Tag Archive for ‘books’ at dougbelshaw.com

Tag Archive for 'books'

Serendipity, living in an echo chamber, and Learning to Change.

Published

on 26 May 2008

. 8 Comments

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A few months back I bought a book entitled World Changing: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century. I managed to get it for the bargain price of £3 from a discount bookshop. I even haggled for money off as the cardboard sleeve had a small tear in it. What can I say? I’m a skinflint…

But I’m drifting off my point. I began reading the Editor’s introduction this morning, which includes the paragraph:

Because the planet seems so large to each of us as individuals, it’s easy to forget how many of us there are (over six billion and counting) and how much stress we collectively put on the earth. Though it’s not always east to see it as we go about our days, our current way of life is unsustainable, and that which is not sustainable does not continue. We are using up the planet, one person, one day, one decision at a time; we’re not considering the consequences.

And then, just now, going through my feed reader, I come across the following blog post from CommonCraft team kindly shared by Richard Platts:

We work from home. We make videos, we put them on the Web, people watch them. We track our views, our Technorati links, our mentions in Twitter, our blog comments. A good percentage of people we see in social situations in Seattle are aware of our work. Most of the email we receive is about the videos and of course, it dominates our discussions at home. This is all misleading and a bit unhealthy.

It’s too easy to start making assumptions - assumptions about general awareness, about the number of people who really know what’s happening in “our” online world. Viewed from the comfort of our living room, bookmarked pages and social circles, the Web looks pretty small and awareness looks pretty big. It’s too easy to assume that people have heard about the tools and sites we use everyday.

But they haven’t. In real terms, no one has. I look at Las Vegas as a cross section of the US. At any moment there are people from every state and many countries. They are the General Public in a lot of ways. I sat back and asked myself - forgetting Common Craft - do these people know about Twitter? Has Flickr become part of their world? What about wikis, do they care? Are they using RSS readers? My completely anecdotal evidence says the answer is no. In our own little online world, it’s too easy to assume they do.

Richard Platts shared the above with this note:

It’s easy to assume a change is happening in the world of education because we see more and more people joining the edublogosphere. But in terms of the number of educators the world over, it’s just a drop in the ocean.

What are we doing to get the message out about the way young people should be taught in the 21st century? Are we just preaching to the choir?

I hope not. Next year, I’ll be E-Learning Staff Tutor at my school. In practice, that means half a timetable of teaching, and the rest of the time working with members of staff, encouraging them to use educational technology, team-teaching, researching and developing, and so on. One of the first things I’m going to show them all together is the following:

Thanks again to Richard Platts for the link. OK, so it might be slightly biased, but it’s a great conversation starter.

What are YOU planning to do next academic year to get the message out?

The Working Classes

Published

Doug Belshaw

on 29 April 2008

in Everything Else

. 2 Comments

As regular readers of my blog(s) are no doubt sick of hearing by now, I grew up in Ashington - once, allegedly, the largest mining village in the world. Although class consciousness didn’t really rear it’s ugly head until I flew the nest and headed off to university, I grew up within - but was never really part of - a predominantly working-class culture.

Again, as regular readers will testify, I’m fundmentally against the idea that middle-class ideas and values are ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than those of the working classes. I’m as willing to parody the hypocrisy, two-facedness and pious platitudes of the former as I am to take the mick out the latter.

I’m currently near the end of reading V.S. Naipaul’s Magic Seeds. I feel a little cheated by not having realised before beginning that it’s really the second instalment of the author’s Half a Life. Until about a chapter ago I really couldn’t understand why Naipaul, who has a reasonable but not outstanding style of writing, has been so lauded and, indeed, has been a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Now I understand. I make no apologies for the following lengthy quotation (which spans just over a page in the book). Suffice to say that, whilst I have sympathies in this direction, my views are not quite as harsh and right-wing as Roger, who says at one point in the novel:

“Weddings are such a carnival these days. I went to a wedding not long ago. At the other place I go to. We’ve pulled everything down, we’ve changed the rules on everything, but the ladies still want weddings. It’s especially true on the council estates. Council estates are blocks of flats or houses built by a municipality for the poor of the parish, as they used to be called. Only, the people there are not poor now. Women there have three or four children by three or four men and they are all living on benefits. Sixty pounds a week a child, and that’s just the beginning. You can’t call that a dole. So we call them benefits. Women see themselves as money-making machines. It’s like Dickens’s England. Nothing’s changed except that there’s a lot of money about, and the Artful Dodger is doing very well indeed, though everything is very expensive and everyone’s hopelessly in debt and wants the benefits increased. People there need to take one or two holidays a year. Not in Blackpool or Minehead or Mallorca now, but in the Maldives or Florida or the bad-sex spots of Mexico. They need hours in the sky. Otherwise it’s not a proper holiday. “I haven’t had a proper holiday all this year.” So the planes are full of this trash flying about and drinking hard, and the airports are packed. And every week the papers have twenty pages of advertisements for holidays so cheap you wonder how anyone even in Mexico can make money out of them. The wedding we had to go to was for a woman who has had three children by a club cook she lives with off and on. Usually a cook, but also off and on, on especially festive nights, the club bouncer. The thing was the most horrible kind of socialist parody. The top hats and morning coats on the weekday scroungers. It’s what the battered women want for their men on wedding Saturdays. For themselves they want the long white dresses and veils to hide the bruises and black eyes of the love that comes and goes, what they call relationships. On this particular wedding day the beaten-up children, fat or scrawny, normally fed on sandwiches and pizzas and crisps and chocolate bars, were dressed up and displayed and were to be fed on even richer foods. Like young bulls bred for slaughter in the bullring, these children are bred sacrificially and in great numbers for the socialist benefits they bring to a council house. They are not really looked after, and many are destined to be molested or abducted or murdered, providing then, like proper little gladiators, but for three or four long days, socialist excitement for the burgesses. I told you once that the only people here who were not common, in the way of being false and self-regarding, were the common people.”

Anyone else recognise the above quotation as a nail being hit (perhaps a little too firmly) on the head?

The Working Classes: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Context is everything

Published

Doug Belshaw

on 31 January 2008

in Everything Else

. 2 Comments

I once aspired to be a great writer. Work experience at a newspaper in Newcastle and reading of the hand-to-mouth existence of many famous writers in history soon cured me of that. I do, however, greatly enjoy passages of books which express something that has been latent within me. The following passage from Gunnar Kopperud’s Longing (I’ve a pre-publication copy from my days working part-time at Waterstone’s) is masterful, in my opinion…