Spinning a Learning Web

Not really time to go, just a shift across. From today you can find Spinning a Learning Web at its new home on its own domain.

Please point your browsers to Spinning a Learning Web at http://www.katefoy.com

Look forward to your joining me.

It’s blog makeover time I declare. I spent a good deal of last Sunday afternoon doing a tidy-up of the blog. The sidebars were starting to flow over, and I was particularly unimpressed with the way the category cloud looked totally useless … a mass or mess of words which I reckon would be daunting for a visitor to say the least. Time to sort things out.

WordPress 2.1 now supports tags, and those of us who had been organising our posts using both tags and categories, tossing in every possible relevant key-word, were faced with tag and category clouds which looked like a storm about to break. It’s nice now to be able to get some organisation into the blog, and to ask what use tags and categories serve. At the end of Sunday I felt good, like you do after a big clean out of a messy cupboard or file system. I’ve lost the tags … well, I hadn’t been using them for ages, not since I migrated from Blogger. My category cloud has reduced itself down to the lean animal you can see on the right. In fact I have only now got 8 parent categories, with the kids nestling underneath. What does this all mean? Keep reading →

Image: Expectations dcjohn

Looking back over a year or more of blog posts, I can see a profound change in my blog’s focus … for the better. Back then it was a collage of the personal, professional, and even a smattering of the political. Now it is focussed on the by-line which guides my writing: academic adventures in e-learning with a Mac. The keywords here are academic, e-learning, and Mac. The adventures part is an indication of the tone and the voice of the blog itself, which I hope my readers respond to. And this brings me to the topic of this post … fulfilling your readers’ expectations. Keep reading →

I like to grab images of subjects related to theatre and theatres. I have a growing collection, some of which you can find in my Theatres set on Dramagirl’s Flickr page. I tag all of these public photographs with a pretty liberal Creative Commons licence. It’s a good thing to share these things around.

A couple of weeks back I was approached with a request to use my image of the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, shot last July. It was being considered for inclusion in the 4th edition of the Schmap London Travel Guide. I didn’t know it, so I checked out Schmap, and it’s a great interactive travel site. If you are heading to London, or anywhere covered by Schmap’s guides sometime this year, you might want to check it out.

I heard last night from the publishers that my image has been included. I am now a ‘Schmap published photographer’ here. A nice little bonus for sharing.

Fascinated to see how lots of people in my Twitter network stayed up around the world waiting, waiting for that keynote speech. When I got out of bed next morning it was all over bar the blogging, Tweeting, and podcasting. There was predictable gushing and cooing over the MacBook Air, quickly followed by a dousing with cold water when the price ticket was digested and its limitations dissected.

I was keen to hear what the MacBreak Weekly podcast team had to say; they are smart folks. Predictably on the job, they reported within an hour or so of Steve Jobs’ Keynote from the Moscone Center in SF. Like me, some admired but weren’t about to spring the cash for the newest MacBook, the Air. I’m also hearing this from colleagues around the traps: ‘beautiful, if expensive, but I’m going to wait, and besides, I love my (insert whichever Mac model you like here).’ For more extended comment, you might want to read Paul Boutin on ‘Why I’m disappointed …‘ Keep reading →