Weeknote 19/2018

• Walking for two days in the Galloway Hills with my wife (Sunday/Monday). It was great, but the lack of a recovery day had a knock-on effect on my whole week. I felt I was playing catch-up with myself and, although I did exercise every day, continued to feel tired until Friday.
• Working on Moodle stuff — and, in particular, the MoodleNet project:
  • Triaging applicants for the Technical Architect position. There have been some great ones and some people who seem to have almost applied accidentally!
  • Talking with applicants that we’ve moved to the ‘phone screen’ stage. Martin Dougiamas, Moodle’s Founder and CEO, has interviewed a couple of people who passed that phase. I’ve more conversations to have with applicants, so if you know someone who would be good for the position, please encourage them to apply!
  • Presenting on Tuesday’s Moodle Users Association (MUA) Town Hall meeting, and answering questions from those present.
  • Preparing for the Design Sprint the week after next. That’s involved putting out a survey (completed by around 100 people so far), interviewing three people via recorded video chat, arranging travel/accommodation, and approaching people in my network potentially available for user testing in London on Thursday 24th.
  • Running May’s community call, with the recording available here.
  • Attending one of the Moodle ‘Culture Champions’ meetings. I volunteered to remix the ‘Rules of Engagement’ that we came up with collaboratively. The result is on this etherpad.
  • Catching up with one of the consultants for the MoodleNet project, Mike Larsson, who’s been advising on custom search indexes and other ways of providing what we need for search in the MVP. His notes can be found here.
• Continuing to read a couple of really interesting books:
  • Stealing history : tomb raiders, smugglers, and the looting of the ancient world by Roger Attwood
  • Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman
• Curating interesting things I came across on the Thought Shrapnel blog. This week I collected some quotations and commented on the following:

  • “Idealistic as it may sound, altruism should be the driving force in
    business, not just competition and a desire for wealth.” (Dalai Lama)

  • Work-life balance is actually a circle, according to Jeff Bezos
  • Microcast #020 (supporters only!)
  • “Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.” (Oscar Wilde)
  • Microcast #019 (supporters only!)
  • The virtue of rest
  • Tolerating uncertainty
• Writing:
  • MoodleNet pre-Design Sprint survey (MoodleNet blog, 11th May 2018)
  • Recording of May 2018 MoodleNet community call now available! (MoodleNet blog, 9th May 2018)
  • Quality Mountain Day 12: Black Craig, Knockower, and Coran of Portmark (Galloway Hills, Scotland) (Open Educational Thinkering, 7th May 2018)
  • Quality Mountain Day 11: Merrick (Galloway Hills, Scotland) (Open Educational Thinkering, 7th May 2018)

Next week I’m working from home on Moodle stuff, and attending the Thinking Digital Conference on Thursday, as well as the pre-conference workshop and dinner on Wednesday afternoon/evening.