Month: September 2015

Weeknote 38/2015

Posted on September 19, 2015September 18, 2015 by Doug Belshaw

This week I’ve been:

Sending out Issue #186 of my newsletter, Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel. Many thanks to Makers Academy for sponsoring September’s issues. Let me know if you know an organisation who might be interested in sponsoring October!
Releasing Episode 22 (‘Badass Context’) of the Today In Digital Education podcast that I record regularly with Dai Barnes. We discussed lots of things including Apple’s most recent product launch, banning smartphones and tablets in classrooms, and the ROI of open education.
Teaching the first session of Computing Club at my kids’ school. My son’s now old enough to come along and, after he got over the embarrassment of his dad teaching his friends, got stuck with the rest of them as learned a bit of Markdown.
Making (some) decisions about our loft conversion. We’re only one week in and the steels, windows, and floor are in! My wife’s making the majority of the decisions as I’m away at least a couple of days a week. It’s going to be a wonderful light and airy space when it’s finished.
Travelling to London and Brighton for work with City & Guilds. Lots of interesting stuff including chairing the regular Open Badges Advisory Group and being part of a pitch team for a relatively large and exciting project.
Learning the basis of iDraw. Many thanks to Bryan Mathers who gave me some very helpful pointers.
Involved in a full-day future planning session. More details when I can share them about that.
Staying at The Waterfront hotel in Brighton (along with the Samoan rugby squad who are immense) and the Novotel London City South, which had awesome privacy glass in the bathroom (see this video I took).
Catching up with Oliver Quinlan over coffee. We then headed to a Digital Leaders Salon. Felicity Singleton from the UK Government Digital Service was excellent.
Writing about how to sponsor my newsletter, as well as taking another look at the digital credentials landscape.

Next week I’m down in London on Wednesday and Thursday as it’s City & Guilds second UK Products & Services conference on the Thursday. The rest of the week I’ll be working from home — or, more likely, the library and coffee shops due to the noise generated by the builders…

Taking Another Look at the Digital Credentials Landscape [DMLcentral]

Posted on September 18, 2015September 18, 2015 by Doug Belshaw

My latest post for DMLcentral is up. Entitled Taking Another Look at the Digital Credentials Landscape, I attempt to clear up some confusion in the Open Badges landscape about various terms.

Here’s an excerpt:

In the early days of talking about Open Badges, I feel that we conflated several important points: the ability to issue micro credentials, bypassing traditional gatekeepers to learning, and the Open Badges standard itself. What I’ve tried to do in this post is, to some degree, begin to tease these apart. The important innovation is the interoperability and standards-based approach.

I’ve closed comments here to encourage you to leave them on the original post.

Click here to read in full on DMLcentral

How to sponsor Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel newsletter

Posted on September 15, 2015September 15, 2015 by Doug Belshaw

TL;DR: My weekly newsletter, Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel, goes out every Sunday morning (UK time). There’s 850+ subscribers and that’s growing every week. You can sponsor the newsletter by emailing me: [email protected]. It’s currently £400 per month, but this will increase in 2016.

A few years ago I started a newsletter called Things I Learned This Week. It was for my own benefit as I used it as a way to review what I’d come across that week. It started off small, but grew by word of mouth and people forwarding it to their friends.

Last year, I renamed it to Things We Learned This Week as I wanted to make it more inclusive. I’d envisioned people sending me links which I’d curate into something useful. That happened on occasion, but it became clear that people appreciate a clear voice.

So, this summer I rebranded my newsletter Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel. My good friend Bryan Mathers created a wonderful header image and I set up a page at thoughtshrapnel.com. My aim with Thought Shrapnel is to inform, entertain, and persuade. The current format is:

Sponsor message
Short introduction
Tweet of the week
Three main links (education, technology, productivity)
Six shorter links
GIF of the week
Quotation of the week

There’s two simple and straightforward reasons I’ve decided to allow limited, carefully chosen sponsorship. The first is that my newsletter takes time to create. It’s extra to my weekday commitments, taking me away from my wife and children. I need a justification for that. Second, it motivates me to create an issue during a week when I’d otherwise be lazy. There were plenty of issues of Things I Didn’t Learn This Week back in the day.

Sponsoring Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel gets your message in front of an engaged audience of educators, technologists and productivity enthusiasts. Sponsorship is exclusive: there’s only one sponsor per month.

Here’s how it looks at the top of the newsletter:

There’s also a space for the sponsor’s logo at the bottom of the newsletter.

Check out previous issues of Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel using the link below. Note that until Issue #185 the newsletter was known under a different name:

Newsletter archive

If you’d like to make an enquiry, including requesting more detailed statistics, please email me at [email protected]. Multi-month sponsorships and dates further out than six months are also available.

Many thanks to Makers Academy, nCube, Think Associates, and C-Learning for being early adopters and supporting the newsletter over the last few months!