Weeknote 14/2015
Update: I forgot to mention my activity as part of #lookjustphone, an experiment in creating a business or product solely using a smartphone. I introduced the concept to others, then created a pay-to-email me service followed by a hi-res wallpaper pack.
This was my first week of consultancy. (o^_^)o
It was a three-day week: I took Monday off and then Friday was a public holiday. Despite that, it was a fairly intense and tiring week — mainly due to travelling and meeting new people!
After playing with my children on Monday and taking them to the inflatables session at the local swimming pool, I caught the train down to London. That night I stayed in the Z Hotel Shoreditch next to Old Street’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’. Despite the great ratings, I thought it was pretty average.
I headed over to the London College of Fashion on Tuesday, part of the University of the Arts. They’d asked me to give a keynote and facilitate a workshop around Open Badges. I took the opportunity to weave in some stuff around digital literacies and learning pathways, too. It was a great day. You can see curated tweets from the day, including a link to my slides, in this post.
On Wednesday and Thursday nights I stayed at a City Marque Clerkenwell serviced apartment, which was much better. Very spacious, more facilities, and pretty much brand new! It wasn’t far from there to walk to the City & Guilds offices in Giltspur Street. I met up with Bryan Mathers, one of the main reasons I’m working with them full-time for the next five months, for breakfast. They do great sausage sandwiches!
Most of Wednesday and Thursday was met meeting various people at City & Guilds and getting myself acquainted with their IT systems. They’re using Microsoft Office 365, which I haven’t used before. However, it’s pretty straightforward: I installed the mobile apps and then set my email autoresponder to say that I only check my email first and last thing during the day.
There’s plenty of interesting work to be getting on with at City & Guilds and, from what I’ve sensed this week, an appetite to do things differently. I’m looking forward to getting to grips with ways in which Open Badges can be used to think differently (and adjacently) about their qualifications and credentialing offer.
I’ve never seen Kings Cross train station as busy as it was on Thursday night. This was understandable, as it was the day before a four-day weekend. I had a ticket but no reservation so, instead of standing for almost four hours on the way home, I decided to upgrade to First Class. I got a seat, sat back, drank some free whisky, and watched Léon.
On Friday I took everything out of my office in preparation for a carpet being laid. I also upgraded to Bittorrent Sync Pro as I’ve been really happy with the way it enables cloud-like file syncing, but only between devices I own.
Today (Saturday) I’ve been putting everything back into my home office. I’ve now got a carpet in there! It’s so much nicer than having laminate. There’s still far too much stuff crammed in too small a space, but at least it’s cosy and warm.
Due to being so busy, the only things I wrote this week were Wednesday Wisdom #31: Context (on Thursday!) and a link to my DMLcentral post, Peering Deep into Future of Educational Credentialing.
Next week is also a shorter week due to Easter Monday. I’ll be working in London on Tuesday and Wednesday and then from home on Thursday/Friday. 🙂
Image CC BY-SA Susanne Nilsson
