Weeknote 15/2016

This week I’ve been:

• Sending out Issue #210 of Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel, my weekly newsletter loosely focused on education, technology, and productivity. This week it included links about blockchain in education, Mozilla’s Web Literacy Map 2.0, and how to find productive hours. Many thanks to 9Sharp for sponsoring this week’s issue!
• Recording and releasing Episode 46 (‘Maltese Credentials’) of the Today In Digital Education podcast, my weekly podcast with co-host Dai Barnes. This week we discussed elephants in the classroom, Dai’s experiences in Malta, Liberia outsourcing their education system, what Doug learned while at Mozilla, the cult of the attention web, what constitutes a credential, how to find your most productive hours, and more! You can discuss TIDE in our Slack channel.
• Demoing the progress I’ve made on the refresh to our church’s website. You can see it here. I’ve still got to port a lot of the content across.
• Suffering from a debilitating migraine on Monday. I’d planned to work from home, but I ended up spending the day in bed, and reading as I wasn’t much use to anyone. It’s been a while since I’ve had one that bad.
• Helping Eylan Ezekiel with some planning and prioritisation as a ‘critical friend’. It was a great opportunity to hang out with him in his house in Oxford, and meet his lovely family. I’ve been doing more and more of this kind of work, both in-person and remotely, so perhaps it’s time to offer it as an explicit service of Dynamic Skillset?
• Setting up and instance of Sandstorm for Work to see if it’s going to work for a new venture a few of us have planned.
• Participating in the first day of the Tech Infrastructure for the Future Social Sector Hack in Oxford. This was organised by Tris Lumley from NPC, and facilitated by Andy Gibson. Eylan was there, as was John Bevan, and I managed to demo something by the end of the day! Afterwards, I checked out Broad Street, where Thornton’s bookshop used to be (where I worked during the summer almost 20 years ago) and had a pint with Eylan in The Eagle and Child, a famous and favourite pub.
• Working for City & Guilds from their London office on Thursday, and from home for them on Friday. This involved some collaboration with Bryan Mathers and collating lots of links around the future of work/toolsets.
• Flashing my Sony Xperia Z3 Compact with a new ROM giving me Android 6.0.1 (‘Marshmallow’). I’d been using CyanogenMod nightly builds, but they were both a little unstable (especially around Bluetooth) and stuck on Android 5.1. In the end I used a ROM that Sony have rolled out experimentally in Latin America…
• Writing:
  • Sandboxing Emotions (15th April)
  • Brewing up a telescopic (sand)storm for digital charities’ projects (14th April)
  • The Migraineur’s Dilemma (13th April)

Next week, I’m working from home on Monday, then in London from Tuesday to Thursday. I’ll be back home to sleep in my own bed, then I’m off to the Lake District to spend two days up a mountain. This should count towards the 20 ‘quality mountain days’ I need to accrue before starting my Mountain Leader course. It’s then Maker Faire UK in Newcastle on the Sunday!