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Weeknote 10/2017

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

This week I’ve been:

  • Doing different and diverse kinds of work. I’ve really enjoyed the variety of this working week in particular. I’m self-employed so I get high levels of autonomy and agency in my work anyway, but the focus of the things I’ve done for three different clients has been vastly different. It’s also involved a nice mix of working from my home office, travelling within the region that I live, and travelling further afield.
  • Sending out Thought Shrapnel, my weekly newsletter loosely structured around education, technology, and productivity. Issue #249 was entitled ‘Ain’t no time like the present’.
  • Catching up with Thomas Steele-Maley, who’s currently doing great things in Dubai.
  • Failing to record an episode of the TIDE podcast, as Dai and I couldn’t align our schedules this week. Still our episodes are quite long, so it will give people a chance to catch up!
  • Sad to see the Azure Window in Gozo (an island off Malta) collapse into the sea. My family visited it on a number of occasions, as Gozo is one of our favourite places to go on holiday. It’s going to be a very different place as a result.
  • Helping facilitate a Story Hack event at Gateshead Central Library. We used the Booktype platform to create a book in less than seven hours. The quality of the book wasn’t the important part; the focus was on collaboration and framing an interesting topic. We chose to question Wikipedia’s guidelines around ‘notoriety’.
  • Interviewed for E-180 magazine. I really enjoy their regular newsletter, so was pleased to be able to answer some of the questions they had about Open Badges.
  • Working with Laura Hilliger to install Discourse, an open-source forum platform for a client of our co-op. We’re configuring it so each user chooses a pseudonym and so can be as anonymous as they want to be to other users. However, those in charge of the forum will know who each individual user is. It’s reasonably high-stakes in focus, so you can’t access it without a login to the forum itself.
  • Running a thinkathon for the NCCA in Dublin, Ireland with Bryan Mathers. We stayed in an apartment that was quiet, yet also right opposite the famous Toners pub! It was good to help Fred Boss and colleagues think through Open Badges.
  • Writing:

Next week, I’ll be finishing off that discussion forum piece of work, recording a new chapter of my audiobook on productivity, and preparing for a couple of upcoming trips to record some ‘quality mountain days’ in preparation for my Mountain Leader course.

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]

 

Weeknote 25/2013

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

This week I’ve been:

  • Hosting the Web Literacy Standard community call. Audio and etherpad here.
  • Communicating with the people behind Grimwire and +PeerServer about potentially contributing towards Firecloud.
  • Interviewed for a potential upcoming piece in PandoDaily about the Web Literacy Standard.
  • Talking to Sara Mörtsell about Open Badges for her upcoming MOOC.
  • Presenting at the Learning & Skills Group conference in London. Slides here.
  • Moderating a session – and feeding back from it to the EC Digital Agenda Assembly in Dublin.
  • Messing about with, and getting used to, my new Geeksphone Keon running Firefox OS. It’s a developer preview but I’ve got it on the expectation that I’ll be ‘dogfooding’ – i.e. using it as my ‘daily driver’.
  • Trying (and failing) to set up my new 24″ Dell monitor. The different digital display technologies are confusing (e.g. Thunderbolt and Mini-DisplayPort same physical size but are incompatible?)
  • Answering questions from the community about Open Badges and the Web Literacy Standard.
  • Talking to Erin Knight about a potential new role for me at Mozilla.
  • Tidied up and added questions to the Web Literacy Standard FAQ wiki page.
  • Meeting for coffee with someone who is thinking of joining Mozilla and wanted to know what it’s like working inside the belly of the beast.
  • Putting together a short slidedeck on Firecloud with Vinay Gupta.
  • Enquiring about the possibility of running another Maker Party (as I did last year) at the Centre for Life.
  • Meeting up with a teacher at my wife’s school to talk through how they can use Webmaker tools to deliver part of the new Primary Computing curriculum.
  • Checking out some books that MIT sent me in their Essential Knowledge series. They’ve asked me to put together a proposal for one on digital/web literacy.

Next week I’ve got a bit of a three-day tour of the UK. I’m in Sheffield to run an Open Badges workshop for the White Rose Learning Technologists’ Forum on Monday. On Tuesday I’m in Glasgow to speak at an SQA event entitled Innovations in Assessment for Schools before an epic train journey to Bath to speak at IWMW13 on Open Badges and the Web Literacy Standard. I’ve another three events the week after next as well…

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