Month: January 2016

3 things I’ve learned from 200 weeks of sending out an email newsletter

Posted on January 22, 2016January 22, 2016 by Doug Belshaw

Doug Belshaw's Thought Shrapnel

Every week, nearly 1,000 people receive my newsletter in their inboxes. Entitled Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel it’s an irreverent look at the intersection of education, technology, and productivity. People seem to like it, which is why this Sunday I’ll be sending out issue 200!

Here’s some things I’ve learned along the way. I hope it’s of use to those thinking of starting up their own newsletter in 2016. 🙂

1. You are the most important audience

Even if you’re productive and have great workflows, it still takes time to curate and craft a newsletter. You need to motivate yourself to do it every week, as consistency is key to developing an audience.

I’ve developed a few ways to ensure I send out a newsletter on a regular basis:

I only share links I find interesting. My single criterion is “would I like to see this in someone else’s newsletter?”
I take breaks. Every year I have one, sometimes two, months where I’m off personal email and social media. I’ve extended that to my newsletter. Having downtime makes your uptime more productive.
I’ve started allowing sponsorships. When there’s money involved, then there’s expectation and a contract. This pays for my time, but also means I’ve got another reason to get this week’s newsletter out of the door.

2. People like commentary

Every week I get people replying to my newsletters. Those replies go direct to me, and I respond to each one. What I’ve found is that people really enjoy it when I comment on the links that I’m sharing.

We’re often exhorted to ‘add value’ in life. I think this is one example where I can do so in a pretty simple way. For example, I might point out how X is similar to Y, or how an article is based on a false premise, or juxtapose it with something else to raise a smile.

True curation is about doing more than giving people a bunch of links. It’s about presenting them with information in a way that’s going to inform or entertain to the best of my ability.

3. A little bit of personality goes a long way

I’m a fan of long-form content on the web. I have a weekly podcast with Dai Barnes called Today In Digital Education (TIDE) that often runs to an hour and a half. We discuss lots of things during that time, but even so we could go on longer. The important thing is that we attend to what’s important.

Similarly, with my newsletter, I could literally list the hundreds of links I bookmark and come across each week. But that would be of little value to my subscribers. Instead, I sift through these for the ones that either resonate with, or challenge, my worldview. That means that my newsletter isn’t a bland read: it’s opinionated and biased. But that’s OK.

Conclusion

I greatly enjoy the discipline of curating and crafting a weekly newsletter to send out every Sunday morning (UK time). If you’re reading this and don’t yet subscribe, then I hope you’ll consider doing so at thoughtshrapnel.com.

I’m also looking for sponsors for 2016. I’ve already been fortunate to have some great sponsors last year, including Makers Academy, C-Learning, and Think Associates. Get in touch if you’d like to discuss this further: [email protected]

Many thanks to my friend and collaborator Bryan Mathers for the great logo he devised last year! For more of his work visit bryanmathers.com or follow him as @BryanMMathers on Twitter!

Where I’ll be at BETT 2016

Posted on January 18, 2016January 18, 2016 by Doug Belshaw

I’ve spoken at BETT in many guises. I started off as a teacher, then I went as a school senior leader, then went there during my time with Jisc, then Mozilla… This time around, BETT 2016 will be my first as a consultant. On the first day I’m there I’ll have my City & Guilds hat on as they’re one of my main clients. On the second, I’m representing myself (i.e. Dynamic Skillset).

I love to hate BETT. While I dislike the amount of snake oil I see there, it’s worth attending because of the people. While I’m there I try to bring a dose of healthy edtech skepticism. I also try and show people alternatives to to their current reality.

This year, you can catch me at BETT at the following times:

Wednesday 20th

The first session I’m involved with on Wednesday is a presentation with Bryan Mathers. We’ll be talking about educational credentials such as Open Badges, and how City & Guilds can help with this. We’ll be going both wide and deep.

The Digital Skills Sandwich: credentialing 21st literacies in a fast-paced environment (1:45pm to 2:15pm) Learn Live Further Education and Skills theatre

The second session is one I’m chairing. I’m looking forward to asking probing questions of the panellists and getting input from the audience!

Connecting With Young People: Using Social Media and Digital Marketing to Enhance Student Recruitment (4:45pm to 5:30pm) Learn Live Further Education and Skills theatre

If you’re attending BETT and want to catch up, lunch, a coffee after my presentation, or dinner are your best options.

Thursday 21st

I’m only doing one short presentation on Thursday, and spending the rest of my time wandering around. I’ll be presenting on the Exa Networks stand (full programme), after being asked nicely by Alan O’Donohoe. Space is limited and there’ll be 10 minutes for questions afterwards.

How to be an (open) badger (12:00-12:20) Stand B160 – Exa Education

I’m hoping to bump into a few people on Thursday before heading home late afternoon. I’ll be pretty flexible, so if you want to say hello, do tweet me (@dajbelshaw) or email me beforehand to arrange a time ([email protected]).

If you’re interested in where I’ll be over the coming year, then you might want to check out my Lanyrd profile. I still need to update it with some stuff from last year, but event-wise it’s a decent overview of my past/future movements!

What a post-Persona landscape means for Open Badges

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Doug Belshaw

Note: I don’t work for Mozilla any more, so (like Adele) these are my thoughts ‘from the outside’…

Introduction

Open Badges is no longer a Mozilla project. In fact, it hasn’t been for a while — the Badge Alliance was set up a couple of years ago to promote the specification on a both a technical and community basis. As I stated in a recent post, this is a good thing and means that the future is bright for Open Badges.

However, Mozilla is still involved with the Open Badges project: Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, sits on the board of the Badge Alliance. Mozilla also pays for contractors to work on the Open Badges backpack and there were badges earned at the Mozilla Festival a few months ago.

Although it may seem strange for those used to corporates interested purely in profit, Mozilla creates what the open web needs at any given time. Like any organisation, sometimes it gets these wrong, either because the concept was flawed, or because the execution was poor. Other times, I’d argue, Mozilla doesn’t give ideas and concepts enough time to gain traction.

The end of Persona at Mozilla

Open Badges, at its very essence, is a technical specification. It allows credentials with metadata hard-coded into them to be issued, exchanged, and displayed. This is done in a secure, standardised manner.

For users to be able to access their ‘backpack’ (i.e. the place they store badges) they needed a secure login system.Back in 2011 at the start of the Open Badges project it made sense to make use of Mozilla’s nascent Persona project. This aimed to provide a way for users to easily sign into sites around the web without using their Facebook/Google logins. These ‘social’ sign-in methods mean that users are tracked around the web — something that Mozilla was obviously against.

By 2014, Persona wasn’t seen to be having the kind of ‘growth trajectory’ that Mozilla wanted. The project was transferred to community ownership and most of the team left Mozilla in 2015. It was announced that Persona would be shutting down as a Mozilla service in November 2016. While Persona will exist as an open source project, it won’t be hosted by Mozilla.

What this means for Open Badges

Although I’m not aware of an official announcement from the Badge Alliance, I think it’s worth making three points here.

1. You can still use Persona

If you’re a developer, you can still use Persona. It’s open source. It works.

2. Persona is not central to the Open Badges Infrastructure

The Open Badges backpack is one place where users can store their badges. There are others, including the Open Badge Passport and Open Badge Academy. MacArthur, who seed-funded the Open Badges ecosystem, have a new platform launching through LRNG.

It is up to the organisations behind these various solutions as to how they allow users to authenticate. They may choose to allow social logins. They may force users to create logins based on their email address. They may decide to use an open source version of Persona. It’s entirely up to them.

3. A post-Persona badges system has its advantages

The Persona authentication system runs off email addresses. This means that transitioning from Persona to another system is relatively straightforward. It has, however, meant that for the past few years we’ve had a recurrent problem: what do you do with people being issued badges to multiple email addresses?

Tying badges to emails seemed like the easiest and fastest way to get to a critical mass in terms of Open Badge adoption. Now that’s worked, we need to think in a more nuanced way about allowing users to tie multiple identities to a single badge.

Conclusion

Persona was always a slightly awkward fit for Open Badges. Although, for a time, it made sense to use Persona for authentication to the Open Badges backpack, we’re now in a post-Persona landscape. This brings with it certain advantages.

As Nate Otto wrote in his post Open Badges in 2016: A Look Ahead, the project is growing up. It’s time to move beyond what was expedient at the dawn of Open Badges and look to the future. I’m sad to see the decline of Persona, but I’m excited what the future holds!

Header image CC BY-NC-SA Barbara