No jobs being forthcoming after withdrawing from my course, I set up as a freelance web developer. It’s been an incredible learning experience, and great fun. I’ve learned a lot about business, from marketing through to finance and everything in between, and I’ve met lots of new people into the bargain.

However, life is always ready with a curveball. (What’s the appropriate British metaphor here? A googly perhaps?) I’d stopped applying for jobs to focus on freelancing, and business was just starting to pick up. Then out of the blue I was interviewed for, and subsequently offered, a post for which I’d applied back in May.

The job? ICT Project Manager at the University of Bath’s Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies (CSCT) and, basically, it’s my perfect job. I get to be involved with setting up a virtual research environment (VRE) for the centre, which will involve lots of web stuff along with consulting, training and supporting users, all of which I really enjoy.

So, I’m back working in higher education, and I’ll be back blogging on similar subjects after a hiatus of several months. Given the nature of the job, there will be more of a focus on research and digital scholarship than before, but I’m sure I’ll still have plenty of opportunities to talk about elearning and education too, especially as the EPSRC-funded doctoral training centre is a major part of CSCT.

I’m really excited about the whole thing. Bye for now!

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More posts, when I get back from the honeymoon. Bye for now!

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But I got to thinking: What do you do to protect your privacy and/or identity on Facebook, Twitter or the rest of the web?

Please share your thoughts by posting a comment below, or by writing a post on your own blog and linking to this one — a link will automagically appear below.

Possibly related posts:

1. Privacy, identity and control on the web
2. Beginner's guide to Twitter Part II: @s, #s and RTs
3. Beginner's guide to Twitter Part I: messages, followers and searching

It’s still unclear what the intention was here. It may have been to groom children by posing as someone they knew. It may have been to falsely accuse the friend of grooming children. It may even have been totally innocent.

In the end, the friend was very lucky. Well before the situation could get out of hand, he was able to contact Facebook, prove satisfactorily that this was a fake account and have it taken down. But reputation being what it is, it could have ended his career.

Last week was the Plymouth e-Learning Conference 2010, and although I didn’t attend, I have been reading some of the coverage on the blogosphere. In particular my eye was caught by James Clay’s blog post, Privacy has gone… which in turn discusses Josie Fraser’s keynote on privacy.

As I was reading James’s blog post, that story came back to me, and it occurred to me that there’s an element of balance to be found in protecting one’s privacy and identity online.

Those of us engaged in education often teach our students about the dangers of revealing too much information about ourselves online. The publishing of addresses, birth dates, account numbers will almost inevitably lead to identity theft.

But it seems just as important to strongly establish your identity online. Perhaps by having a well-established Facebook page it would be much easier to say “that fake profile is not mine.” If there are even a dozen people who you’ve friended online who you know in real life, and who can vouch for the real you, you’re in a much stronger position.

In addition to this, having a Facebook account permits your friends to tag photos of you properly if they wish, rather than just entering your name, which in turn allows you to restrict who sees those tags.

The way to protect yourself online is not to become the Ungooglable Man — James rightly points out that this strategy doesn’t work. Much better to step up and proudly say “this is me“. Take control of your brand, and don’t let other people have the only voice in what the web says about you.

Do you have a Facebook profile? How tightly do you control your privacy settings? What comes up if you Google yourself? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Photo credit: My Identity by Kathryn B

Possibly related posts:

1. Ask the readers: How do you protect yourself online?
2. Beginner's guide to Twitter Part I: messages, followers and searching

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

So said Socrates, anyway, and he was a pretty bright chap by all accounts.

Reflective writing is increasingly being used as a form of evidence in many qualifications and as part of professional development programmes. It was central to the assessment of my PCHE qualification, and it’s the main method of assessment for my other half’s CILIP chartership process.

By why? What’s so important about it?

Well professional qualifications are typically about being better at what you do.

Now, if you’re studying mathematics, biology or astrophysics, the object of your learning is external and independent. On the other hand, if you want to be better at teaching or people management, it’s your own behaviour that needs to change.

It’s not enough to know what you should be doing in theory. You also need to know what you’re actually doing so that you can work out how to improve.

Where does writing fit in?

It’s perfectly possible to think about your own behaviour without going near a pen (or computer). Why would you want to write it all down? For me, reflective writing serves several purposes.

First, it makes a permanent record. I can quite easily forget what I was thinking five minutes ago, let alone remember everything I thought last month. But if I write something down it’s a lot harder to lose.

Plus, it can be enlightening and even surprising to look back at a later date at what you thought in the past. It can be particularly useful to see how your thoughts develop over a period of time, particularly if you have an interest in how people learn.

Next, it can act as evidence of your learning. A portfolio which includes reflective writing shows not only that you have the right skills, but also that you’re both willing and able to improve them.

Finally, it externalises your thought processes, placing them in the real world where you can examine them more objectively. It’s far to easy to get wrapped up in those processes if you keep them locked away inside your head.

How can I write reflectively?

As I rapidly discovered when I started, reflective writing doesn’t come naturally to a lot of people. Thankfully there are a number of tricks which can help — here are a few that have worked for me:

1. Use a timer: Set an ordinary kitchen timer for 10 minutes, and write without pausing until it goes off. Don’t worry about staying on topic; just don’t stop writing.

2. Write a letter: Try imagining that you’re writing a to a friend or family member. You don’t have to ever send it, but writing for someone else can make reflection feel less futile.

3. Ask a question: If you’re writing about a particular problem, seeing it phrased as a question can help to trigger problem-solving thought processes.

4. Mix it up: If writing doesn’t do it for you, try talking things through into a dictaphone. If you have a trusted friend or colleague, you could set up a tape recorder (or use a laptop or mobile phone) and record a conversation with them.

5. Learn more: Gillie Bolton isn’t the only author to write about reflective writing by a long way, but I found her book Reflective Practice full of useful ideas. I’m also planning to take a look at Donald Schön‘s classic work on the subject, [The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action][Schön 2005] soon.

But I’m interested: what works for you? Share your tips and tricks in the comments below.

Photo credit: Young Narcissist by Victoria Henderson

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However, it does mean that I’ve so far missed out on the traditional ritual of looking back on one’s year to date and using it as blog-fodder. So here we are then. Time to have a look back and see what I’ve learned from the experience so far.

2009 has been my first full year of blogging. It took me a while to get going, and to begin finding my voice (I’m still working on that), but then I made some decisions about my future career and suddenly this blog had a purpose: to give me a way to join in the e-learning community, reflect and learn. Since then, I’ve posted on pretty much whatever’s seemed appropriate, and started getting to grips with what makes this medium tick.

What did people read?

My most popular (i.e. most viewed) posts seem to fit into one or both of two categories: “hot topics” and conversations.

By “hot topics”, I mean subjects which interest a large portion of the online community enough to see what I’ve got to say. Examples of this type of post include:

• My three part beginners guide to Twitter;
• A brief note on the University of Sheffield’s decision to use Google Mail.

By “conversations”, I refer to posts which are actively trying to engage with my audience. My favourite of these (and my favourite post of the year) has to be:

• Ask the readers: Why use technology in teaching?

I think its success lies in the fact that it was a question broad enough for everyone to have an opinion on and important enough for many people to want to comment on. I intentionally kept the original post quite short, and ensured that the question I was asking stood out.

Then, of course, there are posts which fall into both categories, such as my contribution to the debate on the death or otherwise of the VLE.

What didn’t work?

I tried a couple of different things to keep things interesting, such as posting a weekly summary of links that I’d found around the internet and trying monthly themes, but neither of these really caught on as I didn’t have the motivation to keep on with them.

I think perhaps the monthly theme idea would work better for a blog which was consciously aimed at being educational resource for the reader, forming part of the ongoing story which keeps learners engaged. For this blog, though, which is more reflective and tends to be a reaction to my own thoughts and experiences, it feels unnecessarily prescriptive.

Other highlights

In August, I moved from WordPress.com to my own self-hosted blog, thanks to the generosity of a friend with a server to host it. I wanted to have scope to experiment and expand, so I went with WordPress MU, the multi-user version of WordPress which allows multiple blogs to run off a single installation.

I also tried my hand at writing some fiction in response to a challenge on Joanna Young’s Confident Writing blog. I really enjoyed it, but decided that it didn’t really fit into my plan for this blog, so I took advantage of WordPress MU and started a separate non-work-related blog to keep all of the random writings and photos that I wanted to share.

Conclusion

I’ve found blogging to be valuable. It lets me reflect and organise my thoughts in a form suitable for consumption by other human beings; it lets me connect to the e-learning community and build a useful professional network; it lets me take part in a global conversation.

Enough cliches.

Here’s looking forward to the next twelve months.

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If you live in the UK, you’ll probably not have managed to avoid at least hearing about Strictly Come Dancing, a reality TV show in which professional dancers teach celebrities to dance (in the US and Australia it’s called Dancing with the Stars).

In recent years the big Saturday show has been supported by a half-hour gossip show every weekday evening, going by the name Strictly Come Dancing: It Takes Two.

In case you were starting to wonder where I was going with this, the first little bit of yesterday’s It Takes Two saw the professionals talking about the approach they take to teaching their celebs, and it makes for quite interesting watching. If you’re in the UK, you can watch it on BBC iPlayer, around 1:10.

What’s interesting is that all of the celebrities think that their pro is a great teacher, but from a dispassionate point of view there are differences. I think Brian sums it up nicely when he says “a really good teacher is a teacher who learns to adapt their teaching style to different types of student.” It’s noticeable that the professionals who have consistently done well across series have been the ones who adapted well to their celebrities.

And as Erin points out: “‘World Champions’ doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a good teacher.”

Just a little something to think about.

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Margin Notes by Peter Lindberg

For a long time, I’ve been the sort of person who tends to read and absorb information, without really wanting or needing to scribble notes down. This is probably because my background has been maths and computing, and the elegance of mathematics as a language is in its ability to express big ideas and small in a concise way: no annotation needed if everything you need is there.

More recently, though, I’ve been reading things with, well, more words in them.

Learning how to teach has been an education (pun fully intended) — I’ve started reading a much broader range of material, and a lot of it is quite social-sciencey. This stuff is necessarily quite verbose, and I find I need to take notes and rephrase things in my own way to get the most out of them.

Now, with library books, people seem to get a bit upset if you start scribbling in the margins. I have to keep a notebook in which to jot down thoughts.

Out on the web, the situation used to be much the same: unless a web page specifically included features for commenting, any annotation had to be kept in a notebook or a separate file, leaving you searching through to find what notes go with which page or dreaming up an ingenious indexing system.

No longer!

A while back, Mark Morley pointed me in the direction of Diigo. I’d variously been using Delicious and Magnolia (now defunct, but replaced by the intriguing gnolia) for storing bookmarks, so I thought I’d give this rival service a try.

For a while, I used it just as a bookmarking service, but it wasn’t long before I cottoned on to the real power of Diigo: highlighting and sticky notes.

Using the Diigo plugin for Firefox, or the diigolet (a rather clever little bookmarklet) you can:

• highlight any part of any web page, in a variety of colours;
• add comments to your highlightings;
• add sticky notes to the page.

Now, I can take all the notes I want, and keep them right next to the page they refer to. Great for getting the most learning out of what I read.

But the really exciting thing is that I can choose to make my comments public. And so can other people. And when we do that, it becomes a conversation. I can talk and debate with people all over the world on any website, whether or not that site allows it or not.

And that’s pretty cool. If you want to learn more, check out this video guide or take a look at an annotated blog post.

Now, a few weeks ago, Google got in on the act with their new Sidewiki project, and it’s caused a bit of a stir. It’s not as flexible as as Diigo — it’s a very simple sidebar-type affair — but it does a similar job in terms of turning the web into a conversation.

The big advantage it has is the Google brand behind it. It’s built into a special version of the Google Toolbar and I think we can expect it to make it into the standard version before long; it’ll also be working its way into Google’s new browser, Chrome. There’s an open API too, which means that if you don’t want to use Google Toolbar, there’s this standalone client for Firefox.

So now, I can scribble all over your web page. What are you going to do about it?

On a semi-related note, I’m still looking for ideas and opinions about using a portfolio to record professional development, so please drop by that post and join in the conversation.

Possibly related posts:

1. Quickie: University of Sheffield to use Google Mail

Room 800: Police Evidence Room by Sam Teigen

But as I’ve come to the end of my current stint of volunteering at the National Trust (on which more in a later post), I’ve been feeling that I want something a bit more than just the shouting into the void that I do here.

I have two difficult tasks ahead:

1. Find a challenging and rewarding job in a very competitive marketplace;
2. Continue to learn and grow outside the structures of formal education.

What I really want, then, is somewhere I can:

• Continue to reflect and learn, even when said reflections aren’t suitable for public consumption;
• Gather a base of evidence for my skills, to draw on when applying for jobs, and to identify gaps for me to work on;
• Access online, from work, home, conferences, etc.;
• Keep private but make available to individuals for PDRs, professional qualifications, etc.;
• Retain control of and keep regular backups of (this stuff’s valuable).

It seems to me like it’s time to resurrect a full portfolio, but as I’m new to this I thought I’d ask for some advice. My question to you is this: Do you keep a professional portfolio and if so, what are your top tips for doing so?

To get the ball rolling, this is where I am at the moment:

• I’ve set up a new blog on my trusty self-hosted WordPress MU installation;
• For advice I have this advice from the University of Sheffield careers service, the course guide from the PCHE and my other half’s copy of Building Your Portfolio (aimed at qualified librarians seeking chartership).

I look forward to reading your comments and I’ll be sure to summarise them in a blog post next month and continue to keep you informed about my progress.

Possibly related posts:

1. Portfolio assessment in the age of the computer
2. Reflective writing
3. Ask the readers: Why use technology in teaching?

A number of thoughts ran through my mind at this point:

• Ooh, interesting question…
• Hmm, that depends…
• That sounds like a blog post in the making…
• What! Only two?!

But I like the idea of narrowing it down to just the two most important; a bit like some weird and geeky version of Desert Island Discs. Plus, to keep my analytical side happy, there’s plenty of scope for categorising loads of specific ideas under two broad techniques.

So, on with the game. After some thought, I think that my two favourite techniques are:

1. Talking to people; and
2. Leading by example.

Let’s take them one at a time.

Talking to people

Well, when I say talking to people, I don’t really mean talking all the time so much as listening. I may not know everything there is to know about technology, but I know more than a little about how it can support teaching; I know plenty about how it’s useful for teaching for me.

But I’m not you. I’m not him over there. And I’m certainly not a busy academic with half a dozen research grants on the go trying to teach my students as best I can alongside the myriad other commitments of life in HE.

And when I say listening, it’s not just about listening. It’s about caring. If I knew the right techniques, I could probably convince you that I was listening, but if I didn’t actually care what you were saying, you’d probably guess pretty quickly.

I don’t know much about neurolinguistic programming or anything like that, but what I do know is that when I take a genuine interest in what someone’s saying then I really get a lot out of it. That’s not something you can fake, but I’ve found that you can actively take an interest in pretty much anything or anyone if you make a bit of effort.

Why is this important? The only way I can help you (or him over there) to make the best of technology is to get a clear picture of what your needs are. I need to understand you. It’s no use me patronising you with information you already know; neither is it helpful to force-feed you information that you just have no use for.

Only if I understand your unique situation can I provide the advice that will help you improve your teaching, or leave well alone if that’s the best option.

Teaching by example

This is something I try to do all the time, in everything I do. I won’t claim that I succeed all of the time, but I’m getting better at it the more I do.

A little while back I read Postman & Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity (and I recommend you do to if you’re interested in improving the quality of education). One of the big messages I took away from it was that we learn what we do.

In other words, how we teach (and thus how students learn) is just as important, if not more so, than what we teach.

So, if I want to help you understand how technology can improve your teaching and make life easier for both you and your students (“Why should we make life easy on our students?” I hear them cry) it won’t help if I stand up in front you and your colleagues and give a 45 minute death-by-Powerpoint presentation on how to use Facebook.

Instead (and having listened to you I’ll have an idea of what fits the way you work) I’ll use a whole range of techniques. By giving you a 2-minute online video of tips on how to facilitate online discussions, I can show you how effective YouTube is for teaching. By encouraging you to take part in an online discussion about teaching with video, I can help you see what does and doesn’t help people learn from forums. I might even give you a 45-minute presentation on the theoretical pedagogies of Facebook, if that’s what works for you.

This technique does at least two useful things. First, it gives you an opportunity to get first-hand experience of what tools are out there and what they’re like to use. Secondly, it demonstrates that when it comes to e-learning I have a good enough idea of what’s going on to give you advice that you can trust.

In the end…

…it mostly comes down to trust. If you trust that I both care about you (and your students) and know what I’m talking about, how much more likely are you to consider listening to me?

Possibly related posts:

1. Introduction to SLC 2.0: Part I
2. Ask the readers: Why use technology in teaching?