Weeknote 42/2015
This week I’ve been:
- Taking today (Friday) off as part of my new four-day work week experiment. I read more of The Open Organization and started planning a submission to the #OER16 conference with Laura Hilliger.
- Sending out Issue #190 of my newsletter, Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel. It featured links about; toolsets, mindsets, and skillsets; blockchain technology; and being ‘agile’ in a non-agile environment.. This month’s newsletters are in association with City & Guilds TechBac.
- Releasing Episode 26 (‘Pre-Mortem Blockchain’) of the Today In Digital Education podcast, my weekly podcast Dai Barnes.In this episode we discussed performing a ‘pre-mortem’ on projects, hack days, what disruptors really want, the difference between toolsets, skillsets, and mindsets, blockchain technologies, the ‘human cloud’, basic digital skills, and… squatty potties.
- Teaching this week’s session of Computing Club at my kids’ school. This week we started messing about with HTML with the new version of Mozilla Thimble.
- Enjoying my wife accompanying me to London as part of her birthday celebrations. She shopped while I worked! We stayed at Citadines St Marks near Islington and went for dinner at Hakkasan then breakfast at Caravan.
- Leading the second part of a pre-mortem on an Open Badges-related project. It worked really well and I’d definitely recommend using this approach if you’re about to kick off something new in your organisation.
- Meeting up with my former Mozilla colleague Jade Forester. We caught up at Lantana in Shoreditch about lots of things, including badges.
- Collaborating with Bryan Mathers on all the possible things we could do with MOO’s new NFC-enabled business cards. We came up with quite a list! More on this next week when the first pack arrive…
- Setting up a Medium publication called The Slackerati. It’s a place that people on my (not-so) super-secret Slack channel can use to syndicate posts they write elsewhere.
- Agreeing to run a workshop at the edLab at MMU on the same day as I’m giving a seminar talk at the university. More details once I’ve fleshed them out with Mick Chesterman.
- Ordering and setting up my new Nvidia Shield TV (along with all of the accessories you can get for it). I’ve managed to sideload some Android APKs onto it to run games that aren’t supposed to run on it!
- Discussing with Moira Savage my involvement at the University of Worcester‘s teaching and learning conference next month.
- Connecting with Kev Jones from South Downs College who’s kicking of a badging program which I’ll hopefully be able to help him out with a bit.
- Attending a DynamoNet event in Newcastle where I got to network with some people in the North East IT industry and listen to a really interesting presentation from GP Bullhound about their research on ‘European unicorns’ (i.e. tech businesses worth in excess of $1 billion).
- Writing:
Next week I had planned to take Monday as my ‘Doug day’ but it looks like I’m going to have to help look after my kids due to a teacher training day at their school. I’ll be down on Tuesday/Wednesday where I’m hoping to meet up for a beer with Åke Nygren.
Next week is my last at work in October. We’re jetting off to Gozo on holiday for a week during half-term!
