Weeknote 16/2018

This week I’ve been:

• Sending out Issue #300 of my Thought Shrapnel newsletter. This one was called ‘Tricentennial’. Fist-bumps to the 29 people who support me via Patreon plus those backers via Gumroad!
• Meeting with representatives from Brunel University about some potential upcoming Open Badges work. Also with Cliff Manning about a workshop I’m running in July for the Carnegie UK Trust.
• Curating interesting things I came across on the Thought Shrapnel blog. This week I collected some quotations and commented on the following:
  • Clickbait and switch?
  • “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” (Frederick Douglass)
  • Soviet-era industrial design
  • Conversational implicature
  • Ryan Holiday’s 13 daily life-changing habits
  • Valuing and signalling your skills
  • Microcast #016 (supporters only!)
  • Microcast #015 (supporters only!)
  • Intimate data analytics in education
  • All killer, no filler
  • “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” (Theodore Roosevelt)
  • Systems thinking and AI

• Working on the MoodleNet project:
  • Discussing some potential upcoming work with a range of design and development agencies. More on that soon, I hope, as I want to get cracking with a design sprint in May.
  • Talking with smart people, including Emma Richardson (President of the Moodle Users Association), Mike Larsson,
  • Catching up with the recording of the Moodle All-Hands meeting on Wednesday where some important things were announced to colleagues.
  • Adding some more detail to the wiki page I’d started, digging into different types of resource-centric social networks.
• Attending the OER18 conference with my Moodle hat on. It was a great event, superbly organised by the ALT team. I caught up with so many people in sunny Bristol — too many to name individually. I also participated in a Virtually Connecting session (recorded) and learned a lot to apply to my MoodleNet work.
• Running a thinkathon with my co-op colleagues for CET in Israel about a digital literacy MOOC they want to create for teachers in the city of Beer Sheva with the municipality. It went really well, and we’ll be following up soon.
• Collaborating with Bryan Mathers on some follow-up co-op work for the Inter-American Development Bank. We’re making use of Badge Wiki for the outputs.
• Writing:
  • (None, other than Thought Shrapnel)

Next week I’m going to be at the OE Global Conference 2018 in Delft, Netherlands. Moodle is sponsoring it and I’m looking forward to catching up with Martin Dougiamas.