Weeknote 37/2016
This week I’ve been:
- Sending out Issue #228 of Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel, my weekly newsletter loosely focused on education, technology, and productivity. It featured links on officeless work, the world-wide cage, and how to raise a genius. Many thanks to Makers Academy for sponsorship!
- Recording and releasing Episode 60 (‘Complicated Screens’) of Today In Digital Education, my weekly podcast with co-host Dai Barnes. This was the first episode after the summer break, and we’ve experimented with the format a little, discussing a main topic (this week: ‘screentime’) and then a few other links towards the end. You can join the community to discuss these changes to TIDE in our Slack channel!
- Settling into Campus North in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where I’ll be based every Monday from now on. It was great to see some familiar faces and I’m looking forward to being even more embedded in the North-East tech community.
- Co-facilitating a thinkathon with my We Are Open colleagues for Creative Commons. It’s the first one we’ve done entirely virtually, with their team in Vancouver and us geographically-dispersed around Europe! We’ll be doing some follow-up work with them over the coming months.
- Selling various items of tech kit on eBay, either with a view to upgrading, or just because I came back from holiday and realised I didn’t need them any more!
- Meeting with lots of people, including:
- Jacqui Thompson and colleagues from Gateshead Libraries
- Jordan Poulton from Makers Academy
- Rob Robson (consultant)
- Rachel Hammel from Around The Curve
- Dom Murphy from Geek Talent, along with representatives of Sunderland City Council and local businesses around a potential new project
- Kev Jones from Sussex Downs College
- Gareth Jones from The Chemistry Group
- Dominic Smith (artist, curator, writer, and researcher)
- Lucas Blair from Little Bird Games
- Wayne Skipper from Concentric Sky
- Finalising arrangements for next week’s trip to Victoria College in Jersey.
- Suffering from a migraine on Wednesday night, which led to (what I tend to call) a ‘migraine hangover’ on Thursday morning. Unsure of the provenance of this: could have been fluorescent lighting, impending thunderstorm, dehydration, a lack of sleep, starting running again or — more likely — a combination of all of these factors!
- Crafting a new (self-hosted) home for the TIDE podcast using the free, open source, and very easy-to-use Podcast Generator. The site is currently accessible via a subfolder of my website, but soon will resolve to the main tidepodcast.org URL! Previous episodes with shownotes are still available at tumblr while we transfer everything across…
- Spending a lot of Friday (my ‘Doug day’) napping after being rudely awakened by the most violent thunderstorm I’ve ever witnessed over our house. My wife and I sleep in our new loft conversion and it was pretty clear that I wasn’t going to get back to sleep until the thunderstorm finished.
- Writing:
- Remote jobs vs. remote teams (Discours.es, 16th September 2016)
- More evidence to show open-plan offices are bad for productivity (Discours.es, 15th September 2016)
- Philosophy is the best-value degree going (15th September 2016)
- Digital Literacy, Identity and a Domain of One’s Own [DML Central] (Open Educational Thinkering, 15th September 2016)
- What do we mean by ‘open education’? (Ambiguiti.es, 15th September 2016)
- How to be an effective knowledge worker and ‘manage yourself’ (Open Educational Thinkering, 15th September 2016)
- The problem of living without constraints (Discours.es, 14th September 2016)
- Amazon Echo: cool and creepy in equal measure (Discours.es, 14th September 2016)
- Why a P2P version of Facebook just isn’t going to happen anytime soon (Discours.es, 12th September 2016)
- The best time of day to do everything (Discours.es, 12th September 2016)
- The jobs of the future require social skills, not maths (Discours.es, 12th September 2016)
- Google’s new AI voices are nothing short of incredible (Discours.es, 11th September 2016)
- Mistakes are part of the human condition (Discours.es, 11th September 2016)
Next week I’ll be working from Campus North on Monday, in meetings on Tuesday, flying to Jersey on Wednesday (afternoon) and then working with Victoria College on Thursday and Friday. Due to flights, I’ll not be back home until Saturday afternoon.
Work with me: Dynamic Skillset / We Are Open Co-op
