concerned with action and the practical application of meaning. It is concerned with the development of capacities and habits that allow for human beings to be successful and productive in the world. As we shall see, Pragmatist philosophers have little patience with definitions for their own sake.

As William James explained through the title and content of Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, there is little ‘new’ in the philosophy of Pragmatism other than its name. Indeed, although Peirce coined the term ‘Pragmatism’ – later switching to ‘Pragmaticism’, “a term “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers” (Collected Papers, 5.414) – the ideas it represented have older origins and wider usage. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, demonstrated his adherence to a proto-Pragmatist project, stating:

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens. (Emerson, R.W., ‘Circles’ in Goodman, R.B., 1995:25)

And later in the same essay:

Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder; the steps are actions, the new prospect is power. Every several result is threatened and judged by that which follows. Every one seems to be contradicted by the new; it is only limited by the new. The new statement is always hated by the old, and, to those dwelling in the old, comes like an abyss of skepticism.

Peirce and James did formalised this way of thinking in such a way that it provided a philosophical approach to problem-solving. Peirce’s project was anti-Cartesian in approach and focus, whereas James was concerned with the concept of ‘truth’ – especially as it related to religious belief. In addition, they both discussed the skepticism to which Emerson alludes, rejecting it as debilitating. James in particular thought that cultivating a habit of doubt in relation to truth statements was indicative of an attitude rather than an intellectual position (Mounce, 1997:88). Skepticism is the result of confining one simply to the intellectual and theoretical sphere, as dangerous as confining one solely to the non-rational.

Instead, James argued that we should allow our ‘passional nature’ to help us decide upon the truth or falsity of statements and propositions:

Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must decide an option between two propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, ‘Do not decide, but leave the question’ is itself a passional decision – just like deciding yes and no – and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.(James, 1918:108)

Like the historian, we gain certainty through commitment, by leaving certain areas unquestioned. Certainty both in history and science comes through being ‘imperfectly theoretical’ – i.e. Being theoretical up to a point. As Mounce (1997:99) puts it, “It is only in philosophy, where commitment is at a minimum, that scepticism flourishes without limit.”

As a result, endless definitions do not serve to advance our understanding of the world and move closer towards truth. ‘Bachelor’ is a oft-cited example of a definition that means something precise. However, an alien to our planet would have to understand the institution of marriage, which cannot be easily explained in a sentence, before grasping the meaning of ‘bachelor’. Instead of definitions, then, it is the commitment to a statement, proposition or belief that helps us make our ideas clear. To use another example from Mounce, there is no sharp demarcation between day and night but we still find it useful to use these terms (Mounce, 1997:104).

It is precisely the fact that Pragmatism allows for error and chance that makes it a practical philosophy. Instead of committing ourselves to omniscience when using the words ‘know’ and ‘certainty’ we use them as practical instruments to go about our business in the world. I, for example, know that I am to attend a conference in a foreign country soon. I can express this certainty despite my attendance depending upon my continued health, an absence of airline strikes, and various geological phenomena not taking place.

For Pragmatists, and James in particular, truth becomes close to utility – what is ‘good in the way of belief’. James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience is a defence of this position. We cannot base beliefs on a theoretical conception of the world because this would, in effect, be a ‘view from nowhere’. Pragmatism, it will be remembered, is a philosophy that rejects the existence of an objective standpoint from which to ascertain the truth or falsity of a statement or belief. Reasoning is allied to experience rather than replacing it.

James was the original populariser of Pragmatism, the one who explained it to the intelligentsia of the early 20th century. However, it is important to briefly sketch the origins of Pragmatism in Peirce to understand the true aim of the overall project. Peirce rejected Cartesian dualism along with the Kantian distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal world. To Peirce and later Pragmatists, what Kant termed the noumenal world – the unknowable world ‘as it exists in itself’ – is a fiction. Likewise, Peirce rejected Descartes’ recommendation to start from a position of scepticism:

Philosophers of very diverse stripes propose that philosophy shall take its start from one or another state of mind in which no man, least of all a beginner in philosophy, actually is. One proposes that you should begin by doubting everything, and says that there is no one thing that you cannot doubt, as if doubting were as ‘easy as lying’… But, in truth, there is but one state from which you find yourself at the time you do ‘set out’ – a state of mind in which you are laden with an immense mass of cognition already formed, of which you can not divert yourself if you would; and who knows whether, if you could, you would not have made all knowledge impossible to yourself? Do you call it doubting to write down on a piece of paper that you doubt? If so, doubting has nothing to do with any serious business. But do not make believe; if pedantry has not eaten all reality out of you, recognise, as you must, that there is much that you do not doubt in the least. (Peirce, 1935(V) para 416:278, quoted in Mounce, 1997:21)

Meaning can only be grasped through practice, not through armchair philosophising, for Peirce and other Pragmatists. The ‘Pragmatic Maxim’ as formulated by Peirce states that a conception does not differ from another conception (either in logical effects or importance) other than in the way it could conceivably modify our practical conduct (Mounce, 1997:33).

It is this Pragmatic Maxim that I shall be using to test concepts surrounding ‘digital literacy’ in my Ed.D. thesis!

Bibliography

• Goodman, R.B. (Ed.) (1995) Pragmatism: A Contemporary Reader
• James, W. (1907) Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (available online at http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=5116, accessed 8 August 2010)
• Mounce, H.O. (1997) The Two Pragmatisms: from Peirce to Rorty

User eXperience (UX) is about how a person feels about using a system. User experience highlights the experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction (HCI) and product ownership, but it also covers a person’s perceptions of the practical aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency of the system. User experience is subjective in nature, because it is about an individual’s performance, feelings and thoughts about the system. User experience is dynamic, because it changes over time as the circumstances change. (Wikipedia)

Since then, I’ve been looking for resources that will help me sharpen my thinking around UX. Here’s five that I’ve come across:

1. UX booth – a blog ‘by and for the User Experience community’.
2. Chris Messina’s Design Patterns – a collection on Flickr of ‘interesting interfaces and design flows from around the web’. Definitely worth checking out!
3. UX Myths – a collection of user experience misconceptions, with explanations of why they aren’t true.
4. Smashing Magazine: 25 User Experience videos that are worth your time – the title says it all!
5. UX Magazine – a really nicely laid-out site (as you’d hope!) settting out ‘to explore, promote & discuss the multiple facets of user experience one article at a time.’

Have you come across UX resources that would help?