Weeknote 23/2016

This week I’ve been:

• Refreshing my Dynamic Skillset website during the time I had to myself while my family were away in Devon visiting my inlaws last weekend.
• Sending out Issue #218 of Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel, my weekly newsletter loosely focused on education, technology, and productivity. Many thanks to 9Sharp for sponsoring this week’s issue! (Note: I’m looking for sponsors for July and September)
• Recording and releasing Episode 53 (‘Wild Sleep’) of the Today In Digital Education podcast, my weekly podcast with co-host Dai Barnes. We discussed the end of average, wild ideas, kids and online privacy, being human, encryption through the ages, Internet trends, getting a good night’s sleep, and more! You can discuss TIDE in our Slack channel.
• Unproductive on Monday. I did a bit of work but, for some reason, I was all over the place. I took some time to get myself sorted, and was back to my usual productive self by Tuesday!
• Spending Tuesday and Wednesday in London working with City & Guilds. I usually stay in an aparthotel when I’m down there, but this week stayed at a Premier Inn and managed to sleep for 11 hours!
• Having lunch with the inimitable Graham Brown-Martin who, as ever, was on fine form. Bryan Mathers joined us at Pizza East in Shoreditch as we talked about western cultural imperialism, edtech, and the dark web.
• Catching up with Nate Otto about the (positive!) future of the Badge Alliance.
• Helping Digitalme with preparations for their June 28th event around digital credentials for employment. It’s invite-only, so if you haven’t received an email yet, you’ll have to watch the livestream!
• Voting in the EU Referendum to remain in the EU. Ever since being a teacher I’ve requested a postal vote as it just makes life easier. Weareopen.coop have also been using Loomio to vote on a couple of things: pricing for orgs/causes we believe in, as well as deciding on our toolset.
• Ordering new business cards courtesy of moo.com. As I don’t give them out like confetti, I’ve again gone for the more expensive, square ones. One side has my avatar, the flip side uses the colours from my newly-refreshed website, looking like the image in this tweet (note the weareopen.coop logo!)
• Eating a lot of dates combined with 100% chocolate as I’m not consuming refined sugar this month.
• Working on a post about how Open Badges ‘work like the web’ for DML Central. It will go live on Monday but you can see a preview here. Thanks to those who gave me feedback, and to Bryan Mathers for creating a couple of illustrations for it!
• Meeting for a ‘critical friend’ session with Eylan Ezekiel. Find out more about what these are here.
• Scoring applications for the sixth and final DML Competition about playlists for learning.
• Starting to write the report of last week’s Cambridge English workshop. I’ll have to finish it last week as I had childcare duties, cutting short Friday’s working hours.
• Watching the first match of EURO 2016 football tournament between hosts France and Romania. In fact, I’m writing this while watching it!
• Writing:
  • Towards a repository of ‘open’ Open Badges around employability (8th June 2016)
  • Improving the style and content of dynamicskillset.com (4th June 2016)

Next week I’m working on our church’s website on Monday, down in London on Tuesday and Wednesday, working from home on Thursday, and then starting to plan my Badge Summit keynote for a couple of weeks’ time.