Weeknote 40/2015
This week I’ve been:
- Working a four-day week. It’s an experiment that I go into a bit more detail in this short post. I’ve been calling my day for non-income-generating activities my ‘Doug day’.
- Sending out Issue #188 of my newsletter, Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel. A final thanks to Makers Academy who kindly supported September’s issues.
- Celebrating my Dad’s birthday early as he’s flew back this week for another few months working with Aspire Academy in Doha, Qatar.
- Releasing Episode 24 (‘Subversive Smartphones’) of the Today In Digital Education podcast that I record regularly with Dai Barnes. This week we discuss open organisations and badges, edtech and edupunk, government innovation and spying, as well as social network illusions.
- Teaching another session of Computing Club at my kids’ school. This week we did a bit more with Markdown: I produced a super-simple cheatsheet to help with their deliberate practice.
- Taking some photos in and around Morpeth, where I live. There’s a lot of development work going on at the moment meaning that some old buildings are being torn down.
- Meeting up with Dave White for a coffee, which was great. We last spoke face-to-face a year ago in quite different circumstances.
- Submitting an ISTE 2016 proposal for an Open Badges workshop with Noah Geisel, Bryan Mathers, and Ian O’Byrne.
- Participating in this week’s Open Badges community call.
- Writing and sending Issue #7 of my monthly Dynamic Skillset newsletter.
- Delighted that an image from my recent DMLcentral post was used in a keynote at DevLearn.
- Setting up a new Trello board, Basecamp area, and other workflow stuff for a new City & Guilds project. I’m looking forward to guiding people through a short ‘pre-mortem‘ next week.
- Pleased at the progress with our loft conversion. The stairs and some of the walls are in place! We’ve decamped to my parents’ house for a few days.
- Writing The TIDE is high…
Next week Monday is my ‘Doug day’ but, because I’m still working four days for City & Guilds, I’ll spend some of it in a meeting with Accenture and some of it being a critical friend to a client. I’ll be in London on Tuesday and Wednesday, and working from home (or my parents’house!) on Thursday/Friday.
While in London, I’m looking forward to meeting up with former Mozilla colleagues Kat Braybrooke, John Bevan, and Paula Le Dieu. I’ll also be working with Bryan Mathers and catching up with Andrea Carr. When I get back home, and if I can pin him down, I’m also hoping to meet with Jonathan Worth, who has recently started working at Newcastle University!
