Weeknote 24/2016
This week I’ve been:
- Sending out Issue #219 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 still looking for sponsors for July and September)
- Recording and releasing Episode 54 (‘23 and Pi’) of the Today In Digital Education podcast, my weekly podcast with co-host Dai Barnes. We discussed giving up (giving up) sugar, Open Badges news, Sonic Pi, how to teach programming, Apple, the past and future of the web, thought leadership, and more! You can discuss TIDE in our Slack channel.
- Helping Digitalme and the City & Guilds group announce the acquisition of the former by the latter. I rounded up the news in this post.
- Ending (some may say ‘giving up’) my sugar-free experiment for June. I explained why here.
- Pleased that my new business cards arrived, along with some stuff from the School of Life which will help with my Critical Friend conversations.
- Working on Open Badges for City & Guilds related to the Festival of Skills next month.
- Meeting for coffee with Anni Rowland-Campbell to discuss Web Science after an introduction from John Bevan. It was also great to catch-up with Cliff Manning (now at the DfE) then Grainne Hamilton, have dinner with Verena Roberts and Mikko Kontto (in London for the Mozilla All-Hands meeting), discuss the future for Digitalme with Tim Riches, have a quick chat with Andrew Greenway, following an introduction from Chris Atherton!
- Leaving my Kindle Paperwhite (3G, 2nd generation) at citizenM. I still haven’t got it back, so making do with the Kindle app on my iPad Mini.
- Finalising plans with Noah Geisel, Ian O’Byrne, and Bryan Mathers for our ISTE 2016 pre-conference workshop. I’m working on my Badge Summit keynote next week — my tentative title is Badges, bundling, and blockchain: the importance of human-scale technologies.
- Starting to create a “Who’s who” of the Open Badges ecosystem for a client. I’ll share in the coming weeks, but I need to do it sensitive so not as to offend anyone.
- Finalising and sending the report of the second workshop I ran for Cambridge English recently.
- Talking with a potential new client. I’ll be flying over to talk with them towards the end of the month.
- Chilling out on Friday. I’ve always got stuff to do, but given my weekends are family time, I always appreciate this day to decompress, think, and catch up on reading. I went for a walk (about 15km) around where I live, including places I’ve never wandered before.
- Writing:
- Never mind #Brexit, let’s get rid of our royal family (16th June)
- Digital detox (16th June)
- Why we need ‘view source’ for digital literacy frameworks (15th June)
- More on City & Guilds and digital credentialing (13th June)
- Abs(tin)ence makes the heart grow fonder (13th June)
- The big acquisition news of the day (13th June)
- 3 Ways Open Badges Work Like the Web [DML Central] (13th June)
Next week I’m spending Monday to Wednesday at home with my family making sure I’m ready for my trip to the US. I’m arriving in Denver on Thursday, keynoting on Friday, running a pre-conference workshop on Saturday, attending ISTE on Sunday, then flying back to facilitate an event for Digitalme in London!
