Weeknote 22/2015
This week I’ve been:
- At home. Yep, that’s right – due to a Bank Holiday on Monday, a meeting up here in the North East, and half-term I decided not to go down to London this week!
- Picking up our brand-new, second-hand Ford Focus Estate. It’s a Zetec model so it’s OK, but it’s no Volvo V50 R-Design. Sad to say we just couldn’t find one of those close enough to where we live.
- Sending out Things We Learned This Week #175. This month’s newsletters are kindly sponsored by C-Learning. There was no episode of the TIDE podcast this week.
- Getting to grips with my drone. I managed to fly it through the window of a ruined castle near where we live. Of course, once I found the ‘low-speed’ mode, it was much easier to control…
- Composing an article about peak centralisation and ‘software with shareholders’ for Ben Williamson‘s upcoming ebook.
- Preparing for next three weeks where I’ve got a lot of travel. I’ll be in Scotland (twice), Ireland, Spain, and London three times!
- Using Hackpad as a half-way house between Etherpad and Google Docs for my work with/at City & Guilds. I’m not sure if it’ll still exist when Dropbox Notes launches, however.
- Starting to write a six-month plan for June to November at City & Guilds. I’m probably going to drop down to three days a week from September so I can have a day to myself and a day working with other clients (otherwise I might as well be employed by them!)
- Putting together a Open Badges Playbook (resources) Google+ collection.
- Purchasing a Lenovo N20 Chromebook. I got it super-cheap on eBay as, despite being pretty much brand new, it was being sold by a someone with zero feedback and it’s got a Swedish keyboard!
- Meeting with representatives from Gateshead Council on behalf of City & Guilds Kineo. They provide courses for 49,000 learners and want to improve their Open Badges offerings, so Bryan Mathers and I gave them some advice and are writing up a report.
- Taking it a bit easier with work and exercise as I felt under the weather. Just a cold, but I find if I try and soldier on regardless, I stay ill for longer.
- Catching up with Grainne Hamilton about a meeting we’ve got with the SQA next Monday. I also had a conversation with Satu Järvinen and Esko Lius about Open Badges activity in Finland, and helped a couple of other people with brief conversations.
- Going out for dinner with Alan O’Donahoe and Claire Garside, who stopped off in Morpeth on their way from Leeds to Edinburgh. It was great to meet them face-to-face after following their work for the last few years.
- Writing:
Next week I’m up in Glasgow on Monday, at home on Tuesday, then in London Wednesday/Thursday. Depending upon whether the rail workers’ strike goes ahead, I may or may not be running a digital literacies workshop for the SSSC in Edinburgh on Friday!
Image CC BY-NC-SA Chris Yarzab
