Open Thinkering

About

Last updated: February 2026

Hello!

👋 I'm Doug Belshaw, based in the North East of England. I work through We Are Open Co-op and Dynamic Skillset.

I’m on Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.

This blog is also available as an .onion site via Tor. You can receive notifications of new posts via email, RSS, or on the Fediverse (Mastodon, etc.) by searching for @openthinkering@blog.dougbelshaw.com

A bit more about how the sausage is made and the history of this site is available in my colophon.

I’ve previously had lots of different sites, such as discours.es (commentary) and literaci.es (new literacies-related), and ambiguiti.es (more philosophical). The main places I write other than here these days are Thought Shrapnel (which is also a monthly newsletter) and the WAO blog.

In previous guises I took the MoodleNet project from zero to one, worked on Open Badges and web literacy for Mozilla and on mobile learning, digital literacies, and Open Educational Resources for Jisc. Before that I was a History teacher and Director of E-Learning across a nine-site, all-age Academy.

My doctoral thesis (2012) was on digital literacies and I’ve written an e-book and given a TEDx talk on the subject. Here’s what I use to get stuff done.

I used to record a podcast with colleague Laura Hilliger entitled The Tao of WAO which covered the intersection of technology, society, and internet culture – with a dash of philosophy and art for good measure.

Until the untimely passing of my co-host, Dai Barnes, we recorded a regular podcast called Today In Digital Education (TIDE). The archive of the episodes from 2015 to 2019 remain available.

My most popular posts from each year since 2006 can be found below. For 2018 and 2019 these include ones from Thought Shrapnel, and from 2020 onwards I selected my favourites from the 10-20 most popular. 

2025

  1. Things change (or, Montaigne and the Open Web)
  2. Memorialising the TIDE Podcast
  3. Ethical Licensing for Impact Organisations
  4. My postgraduate qualification in Systems Thinking in Practice
  5. Literacy practices: a matter of community

2024

  1. TB871: The five systems of the Viable System Model (VSM)
  2. Exporting blog posts to JSON for easier use with LLMs such as ChatGPT
  3. TB871: Introduction to Strategic Options and Development Analysis (SODA)
  4. Calling short courses ‘microcredentials’ is cringe
  5. TB871: Four perspectives on systems thinking

2023

  1. Building an iPod for 2023
  2. Using AI to help solve Bloom’s Two Sigma Problem
  3. Using Snapchat’s ‘My AI’ feature for revision
  4. The role of endorsement in Open Badges and Open Recognition
  5. House purchases, climate change, and AI

2022

  1. Hadrian’s Wall Path in 72 hours
  2. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
  3. Wanted: a simple 3-step Open Badges platform to generate claim codes and issue badges
  4. First version of report published sharing findings from Zappa project user research
  5. No management but self-management

2021

  1. 3 ways to gain control of your Twitter feed
  2. Solving for complexity
  3. Everything flows
  4. My two biggest insights from last year
  5. Smartwatch ramblings

2020

  1. Letting go of my pre-pandemic self
  2. 3 advantages of consent-based decision making
  3. The auto-suggested life is not worth living
  4. Remaining unmanaged
  5. What I do when I don’t know what to do

2019

  1. #RIPDai: in memory of a good friend
  2. What we need is an Open Badges community renaissance, free of IMS involvement
  3. The best place to be is somewhere else?
  4. Let’s (not) let children get bored again
  5. If you change nothing, nothing will change

2018

  1. Bullshit receptivity scale
  2. The fate of private social networks
  3. On the death of Google/Apache Wave (and the lessons we can learn from it)
  4. Social internet vs social media
  5. Living an antifragile life

2017

  1. 3 reasons I’ll not be returning to Twitter
  2. Friends don’t let friends use Facebook
  3. So it turns out that you can pretty much do whatever you like on your own website
  4. Against mass consumption of ‘already certified’ credentials
  5. How to build an architecture of participation

2016

  1. 3 things I’ve learned from 200 weeks of sending out an email newsletter
  2. Utopia, pedagogy, and G-Suite for Education
  3. 7 approaches to educational technology integration
  4. Open Badges, BlockCerts, and high-stakes credentialing
  5. A new dawn for Open Badges

2015

  1. Why I left teaching five years ago
  2. HOWTO: use GitHub Pages to host a bootstrap-themed website
  3. Today is my last day at Mozilla
  4. The three biggest (perceived) problems with Open Badges
  5. HOWTO: Trello Kanban

2014

  1. Why I’m ditching Evernote for Simplenote (and Notational Velocity)
  2. HOWTO: Ditch Gmail for self-hosted webmail
  3. FirefoxOS v2.0 is possibly the easiest-to-use smartphone operating system I’ve experienced
  4. My morning routine
  5. The Web Literacy Standard is dead (long live the Web Literacy Map!)

2013

  1. What I learned from turning my ‘Out of Office’ auto-replies on for a month
  2. Why I’m saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive
  3. Announcing the Web Literacy Standard (specification)
  4. A tribute to Chris Allan (@infernaldepart)
  5. Answering your questions about Open Badges

2012

  1. Using Raspberry Pi and XBMC to build an ultra-cheap HTPC
  2. This is why teachers leave teaching
  3. Platforms as standards? 10 days with the Nokia N9.
  4. How I use a MacBook Pro (October 2012)
  5. How to make #openbadges work for you and your organisation

2011

  1. How I Use a MacBook Pro (May 2011)
  2. What’s the opposite of ‘digital Taylorism’?
  3. The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies (#digilit)
  4. #ukedchat #fail: TES attempts takeover cover-up whilst Pearson muscles-in on grassroots Twitter teacher CPD
  5. 30 things I’ve learned in 30 years

2010

  1. 5 characteristics of successful organisations
  2. 5 genuinely useful Twitter tools
  3. Google Apps (Education Edition) vs. Microsoft Live@Edu
  4. 7 things the Bible taught me about productivity
  5. Things I learned this week – #1

2009

  1. HOWTO: Add an RSS feed to Google Sites
  2. Are organizations like brains?
  3. Daniel Goleman on Leadership and Emotional Intelligence
  4. HOWTO: Present full-screen using Prezi and an Apple Remote [OSX]
  5. HOWTO: Tether an iPhone to a netbook running Jolicloud

2008

  1. Page peel script
  2. How to upgrade your Nokia N95 to v12.x firmware and make it a whole lot better
  3. 5 ways to make ‘textbook lessons’ more interesting
  4. 4 reasons you should jailbreak your iPhone 3G
  5. What is a VLE?

2007

  1. Nokia N95 tips, reviews and software all in one place
  2. Demotivational posters
  3. Apple iPhone vs Nokia N95
  4. My favourite LOLcats
  5. How NOT to upgrade your Xbox

2006

  1. The purpose of education? It isn’t this…
  2. Some ideas about the structure of my thesis proposal essay
  3. Managing Organizational Change – diagram
  4. Barriers to teachers’ use of ICT
  5. Ed.D. Thesis Proposal Outline

Thanks for getting this far and it’s great to have you as a new reader of my work!