‘Life’ postings
Come Dine With Us
by andystew on February 13, 2011
Ver and I spent the last three or so weeks cooking for each of our friends. We’re absolutely loving to cook at the moment and I have to admit, inspired by none other than Jamie Oliver. So what did we cook? [Where possible I've included the recipes]
First off we made a roast tomato and veg soup, then duck and chinese 5 spice with pomegranate salad and a chocolate brownie cake for desert. If you’ve never tried it before, pomegranate is absolutely gorgeous in a salad!
In the second week we went for an indian theme. For starters we went with saag paneer, then a rogan josh followed by cheese cake. The saag paneer was a lot of work for little taste in our opinion but the cheese cake was another amazing recipe worth trying! Although not quite in with the theme it was a lovely palate cleanser.
In the third week we stuck with a couple of our favourites. Goats cheese with caramelised onion was our starter. We’ve tried a number of different breads to melt the goats cheese and have found ciabatta to be the nicest. For our main meal we had Gordon Ramsay’s Fillet of Beef with tomato and tarragon sauce (plus new potatoes) which is amazing. Well worth spending a bit extra and getting a beautiful fillet. We kept the desert simple that night with lemon possets and mars bar cake :)
Purpose of Education – Wordle
by andystew on February 6, 2011
I recently created a Wordle of tweets that were contributing to the Purpose of Education Twitter Campaign and wanted to explain how I went about this.
First of all I downloaded the tweets as a CSV (Comma-Separated Values) file using tzipir. I then opened the file as a spreadsheet, I used Numbers although you can easily do the same with Microsoft Excel. Using the spreadsheet, I deleted all of the @purposeducation tweets, and all of the retweets of @purposeducation.
I then copied all of the remaining tweets and pasted them into Wordle as ‘a bunch of text’. Upon previewing the Wordle I then deleted the following words which I felt were more requirements rather than contributions to the overview: purposed, RT, purposeducation, dajbelshaw, think, education, purpose, any names i.e. @andystew, any links, launch, 500words, thanks, blog, check, LIVE, live, hashtag, site, twitter, tweets, via, please, retweet, launched, re and purpos/ed.
I also set the maximum number of words to appear in the Wordle to 150. I felt it was worth explaining what I did just in case anyone felt the results may be skewed in any way. It got me thinking quite a lot about how information is portrayed. I don’t think I’ve ever really questioned Wordle images but there’s a case for caution at times.
Exercise isn’t always good for you!
by andystew on January 29, 2011
Give me sympathy :-(
Purpose of Education – Purpos/ed
by andystew on January 2, 2011
For some reason I have a real passion for education and have spent the last seven and a half years working with Colleges and Universities across the UK to help them use technology more effectively. The reason being that I would like to make a difference, to help and improve the way in which we educate as I’ve always felt somewhat let down by my own.
I don’t feel like I’ve achieved anywhere near my own potential and for me that’s what it’s all about. Education is a process that inspires individuals to achieve their full potential whether it’s landscape gardening, politics or becoming an olympic athlete. This is very much spoken from the heart without any thought into the history of education but I’d be interested in what others think so please share your own thoughts.
I’d be grateful if you could tag any responses using “Purpos/ed”.
Changing Education Paradigms
by andystew on November 20, 2010
I love this video – inspiring, thought provoking and insightful!
