Ewan McIntosh | Design Thinking, Education & Learning

December: My favourite moments from 2006 on edu.blogs.com

The last month of the year was filled with controversy in Paris, multiple dead laptops littered in my wake and we make the first concrete steps to 'legitimising' social media as an inherent part of learning.

December
3rd: John and I reveal LTS's plans for EduPedia, the Scottish Education wikipedia and I wonder if I'm doing my job right.
4th: The Self-Publishing Guidelines I first wrote up for LTS two months previously are now up for a touch of communal editing for use in East Lothian. Now the big question - do they really need rubber-stamped to be valid?
12th-13th: I go to LeWeb3 having hoped to write tonnes, only to find yet another laptop woe and lack of viable wifi. The political input turns out to be interesting if a little unexpected at the time, with impressive input from Shimon Peres and Francois Bayrou. Sarkozy left me feeling less than cosy. Hans Rosling got me really excited about modernisation not globalisation and Dave Weinberger reminds us that bloggers are not introverted, even when they right self-referential navel-gazing posts like these end of year ones ;-)
14th: Scotedublogs needs an inter-facelift, but do we need two of them?
19th: We learn that blogs might be dead but their influence is not.
25th: You learn what you'll be hearing about for the foreseeable future on this blog.
29th: I end the year asking if we need edu-friendly tools or whether we should be making school resemble real life a little more. I end up getting told off. The answer to the question gets lost, but I think the main idea was...

compromise.

Every book I read at the moment says compromise is a bad thing. The playoff between the two might be my theme for 2007.

Happy New Year!

November: My favourite moments from 2006 on edu.blogs.com

Continuing some navel-gazing to get a sense of where I want to go next, November was a month of negotiation, compromise and the occasional element of frustration with it all, whatever 'it' was.

November
3rd: The new East Lothian social media service was hatched and will become beta this January.
4th: Social media pulled the biggest crowd at The Language Show.
7th: I found out what I would be doing in Boston in 2007.
8th: The Glow portal is launched for trial and East Lothian bloggers are the most prominent reporters on it.
22nd: The Executive Board of RM want to see what they might do in Virtual Learning Environments 2.0 and take some ideas from a young upstart seriously.
26th: I make some Live Web bucks from Scoopt - Shel gets a story for his book.
27th: LTS gets serious about the Live Web - but will it last? Talk about resolutions for the new year... ;-)
29th: I was lucky enough to swap ideas on stage with Scoble, Bellinger, Locke, Kronin-Lukas and Edwards.
30th: A last minute invitation to join the entrepreneurs at MediaTech2.006 led to some interesting encounters and discoveries with the guys from Bebo, MoBuzzTV and PageFlakes. The latter will hopefully become part of the eduBuzz toolset. I also got a flavour of how the mobile web might shape up and how it links into education as well as its pole opposite, the 10 foot zone of IPTV.

October: My favourite moments from 2006 on edu.blogs.com

October
3rd: I give away my kryptonite and see a lot of bloggers trying to pass others' work off as their own. Interesting. I've changed most of my feeds since then. Most of them haven't ;-)
9th: I get some hard figures to show that my fascination with video is merited on the popularist front at least.
12th: After my run-in with the Sony MD I was told that I wasn't alone in my dark thoughts on Sony's plans for world domination, which made me think his swooning later over wine was just to keep me schtum.
16th: Shel and Rick say hi.
26th: I can tell my grandchildren I used to be famous.
30th: MySpace is officially so last year.
31st: David and I get to talk to more student teachers earlier in the year for longer about social media and mobile development is added to my remit.

September: My favourite moments from 2006 on edu.blogs.com

TeachMeet, SETT and LOTS of presentations and workshops. That was pretty much September. Oh, and my first time in a nightclub in seven years.

September
1st: John Johnston and David Noble quietly launch a superb podcast directory for educators.
2nd: I put my own proposal forward along with loads of other educators around the world for the K12 Conference.
12th: Shel Israel and Rick Segal say that they would love to find out more about Scottish social media and how it's springing from education for the Global Neighbourhoods book. We welcome them with open arms a month later and Scotland gets into the book's first draft.
13th: Two posts from the first meeting of the East Lothian Extreme Learning team. It's gonna be big.
14th: I manage to corrupt Robert into seeing the light, that blogging and maths could go together. Within three months mathematics teachers are around the most innovative of all blogging teachers with their students.
21st-22nd: A fast and furious SETT sees edublogging reach a new profile in the conference centre and the nightclubs of Glasgow. Dave Weinberger, Edward de Bono and numerous blogging seminars make an impact on the SETT front, but TeachMeet steals the show. See who was there.
28th: East Lothian started to glower, or glow, or something...
30th: I want to see more low-scale, low-cost, high-risk innovation instead og lumbering national initiatives, large financing and low risks. I'm still waiting to see it.

August: My favourite moments from 2006 on edu.blogs.com

New job, new remit, new blogs - August was a tricky month trying to work out where I stood in two new organisations, what the hell I was supposed to be doing and trying to get whatever 'it' was done right.

August
1st: The Modern Foreign Languages Environment entered a new phase as I was able to shift contribution from elites to the masses - officially.
9th: I get to know Neil Winton and he makes me add "Social Media Responsible Use" to my to-do list. We now have active policies in LTS and East Lothian.
13th: Flock was the best browser I have ever used - I don't touch it now.
14th: Loic breaks the news of MyBlogLog which I share with my edu-audience. One of the most popular startups of 2006.
15th: I first discover Hans Rosling - it takes me five months to meet him in person. I also get a little bit burnt for pointing out that the Festival my organisation runs doesn't have wifi. They found some by the time the event came around a month later, though. Well, that evening blogging was mainstream enough to be on Richard and Judy, after all.
22nd: It takes me 22 days to work out what my job is.
27th: I get excited about the positivity surrounding a potential mobile phone trial at Musselburgh Grammar. Frustration at the end of the year, though, as hand-wringing and worry get in the way of innovation.

July: My favourite moments from 2006 on edu.blogs.com

July was the best month of the year and the one with least blogging: I got married. The honeymoon in Florence got me all philosophised for a while on the importance of design and personalisationibility. I still feel the same and think any product which places design second is not going to work. Oh heck, just go and check out everyone's wedding photos and havea a break!

June: My favourite moments from 2006 on edu.blogs.com

June was the month where things began to take shape a little more concretely in Scotland, in the UK and beyond with regard to social media use in education.

June
1st: East Lothian Head Teachers invited me to show them the way it could be done... and employed me two months later as part of their team to make it so.
2nd: blog.ac.uk gave a great excuse to score more edubloggers off my list of face-to-face meetups, to have some debate about the best way to introduce social software to institutions... but did it lead to any lasting impact? Some great ideas we're reminded about from the blog, but we'll have to see.
6th: The rest of the world got first wind of the Internet Safety Qualification which appeared to have already been sewn up. The guys at the SQA relented and invited people to a collaborative wiki and podcast four months later.
8th: I was able to convince Assessment for Learning people that Assessment for Learning could be improved with some social media backing it up.
23rd: Between more travels I had been able to address Telford and Wrekin ICT coordinators with my most popular file/talk of 2006, 10 Ways To Stay Connected Without Losing Your Mind And Why Blogging Isn't One Of Them. I also found out that long titles are not necessarily a bad thing.
24th: I discovered QR codes to make mobile phones more useful in the classroom - still waiting for mobile phones which can do it to arrive in our classrooms ;-)
29th: After spending a few days marking out how East Lothian might move forward with its imminent social media plans, I was pleased to announce the opening of TeachMeet06, ScotEduBlog Meetup's big brother.

May: My favourite moments from 2006 on edu.blogs.com

May was a month of meetups and getting to know who those people in the aggregator really were.

May
6th: Chinese blogs outnumber any others - it didn't last long, although that might change again when Technorati starts getting French, Korean and Chinese blogs properly categorised.
17th: More proof from the kids that they want to work on their voice, audience and have real purpose in their tasks at school - better still if it's through making a podcast.
19th: Initial Teacher Education continues to take interest in how social media can improve the learning experience: their annual conference invites me to illuminate them a little further.
23rd and 24th: Alan November and Will Richardson pay a visit to eLive! Will loved it - honest. I met tonnes of people who I had only ever read at the conference and the first ever (if slightly diminutive compared to future efforts) ScotEduBlogger meetup. And I used to be addicted to SecondLife - apparently.
25th: 118 days later, Andrew Brown had nearly done it.

April: My favourite moments from 2006 on edu.blogs.com

April was a great time for making some fantastic new friendships and getting the profile of social media raised in leaps and bounds.

April
3rd: HigherEdBlogCon gets on to the Teaching Strand, setting edubloggers alight with a desire to replicate it for 'lower ed'. James Farmer and I were in the HigherEd version standing up for our corners anyway.
5th: I was fortunate enough to meet Marc Prensky and push him on some of his beliefs on social media and gaming thanks to the kind invite of my new best pal, Steve Beard, with whom I then spent the rest of the evening geographing.
11th: I learned the importance of having a blog when you get misquoted in the national press.
20th: Glasgow University get their undergrad students (but only the MFL ones) into social media.
25th: Edinburgh University join them.
27th: Coming of Age is launched and gets downloaded several thousand times before the end of the month and the BBC announce their Web 2.0 plans which Stephen Heppell and I had been more than happy to feed into earlier in the year. At the end of December the thought of Aunty's social media empire at seems like a solution to an emerging problem. The 27th was a busy day: the first ever ScotEdublogger Meetup gets aired and Will says 'yes' to being our guest of honour.

March: My favourite moments from 2006 on edu.blogs.com

March marked the moment where my work project, the Modern Foreign Languages Environment, started to hit its parabolic curve with some of the highest growth in community interactions and site hits we had seen.

March
3rd: Along with colleagues at Scottish CILT and LTS we were able to pull together a crack squad programme for Communicate.06, the new technologies development day and online conference for Modern Languages teachers. Since then, over 80 MFL blogs across Scotland have been created for long and short-term projects.
10th: The Talking Teddies hit the blogosphere. Where are they now?
20th: My Flickr addiction was fed to greater depths/heights? by my new baby.
24th: I made my "Languages can't exist without social media" talk at the Royal Society. It wasn't blogged but was controversial, made the papers, and made Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education publicly condone social media for learning.