Weeknote 14/2018

This week I’ve been:

• Sending out Issue #298 of my Thought Shrapnel newsletter. This one was called ‘Easter treats’. As of this week, I have 25 people supporting me via Patreon and some backers via Gumroad.
• Sick. Ignoring my own advice (for which Laura scolded me) I worked through the weakness. Instead of taking my laptop to bed, I should of allowed myself time to get better.
• Curating interesting things I came across on the  Thought Shrapnel blog. This week I collected some quotations and commented on the following:
  • Microcast #012 (supporters only!)
  • “All that is gold does not glitter,
    Not all those who wander are lost;
    The old that is strong does not wither,
    Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

    From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
    A light from the shadows shall spring;
    Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
    The crownless again shall be king.”

    (J.R.R. Tolkien)

  • The death of the newsfeed (is much exaggerated)
  • Absentee leadership
  • Social internet vs social media
  • The ‘1, 2, 3’ approach to organising your working day
  • “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” (Mark Twain)
  • Blockcerts mobile
  • Automated Chinese jaywalking fines are a foretaste of so-called ‘smart cities’
  • What’s the link between employment and creativity?
  • Mozilla’s Web Literacy Curriculum

• Sending out the agenda for the next 6th Morpeth Scouts Executive Committee meeting. I also made a small tweak to their website.
• Messing about with my family, as they’re all on Easter holidays. I have never seen children consume so much chocolate. We made collages using cut-up bits of newspaper and magazine (mine is at the top of this post!)
• Working on Project MoodleNet:
  • Talking with smart people, including Mark Pegrum, Stephen Downes, and Mike Larsson.
  • Finalising the job advert for a Technical Architect to help me out. It will be a six-month position, initially, and should be posted before the end of the month.
  • Leading the first monthly community call. The agenda, notes, and recording can be found here.
  • Working with Paul Greidanus on testing some potential solutions for the MVP. Unfortunately, they didn’t work. It’s always useful to bear in mind that Edison quote when that happens…
• Hanging out with my We Are Open co-op colleagues for our monthly co-op day. We talked about the new website we’re building, GDPR, upcoming work, the Co-op College conference, our involvement in the CoTech network, and other silliness.
• Writing:
  • No easy answers (Open Educational Thinkering, 4th April 2018)
  • My takeaways from Stephen Downes’ talk on personal learning (Open Educational Thinkering, 3rd April 2018)

Next week, I’m taking a short break to go on holiday with my family in Jersey at the start of the week. After that, I’m doing a couple of days with Moodle and then spending a day finishing off some of the IDB work for the co-op.