Weeknote 20/2016
Note: the only feedback I got about last week’s alternative weeknote format was from Aaron Davis (“a bit lengthy”) and my wife (“who wants to know about all that stuff?”). So you’ll be pleased to learn that I’ve returned to the original approach.
This week I’ve been:
- Sending out Issue #216 of Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel, my weekly newsletter loosely focused on education, technology, and productivity. Many thanks to 9Sharp for sponsoring this week’s issue!
- Recording and releasing Episode 51 (‘Robot-proof SATs’) of the Today In Digital Education podcast, my weekly podcast with co-host Dai Barnes and special guest Bryan Mathers. We discussed SATs, assessment, ‘robot-proofing’ careers, the state of the web, startups listed on BetaList, morning routines, and more! You can discuss TIDE in our Slack channel.
- Spending four days in London doing some work for NCUB and then three days with City & Guilds. I’ve been helping the latter plan some badges stuff for the Festival of Skills in July.
- Getting a demo from Safwan Hak of 9Sharp‘s new integration with Open Badges.
- Setting up a bank account for weareopen.coop with John Bevan. Many thanks to Metro Bank for being so helpful. TSB, for example, were more interested in asking questions like “what will your cashflow be like in year three?”.
- Having lunch with Myles Runham and John Bevan on Tuesday at the British Library, and then John Potter at the always-great Ask For Janice on Wednesday.
- Contributing to this week’s Open Badges community call. It was a bit ‘inside baseball’ (as Americans say) as we were talking about the future of communications within the community.
- Planning a pre-conference workshop for the ISTE conference next month in Denver with Noah Geisel, Nate Otto, and Bryan Mathers.
- Holding a short pre-planning meeting with the weareopen.coop crew (John, Laura, Bryan) before our actual planning meeting next week at Ravensbourne.
- Bumping into Andrew Haxell who about 10 minutes after following each other, found that we both live in Morpeth and were on the same train! We had a brief chat and I’m hoping he follows up about Open Badges at Northumbria University.
- Finishing off some work for London CLC around events and digital literacies. I’m looking forward to doing some more work with them in the next few weeks.
- Postponing my second workshop with Cambridge English so as to avoid running it a basement room with no natural light..
- Going out for a Dynamic Skillset planning lunch with my wife, Hannah, who’s both my CFO and COO. We went to the Running Fox in Felton which is a delight, both in terms of food and how close they skirt to copyright infringement of the Mozilla Firefox logo. Afterwards we went for a wander, and stumbled across the architecturally-curious Church of St Michael and All Angels.
- Writing:
Next week I’ll be in London from Monday to Wednesday working with City & Guilds, then planning next steps with weareopen.coop on Thursday. I’ve got bits and pieces to do on Friday, before heading to the England vs. Australia match in the evening. After that I’m volunteering to help with Cub camp all Bank Holiday weekend…
