I’ll be doing more blogging next week following Virtual Enterprise but for now I thought I’d collect together all my CPD Videos in one place. These discuss my approach to enterprise education and should be useful to staff in schools and universities.

Inspiring Enterprise – An Introduction from Inspiring Enterprise on Vimeo.

Enterprise vs. Entrepreneurship: A Definition from Inspiring Enterprise on Vimeo.

A Rationale for Enterprise Education from Inspiring Enterprise on Vimeo.

An Enterprising Approach to Teaching and Learning from Inspiring Enterprise on Vimeo.

Engaging Students in Education from Inspiring Enterprise on Vimeo.

Creating An Enterprise Module from Inspiring Enterprise on Vimeo.

I hope you enjoy them!

Thanks

Matt

Here’s my lesson part of the new EEW enterprise education PGCE module, this session covers entrepreneurial skills and how they’ve been defined from different authors perspectives. It also discusses the difference between enterprise and entrepreneurship, showcases CfEL’s model from Glyndwr and finally signposts to some specific resources.

I know it’s been a few months since I’ve blogged (personal and professional time commitments have been a bit consuming) but with this article I’m going to make a commitment to writing once a month across 2011 discussing enterprise education, teaching and learning, web businesses and new technology.

In this blog I’m going to try and give a brief review of the year discussing some of the key achievements and the affects they’ve had on me.

The year started with my good friend Kieran and I travelling around India as part of the 2011 winter Rickshaw Run, I’ve blogged a lot about this over at the Team Altitude site but it was an amazing experience and I will always remember the friends we made and the fun we had.

When I returned in January it was great to start our new cross curricula modules working with level four students to encourage the development of enterprise skills and capabilities, I loved working on these modules and I’m looking forward to developing further content for level five and six.

In February it was great to see my good friend Josh get married to Kate, a really amazing girl, before leaving the UK the following the month to pursue his dreams working in the USA; I really enjoyed the wedding and it was great to spend time with some oldest and dearest friends. This month also saw the second annual Virtual Enterprise Conference with great speakers celebrating the opportunities to create amazing projects and businesses on the internet, each year it’s a pretty scary experience but I love the event and am really looking forward to 2012.

March saw me finally meet Sir Ken Robinson (which was an amazing experience) before returning to North Wales to help manage the 2011 Upside Down Conference. This month also marked a key point in my career as it was the first time I was published as lead author in a peer reviewed journal discussing enterprise education so huge thanks to Kelly Smith and my co-author David Rae for helping me make this dream a reality.

In April I was invited to speak at the ICE House conference in Plymouth about teaching using simulations and virtual worlds, it was a lovely event and it was great to see some old friends at this conference including David Bozward, Kate Beresford, Andy Penaluna and Frances Brown.

I spent most of May travelling across with Jane Morgan delivering courses for Horticulture Wales focused on web design, social media and SEO for businesses working in these industries, these courses went brilliantly and I really enjoyed the experience of working with people from very different industries. May also saw my good friend Colin Jones darken my door all the way from Tasmania to share a beer and some great conversation, I always love seeing Col, he’s so cerebral and any time with him is just a joy.

June was a busy month; it started with me helping to facilitate the Inspiring Enterprise conference at Glyndwr with some brilliant speakers discussing a range of enterprise related issues and again a chance to meet many old friends including  Tom, Andy, Frances and Richard. After this I travelled to South Wales to facilitate part of the EEW qualification in enterprise education (which we hope will soon see more of a take-up across Wales) this was a great chance to meet some new friends and work with some brilliant enterprise educators from across Wales. Following this I had the amazing fortune to enjoy my birthday with my father by seeing one of my musical idols B.B. King play live in Manchester.

July saw me take some rare Holiday to spend with friends before enjoying the Sonisphere festival listening to some amazing music.
In August I recorded a series of CPD videos to help staff learn about enterprise education before launching EnterprisingYou the UK’s first suite of enterprise education e-learning materials.

September was a crazy month I saw Kelly from Huddersfield… and Colin nipped past for a drink before I gave my first ever virtual presentation at the IEEC conference and then inducted over 1000 new students at Glyndwr ready for the 2011-12 term.

October was a heady mix of teaching, managing enterprise at the university and eventually celebrating Halloween (one of my favourite festivals of the year!).

November saw us hold another High Impact Global Enterprise Week with help from some amazing business colleagues before taking on a project to deliver business context lessons to the level four business students using SimVenture. This month also saw me hit a second publication with David Rae and Katie Vause, special thanks to Harry Matlay for helping us to get this published.

Finally December brings me right to up to date, I’m currently sat at my parents really enjoying seeing friends and family and just relaxing before a hectic 2012 which I hope will see me finally get near finishing my PhD!

Thanks to everyone who has made 2011 an amazing year!

P.S. sorry If I missed you or you didn’t get a mention it doesn’t mean I don’t love you… just that I can’t fit everything in (or I have a terrible memory)

I hope you all have a brilliant Christmas and wonderful New Year!

Peace

Matthew

Want to know more about how I define enterprise and entrepreneurship, then check out my latest video:

Thanks

Matt

After a few Tweets with my colleague @CEAnnette during the week I’ve decided that it might be useful to write a blog aimed at helping people struggling with multiple twitter accounts. So here it is… I’m not going to prevaricate, I’m just going to share my methods for managing the three accounts I’m currently running @draycottmc @virtent and @zoneglyndwr.

The first thing about managing multiple accounts is that you just can’t do it easily from twitter so you’re going to need an aggregator, there are a few to choose from but I use HootSuite and TweetDeck, both have similar features although there are some pros and cons…

I tend to use HootSuite on my IPad and PC (…Yes I don’t use a Mac) and Tweet Deck on my Phone (Desire HD). The key advantage of using an aggregator is that they allow you to quickly tweet across multiple accounts and (Re-tweet between them), in addition  both of these applications also allow you to customise your view of the accounts (using columns) so that you can see multiple streams of @’s and DM’s from different accounts without having to flick between screens.

…So why do I use two different ones? Well although I favour HootSuite (even though their free accounts are a bit limited) mainly because I prefer the way it functions and the advanced features TweetDeck has a killer mobile feature which lets you set streams from different accounts to update at different times or not at all. This may seem a bit trivial but it’s crucial in the way I tweet.

You see my big trick… isn’t that complex; I only really tweet from one account with any regularity (@draycottmc) the others I tweet with anywhere from 1 – 4 times a week and this is normally a RT or some other content that I think will appeal to that audience. Also I only rarely watch the home feeds of my other accounts, if someone interesting pops up I follow them in my main account. This means that all I need to do with @virtent and @zoneglyndwr is tweet and watch the @’s and DM’s which is why  I use TweetDeck on my mobile, because I can set it to only check theses messages and only do so in intervals which are spread out across the day meaning that I never get bombarded with content from anything but my main account.

Every few weeks I log into the others add followers do some spring-cleaning but that’s about it, the secret to running multiple twitter accounts is just good organisation… after that creating good content and developing your profile is up to you.

If anyone has any questions please drop them in the comment box below.

Thanks

Matt

At the start of my holiday I decided that for one week I’d de-tweet myself, the biggest reason for doing this is that for me twitter is predominantly a work/news network and I really wanted to have one week off from everything related to that bit of my life and focus on friends and family.

For the first few days I managed Ok… However by day three I felt so disconnected and I was drawn back in… Don’t get me wrong I was relaxed and happy, but I just started to feel that everything was moving so slowly… I watched the news, read papers; I was informed, but something was missing and then it clicked, I was missing the conversation.

This week away has helped me realise that the reason I love twitter isn’t the speed, it’s the conversation and debate from a variety of perspectives, that’s what I missed and that’s why until something better comes along I doubt I’ll ever manage a week without twitter again.

Peace

Matt

Stoked today to finally have got my first video up on the new Inspiring Enterprise vimeo channel I really hope that this can grow into something useful for new educators interested in enterprise so if you want to get involved please get in touch and let me know what your interested in doing. There’s not going to another video now for a couple of weeks as I’m away on holiday…whoooo! But I’ve recorded some content ready to put out soon and I really hope you will like it!

So without any more delay here’s the first video, enjoy!

Inspiring Enterprise – An Introduction from Inspiring Enterprise on Vimeo.

Peace

Matt

Well some of you may have seen that I am a little bit excited today… We just heard from Apple this morning that the new Zone App is now Live on Itunes.

I’m going to use this blog to talk a little bit about how I built the App… but first I’d like to thank a few people; obviously all the Zone team…. Kieran for the use of his Mac and Felix for inspiring me to do this by showing me how simple it was…you guys are awesome!

Actually building an App from scratch was way too difficult and costly (I’m no coder and I’m not trying to claim that I am) and this had always put me off looking into it, the break came when Felix introduced me to appmakr a website that allows you to build Apps and release them with no coding. I thought this was brilliant and decided to use it to build an App to help promote the Zone.

I decided early on that to suit my level of skill I would keep the App simple, so I framed it as a news aggregator collecting different Zone feeds from across the web and packaging them for easy access.

This is a pretty simple App to build, first off I put together the button and splash screen which was created from existing graphics that were sized to spec using Picnik (with help from Andy Price). Then it was a simple matter of trawling the web to collect the relevant RSS feeds which from the App and doing a little bit of work to shape them so Apple wouldn’t reject it.  Once I’d done this I spent a few days testing and adding some other elements such as push notifications, socialise and a message system which allows people to contact us via the App, all of these were simple bolt on elements which were added from appmakr.

One thing I love about appmakr is that it tells you everything you needed to do and even points out things that were wrong with the App that Apple won’t like (via an App score) as a total newbly I found this really helpful when shaping the App for Launch.

Once the App was finished the hardest element was testing and and launch, for this you will need an Apple Developer account (£50), an IOS device and ideally an Mac or one you can borrow…you will also need to know the Unique Device Identifier for your IOS testing device (for this I used UDID Pro)… this isn’t a hard process because it’s difficult to understand, it’s just there are a lot of hoops to jump through, and you can only upload the final build of you App to Apple using a Mac…word of warning there.

After that it takes a couple of weeks to hear back from Apple and then if you get through, just sit back, relax and blog about it

I’m not going to reveal too much more here… Felix is going to be running a course at Glyndwr in the new year academic year and I don’t want to give away all his best tricks!

(If you want to know when the course is…here’s a clue, Download the App)

I hope that’s wet your appetite for App development, I’m so psyched that we are one of the first Enterprise departments in the UK to have our own App… and on a personal level it’s always great to see something you build work… to celebrate I’m off out for lunch

The Zone aPP

Have a Great Day

Peace

Matt

For anyone that is worried by that opener don’t be, this isn’t a failure that will see me out of house and home, it’s a failure in business…one of a few I’ve had and not the last I’m sure. The important thing here is that I’m not writing this post to discuss the failure or pour out my soul, that’s something I want to meditate on, instead I want to share an idea…

If right now you feel your failing, in an aspect of your life, try to look at it…failure…stare it in the face and ask it one question, what can I learn from this experience? If you have the courage to do that you might also discover a few interesting things about yourself and your current predicament that will be useful to you in the future…its hard to do and bloody uncomfortable but I believe its worthwhile.

from my failure I think I’m learning that I over personalise, get way too close to my work and am far to attached to how being young and successful has defined the early part of my career…far a start…but as I said this isn’t about me!

I’m finding this failure hard…but I think on the other side I will be a better person for it, I’m writing this because I hope it helps someone else whose failing feel a little less alone. So If you’ve failed why not share what you learnt to help inspire others facing the same predicament.

Peace

Matt

Not really a blog, just a couple of coll presentations I’ve put together for students focused on our induction week in 2011. I hope you like them if you’ve not seen them already.

Thanks

Matt