Weeknote 16/2015
This week I’ve been:
- In London for two days and two nights. I stayed at the Atelier apartments next to Farringdon again.
- Helping facilitate some of the Nesta event on Young Digital Makers: creative solutions for the challenges ahead. It was definitely a room full of my kind of people – including Oliver Quinlan, Kat Braybrooke, Bryan Mathers, Drew Buddie, Tom Kenyon, John Bevan, and Cliff Manning. I used Google Ventures’ Note and Vote approach, which worked pretty well.
- Presenting at and helping facilitate an internal City & Guilds product and services conference. It was a lot of fun as I got to hang out with the DigitalMe crowd (Tim Riches, Lucy Neale, Matt Rogers) and talk about Open Badges.
- Going to the dentist. Apparently the only thing I could do to make my teeth any better would be to bleach them. Flossing and regular brushing FTW!
- Working on something around engines of growth for City & Guilds.
- Sorting out the Today In Digital Education (TIDE) podcast while Dai Barnes was away skiing. There’s a new URL for the tumblr blog, and we’re now on SoundCloud. Also, we should show up in most podcast directories!
- Thinking a lot about the learner journey and points at which Open Badges could be useful. Unsurprisingly, these are likely to be transition points such as moving between different educational experiences and then from there into a job.
- Plotting and planning with Bryan Mathers. We’ve identified some behaviours (especially around email) that we want to help people avoid. I’m going to write some stuff and he’s going to draw some of his wonderful diagrams.
- Catching up with Laura Hilliger and Jess Klein via Skype.
- Booking travel and accommodation for the next few weeks. London is so expensive!
- Reading the amazing Remake Learning Corps’ epic Learning Competencies resource. Highly recommended if you’re thinking about badge system design.
- Trying out more Freeletics activities. I haven’t been that sweaty in a hotel room for a while.
- Playing about with Slack. We used it briefly at Mozilla but it wasn’t open enough. However, it could be perfect for an upcoming use case I’m exploring.
- Resurrecting my discours.es blog. I’m using a self-hosted instance of Known. This replaces the Evernote + Postach.io workflow I abandoned in early 2014.
- Catching up with Zak Mensah about some exciting upcoming work around digital skills and badges at Bristol Museums. He wrote a great post this week about his first 100 days as Head of Transformation there.
- Finding out from Martyn Ware (SQA)what’s been going on in Scotland with Open Badges recently.
- Watching and, to some extent, participating via the backchannel in Bonnie Stewart‘s PhD thesis defense. Awesomely, she was allowed to stream it via a Google+ Hangout. Sadly, I wasn’t allowed to back in 2012 (although I must dig out that secret audio recording I made…)
- Writing some blog posts:
Next week I start what I hope to be a regular routine. I’m planning to get the train down to London early Tuesday morning, stay over, and then come back Wednesday evening.
Image CC BY-SA Loz Pycock
