Weeknote 35/2017

This week I’ve been:

• Sending out Thought Shrapnel, my weekly newsletter loosely structured around education, technology, and productivity. Issue #272 was entitled ‘My bank is having a holiday?’. Don’t forget you can sign up to Thought Shrapnel Live! using Telegram to receive links as I come across them. You can also become a valued supporter.
• Going through lots of writing by Stowe Boyd and Esko Kilpi. I’ve added some of my favourite quotations from their recent work to my Discours.es blog tagged under future of work.
• Taking Bank Holiday Monday off. I thought I was going to have to work through it, but pulling out all the stops at the end of the previous week meant I could enjoy a glorious summer barbeque with my family.
• Booking a trip to the Amsterdam Christmas markets and light show with my wife for early December. We’ve been meaning to go to a European Christmas market for years.
• Writing a series of blog posts about… writing blog posts! Start with the introductory one here.
• Dismayed that Twitter are once again changing their terms and conditions to allow them to track their users the same way Facebook does. It’s a shame as I’d found myself drawn back towards Twitter in the past couple of weeks.
• Working three days for Totara Learning, helping them both on their community migration and internal processes.
• Talking at length with John O’Duinn, who’s writing a book about leading distributed teams. I blogged about an early release version I’d been sent and which I think is aces. He’s a smart guy with a lot of insight about the processes he implemented at Mozilla and elsewhere.
• Catching up with Martin Dougiamas and Tom Murdock from Moodle.
• Spending a half-day with my awesome We Are Open Co-op colleagues, John Bevan, Laura Hilliger, and Bryan Mathers. It’s such a breath of fresh air to work with them on inspiring projects.
• Curating and publishing Issue #16 of Badge News, a regular newsletter for the Open Badges community, on behalf of the co-op.
• Escaping to the Northumberland National Park for part of the weekend. We stayed at the brand new YHA at The Sill on Friday night and went to the first Kielder Fest on Saturday. We had a great time and the weather was wonderful!
• Writing:
  • Deciding what to write about in your blog post (Open Educational Thinkering, 1st September 2017)
  • Results of Badge News 2017 summer survey (We Are Open Co-op blog, 1st September 2017)
  • Putting your blog post into the world (Open Educational Thinkering, 30th August 2017)
  • Sitting down to write a blog post (Open Educational Thinkering, 30th August 2017)
  • How to write a blog post (Open Educational Thinkering, 30th August 2017)
  • What whalesong can teach us about social learning (Totara Learning blog, 30th August 2017)

Next week I’m looking after my children on Monday as it’s their last day of the summer holidays and my wife’s got a teacher training day. I’m working from home on Tuesday doing some research for London CLC, and then with Totara Learning from Wednesday to Friday.

I make my living helping people and organisations become more productive in their use of technology.  If you’ve got something that you think I might be able to help with, please do get in touch! Email: [email protected]

Photo taken by me as we walked along Hadrian’s Wall from The Sill to Sycamore Gap.