![The Ontology of the Web (Or, Why I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Learning Standards) [DMLcentral]](https://dougbelshaw.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/The-Ontology-of-the-Web-Or-Why-I-Learned-to-Stop-Worrying-and-Love-Learning-Standards-DMLcentral-2013-09-17-10-19-20-280x150.png)
My latest post for DMLcentral is now up.
Entitled The Ontology of the Web (Or, Why I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Learning Standards), I manage to cram in references to Clay Shirky, William James, Plato, and John Dewey into just over a thousand words.
At the beginning of 2013 the Mozilla Foundation announced its intention to work with the community to create a new learning standard for Web Literacy. I’m delighted to say that we’re well on course to release v1.0 of that standard at the Mozilla Festival in London at the end of October. In this post I want to give an overview of how I went from being initially skeptical to an enthusiastic project lead – all because of something I learned about ontology from Clay Shirky.
You can read the post in full here.
This week I’ve been:
- Sorting out this blog with which I’ve been having issues for weeks (if not months). Tim Owens from Hippie Hosting has been beyond gracious and helpful as we tried to get the root of the problem. I think now I’ve reinstalled the whole thing, sorted out caching and Cloudflare on the domain, we should be OK (fingers crossed!)
- Completing a ‘values survey’ for the upcoming Mozilla Summit (I’m going to Brussels). It’s great to be working for an organization with value so close to my own. 🙂
- Responding to more feedback on the Web Literacy Standard.
- Participating in my usual weekly calls. I decided not to attend one of the optional ones this Wednesday so I didn’t have four in a row. Needless to say I felt a lot better afterwards.
- Watching the videos (and trying to remember ‘A’-Level Maths) as part of the Coursera Cryptography I MOOC.
- Joining in the live session for the Open Badges MOOC.
- Writing a last-minute proposal for the Mozilla Festival and helping to wrangle the Badges and Skills track.
- Talking to people like Chris Appleton and Cassie McDaniel in preparation for v1.0 of the Web Literacy Standard.
- Contacting OpenStand about using their insignias with the Web Literacy Standard.
- Joining the W3C Web Education Standards community group. I had to be ‘nominated’ by Mozilla and everything.
- Setting a date for the first LOLCAT (Loosely-Organised Local Community Action Team) meeting. It’s a fancy name for a cross-team group essentially focusing on workflows and documentation to improve co-ordination across MoFo.
- Chopping up Laura Thomson’s excellent Minimum Viable Bureaucracy talk and putting it on the Internet Archive. I’ll be blogging about it soon.
- Hacking on the Web Literacy Standard with a subsection of the community. The latest document is here.
- Talking with Emil Ahangarzadeh and Simon Grant about what they can (individually) do with the Web Literacy Standard.
- Writing a piece for the consideration of Jeff Brazil, editor of DMLcentral about ontology, learning standards and Clay Shirky. You can take a sneak peek here.
Next week I’m in Geneva Monday-Wednesday at OKCon chairing a session on Open Education.
This week I’ve been:
- Celebrating my 10 years of marriage to my wonderful wife.
- Setting up PGP signing/encryption of my work email (surprisingly easy using GPGTools on OS X)
- Mapping existing online activities to the Web Literacy Standard.
- Purchasing a ticket to #CASinclude in November as well as Bruce Schneier’s ebook Liars and Outliers.
- Responding to more feedback on the Web Literacy Standard.
- Changing the way I deal with email on a daily basis.
- Submitting a cheeky last-second session proposal for MozFest.
- Talking with people (like KQED) about aligning with the Web Literacy Standard.
- Setting up a not-so-covert cross-team Mozilla working group that has LOLCAT as an acronym.
- Attending my usual weekly calls. I now have four calls in a row between 3pm and 7pm on a Wednesday, which is an absolute killer.
- Taking Friday off work to look after my daughter (we’ve got some childcare issues at the moment).
Those childcare issues I’ve alluded to in the last bullet point have contributed to us having to abandon plans to celebrate our wedding anniversary in Amsterdam. So I’ve got a bonus three days at work next week! I’ll be using some of that time to prepare for OKCon in Geneva where I’ll be moderating a panel session.
