Weeknote 05/2016

This week I’ve been:

• Sending out Issue #201 of Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel, my weekly newsletter loosely focused on education, technology, and productivity. This week it included links about life skills, software with shareholders, and remote working.
• Recording and releasing Episode 37 (‘Self-driving Newsletters’) of the Today In Digital Education podcast, my weekly podcast with co-host Dai Barnes. In this week’s episode we discussedemail newsletters, things kids should learn at every age, self-driving cars, the ‘useless agony of going offline’, and more!
• At home. My train to London was cancelled on Tuesday morning and the subsequent ones delayed, so I worked for City & Guilds from my home office. In some ways, that was great (seeing family, etc.) but in others not so much (getting things done face-to-face).
• Working on an Open Badges video (with Bryan Mathers) and business case for C&G.
• Running Computing Club at my kids’ school. They’re really enjoying Code Combat!
• Withdrawing from the OER16 conference. It wasn’t clear at all that presenters would have to pay the full registration fee. As my co-presenter Laura would be coming from Germany, that seemed prohibitive. My tweet prompted some discussion…
• Updating a post I wrote last month linking to a couple of Literacy Today articles featuring my work. They’re both now open-access.
• Doing some planning towards the ISTE pre-conference workshop I’m co-leading. I’ve also now been announced as the keynote speaker for the pre-ISTE 2016 Digital Badge Summit, also in Colorado, USA.
• Designing a really early prototype towards a redesign of the website for the church we attend. The current site can be viewed here. This counts towards the pro-bono work I’m doing in 2016.
• Wrote some LinkedIn recommendations for some people I value.
• Hanging out with co-conspirators in my super-secret Slack channel, thinking about how best we can work together. Talking of Slack, they’ve launched a new service for chatting around topics. If you’re a listener to the TIDE podcast, you might be interested in this.
• Writing:
  • Fools suffer from an excess of advice (4th February)
  • Minion mindsets (3rd February)
  • Burn-out happens faster for introverted teachers (3rd February)

This week was a pretty quiet week, which was good as my son was ill with tonsillitis at the beginning of it! Working from home is of real benefit in these situations. There are others, too.

Next week? Well, I’ll be down in London from Tuesday to Thursday working three days for City & Guilds. Tuesday afternoon/evening I’ll be at DebateTech, which should be interesting. Let me know if you’ll be around for a coffee, or if you need someone will my (dynamic) skillset in your organisation’s life!

Image CC BY-NC Gail