This week I’ve been:
- At home. Yep, that’s right – due to a Bank Holiday on Monday, a meeting up here in the North East, and half-term I decided not to go down to London this week!
- Picking up our brand-new, second-hand Ford Focus Estate. It’s a Zetec model so it’s OK, but it’s no Volvo V50 R-Design. Sad to say we just couldn’t find one of those close enough to where we live.
- Sending out Things We Learned This Week #175. This month’s newsletters are kindly sponsored by C-Learning. There was no episode of the TIDE podcast this week.
- Getting to grips with my drone. I managed to fly it through the window of a ruined castle near where we live. Of course, once I found the ‘low-speed’ mode, it was much easier to control…
- Composing an article about peak centralisation and ‘software with shareholders’ for Ben Williamson‘s upcoming ebook.
- Preparing for next three weeks where I’ve got a lot of travel. I’ll be in Scotland (twice), Ireland, Spain, and London three times!
- Using Hackpad as a half-way house between Etherpad and Google Docs for my work with/at City & Guilds. I’m not sure if it’ll still exist when Dropbox Notes launches, however.
- Starting to write a six-month plan for June to November at City & Guilds. I’m probably going to drop down to three days a week from September so I can have a day to myself and a day working with other clients (otherwise I might as well be employed by them!)
- Putting together a Open Badges Playbook (resources) Google+ collection.
- Purchasing a Lenovo N20 Chromebook. I got it super-cheap on eBay as, despite being pretty much brand new, it was being sold by a someone with zero feedback and it’s got a Swedish keyboard!
- Meeting with representatives from Gateshead Council on behalf of City & Guilds Kineo. They provide courses for 49,000 learners and want to improve their Open Badges offerings, so Bryan Mathers and I gave them some advice and are writing up a report.
- Taking it a bit easier with work and exercise as I felt under the weather. Just a cold, but I find if I try and soldier on regardless, I stay ill for longer.
- Catching up with Grainne Hamilton about a meeting we’ve got with the SQA next Monday. I also had a conversation with Satu Järvinen and Esko Lius about Open Badges activity in Finland, and helped a couple of other people with brief conversations.
- Going out for dinner with Alan O’Donahoe and Claire Garside, who stopped off in Morpeth on their way from Leeds to Edinburgh. It was great to meet them face-to-face after following their work for the last few years.
- Writing:
Next week I’m up in Glasgow on Monday, at home on Tuesday, then in London Wednesday/Thursday. Depending upon whether the rail workers’ strike goes ahead, I may or may not be running a digital literacies workshop for the SSSC in Edinburgh on Friday!
Image CC BY-NC-SA Chris Yarzab
This week I’ve been:
- Travelling to and from London on Tuesday/Wednesday. This week I stayed at citizenM, which I always enjoy. I’m seriously planning our loft conversion to have similar levels of home automation!
- Given a tour of the Wayra UK startup accelerator by Uri Gonda. I met Philip Steele, CEO and founder of nCube which might lead to some interesting collaborations.
- Releasing Episode 11: Exponential Excellence of the my weekly #TIDE podcast with Dai Barnes.
- Publishing my Things We Learned This Week #174 newsletter, kindly sponsored this month by C-Learning.
- Securing newsletter sponsorship for June and July.
- Meeting with clients about post-September work. I’m in the very fortunate position of being spoiled for choice.
- Editing Powerpoint decks, sending emails, working on proposals, and sitting in meetings.
- Issuing myself the ‘drone mechanic’ badge after soldering for the first time since a teenager in order to fix the motor on my quadcopter.
- Planning with Bryan Mathers for various things, including our visit to Gateshead Council next week around Open Badges.
- Arranging travel for upcoming trips. The first two weeks of June are going to be very busy!
- Getting Ben Betts to talk me through the technical infrastructure behind TechBacc.
- Starting to plan for my next six months consulting for City & Guilds.
- Writing a post for DMLcentral about Open Badges specification v1.1. It’ll go live next week.
- Writing:
Next week there’s a Bank Holiday on Monday, and then I’m not going down to London. Given that I’m meeting with Gateshead Council on Wednesday, I’ve got loads of travel in June, and it’s my kids’ half-term, I thought I’d stay up here for a change!
This week I’ve been:
- Despairing at the outcome of the UK General Election. I must live in an echo chamber – everyone I know claimed to be voting for Labour, the Green Party, or the SNP. Perhaps I should check out Nomad List – and then check my family out of the UK?
- Involved in a traffic accident after someone took out the side of my car as I was coming off a single-track bridge. My kids were in the back. Everyone was OK – including the driver at fault. Our car’s been written off.
- Travelling to and from London – this time with my wife. We stayed at the Mondrian hotel.
- Delayed on the way back home from London on the train. Coupled with an early morning it meant I slept for 12 hours on Thursday night!
- Collaborating with Bryan Mathers on a v0.5 update to the Community Alignment model. His drawings really bring it to life!
- Continuing to work consult for City & Guilds around Open Badges. I’ve found the recently-published report, Four Scenarios on the Future of Credentials [PDF] incredibly useful.
- Creating a new signup page for my Things We Learned This Week newsletter, this month sponsored by C-Learning. It goes out every Sunday and this week, for the first time, it will be delivered at 6.30am to inboxes – no matter where in the world you are!
- Swimming for the first time for a couple of weeks. Water-based fitness fades much faster than land-based fitness!
- Purchasing the tidepodcast.org domain for the regular Today In Digital Education (TIDE) podcast that Dai Barnes and I produce. I also bought us decent microphones with some of the proceeds from C-Learning sponsoring my newsletter this month.
- Releasing TIDE Episode 9: Hackstage Class.
- Moving to Google Apps for Dynamic Skillset‘s email, docs, calendar, etc. I’m still using Fastmail for my personal email.
- Running another ICT Club session at my kids’ school. I got them to zoom out on their favourite website and then stick Post-It notes all over the screen, identifying different parts of a web page. Then I introduced them to some of the HTML tags that make up those different elements.
- Looking forward to my Dad coming home next Friday from his seven-month stint advising the senior leadership of Aspire Academy in Doha, Qatar. We shall drink much whisky.
- Helping my mother set up her Microsoft Lumia 640. She’s delighted with it as an upgrade from a third-hand iPhone 4. I have to say, I was impressed with it as an integrated package.
- Writing about:
Next week we’re getting a Nest learning thermostat installed on Monday, and I’m down in London on Tuesday and Wednesday as usual.
Image CC BY-NC Duncan Toms
