This week I’ve been:
- Publishing issue #178 of my newsletter, Things We Learned This Week. The awesome people at Think Associates are sponsoring June’s missives.
- Spending three days in London due to a meeting on Monday afternoon. I stayed at the City Marque Clerkenwell serviced apartments (fast becoming one of my favourite places to stay).
- Finalising an Open Badges 101 presentation for use internally in City & Guilds. Bryan Mathers and I are running a ‘brown bag lunch’ for staff next Tuesday.
- Swimming – twice in London at Golden Lane and then once in Ireland. It can be meditative at times.
- Releasing episode 14 of the TIDE podcast. Dai Barnes and I decided to call this one Foucault your edtech.
- Meeting with Paul Bailey and Simon Whittemore from Jisc about learning analytics and, inevitably, Open Badges.
- Making some recommendations around team collaboration for City & Guilds, building on this wiki page.
- Buying an iPad Mini 2 (16GB cellular). I spotted it was £185 via HotUKDeals so it was almost rude not to buy. It’s partnered with this very smart cork case. I find an iPad mini pretty much the perfect conference device: battery life is amazeballs.
- Attending Nesta’s Ready Player Two event as part of London Technology Week, which was great. Afterwards I had dinner at Pizza East in Shoreditch with Oliver Quinlan.
- Participating in an invite-only Jisc Digital Capabilities event run by Helen Beetham where we got to play with pipecleaners! I enjoyed catching up with familiar faces such as James Clay (now at Jisc), Josie Fraser, and Sheila MacNeill.
- Adding links to my discours.es blog.
- Nipping home overnight on Wednesday/Thursday to see my wife and children.
- Travelling to and keynoting the CELT conference in Galway, Ireland. Catherine Cronin‘s been saying I should come over for years so I was glad to have a chance to go. What a beautiful, friendly place! Many thanks to Iain MacLaren, Sharon Flynn, and the rest of the organisers for the warm welcome. I enjoyed the other keynote from Siân Bayne – especially the stuff on twitterbots! You can find my slides below:
- Travelling home Friday/Saturday via Dublin. I’m writing this on the wifi-enabled bus from Galway. In both places my accommodation is/was provided by Radisson Blu – always exactly what you need after travelling.
- Writing:
Next week I’m taking it a bit easier after three weeks of more intensive travel. I’ll be in London Tuesday/Wednesday as usual but otherwise working from home. I may also organise a family camping trip to Galway for August; the original plan of heading to the area around Parco Nazionale del Gargano and back in a week is looking slightly ambitious!
This week, after sending out Issue #177 of my newsletter (sponsored by Think Associates) on Sunday, I spent Monday to Friday away from home in Barcelona and London. It was my first time in Barcelona and I absolutely loved it.
I was there with Patrick Craven from City & Guilds and Bryan Mathers at the ePIC conference. Happily, the Eden conference overlapped with it, meaning I could catch up with people in my network such as those in the image accompanying this post (left to right): Steve Wheeler, Martin Weller, Sheila MacNeill, Me, Audrey Watters, Jim Groom. While I was there I also had a virtual catch-up with Joyce Seitzinger and Mark Smithers to discover more about Academic Tribe.
I spent the time in Barcelona working on this Big Journeys to Small Steps presentation with Patrick and Bryan, as well as introducing them to some key people in the Open Badges community.
On Friday, after (finally!) meeting up with Simon Gough for breakfast, I attended John Bevan‘s #dotcomrades event at the Mozilla London community space. I helped facilitate some of the discussion around Open Source governance and fed back to the wider group at the end. It was great to catch up with former colleagues such as Kat Braybrooke, Adam Lofting, and Paul Le Dieu.
Bryan drew this great diagram as an overview of what we discussed:
Next week I’ll be down in London from Monday afternoon until Wednesday. Then I’ll be home for the night before flying to Dublin and then taking the bus to Galway to keynote the CELT conference. I get back Saturday. Busy few weeks!
This week I’ve been:
- Working four days with City & Guilds. I was down in London on Wednesday and Thursday this week and stayed at the London City Suites run by Montcalm. It was quite posh but I still prefer serviced apartments.
- Running a digital literacies workshop for the Scottish Social Services Council on Friday. As seems to be par for the course these days, slides from the input part made the Slideshare home page. After an extremely delayed journey, I stayed at the Destiny Scotland – St. Andrew Square Apartments. Which was fab.
- Finalising details for a ‘brown bag lunch’ at City & Guilds around Open Badges. Looking forward to that one as there’s lots of interest across the various business units.
- Working on a six-month plan with a super-secret codename for City & Guilds. I’ve also been looking at recommendations for them around internal communications. My Twitter network helped with that and I’m building out a wiki page.
- Writing up a report with some recommendations for Gateshead Council around Open Badges after our meeting last week.
- Putting together issue #176 of my weekly newsletter Things We Learned This Week. This was the last week of C-Learning’s inaugural sponsorship. Huge thanks to them! I’ve got sponsors lined up for June and July, then I’m taking August off from writing. Let me know if you know anyone who’d like to sponsor any month from September onwards!
- Sending through my bio and abstract for my CELT conference keynote in Galway later this month.
- Reading a couple of interesting articles around Open Badges. This one in particular deserves to be re-read.
- Meeting up with the people behind Chirp and suggesting Open Badges as a use case for their technology. I wrote that up here.
- Booking a place on the next stage of the ladder to become a Mountain Leader. I’m doing a Mountain Skills course over the course of a weekend in July.
- Finding somewhere to swim while down in London. Doing a quick 50 lengths on Wednesday re-energised me. This was particularly important due to the extreme hayfever/allergy reaction I seemed to suffer towards the end of the week affecting my right eye and ear.
- Taking our brand-new secondhand Ford Focus Estate into the local garage due to a fault. I knew we should have bought a German car. <sigh>
- Interviewed by Ian O’Byrne as part of the process accompanying the article we co-wrote with Greg McVerry about the development of Mozilla’s Web Literacy Map. You can watch that on my Literaci.es blog.
- Reducing the price of The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies to £3.99. More about that here.
- Kicking off a conversation around the technical side of badge pathways thanks to some prompting by Nate Otto and a great ‘badge constellations’ drawing by Bryan Mathers.
Next week I’m in Barcelona from Monday to Thursday for the ePIC conference. It’ll be great to meet friends old and new in the Open Badges community! On Friday I’m at former colleague John Bevan’s dotcomrade event in London.
Image CC BY-NC-SA Chris Scott
