Weeknote 41/2015
This week I’ve been:
- Working a four-day week again. I took Monday off so that my ‘Doug days’ were either side of the weekend. I did end up doing some work, though…
- Sending out Issue #189 of my newsletter, Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel. It featured links about a no-tech school, Tesla’s bioweapon defense mode, and 6-hour workdays. This month’s newsletters are in association with City & Guilds TechBac.
- Releasing Episode 25 (‘No-Tech Peeple’) of the Today In Digital Education podcast, my weekly podcast Dai Barnes.In this episode we discuss shorter workweeks, a ‘no-tech’ school, a new rating service for humans, Edward Snowden, Evernote and bookmarking apps, and more!
- Teaching this week’s session of Computing Club at my kids’ school. This week we explored the limitations of Markdown and exported to HTML the basic web pages created with the help of this super-simple cheatsheet.
- Helping Sarah Horrocks of London CLC with some upcoming stuff. I’m developing my consigliere skills. 😉
- Talking to some of the organisers of BETT about Bryan Mathers and I being involved in speaking in the new FE & Skills zone.
- Impressed with the Sony background defocus app, simulating DSLR-style shallow depth of field on my smartphone (see header image).
- Beginning to sort out my pension arrangements now I’m a consultant. Boring, but necessary.
- Working in London for two days, during which I met up with Andrea Carr at Hachette’s HQ, John Bevan at the Barbican Kitchen about some Open Badges-related stuff, and attended an edtech tweetup at The Chandos where I saw lots of great people – including Dawn Hallybone, Tony Parkin, and Oliver Quinlan.
- Leading a pre-mortem on a badge-related project for City & Guilds.
- Setting up Trello, Basecamp, etc. so that the above project proceeds smoothly!
- Participating in this week’s Badge Alliance community call and working group call about badge taxonomies.
- Meeting with Malcolm Murray and others at Durham University about some potential badges work.
- Agreeing to keynote the University of Worcester‘s staff development conference. I’ll be talking about digital literacies.
- Writing:
- a piece about badges for opensource.com. You can see a sneak preview here (including three great images from Bryan Mathers!)
- Why you should reply to emails
Next week I’m down in London Tuesday/Wednesday, and working from home on Monday and Thursday. Friday is my ‘Doug day’. I’m looking forward to working with Bryan Mathers on some Think Out Loud Club / #OB101 stuff, as well as meeting up with former Mozilla colleague Jade Forester for lunch. I’ll also be heading to a DynamoNet event in Newcastle, trying to embed myself a bit more in North East networks!
