Weeknote 47/2016

This week I’ve been:

• Sending out Issue #238 of Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel, my weekly newsletter loosely focused on education, technology, and productivity. It featured, among other things, education being the ‘answer’, super-private web browsing, and B.S. detection. Many thanks to Makers Academy for sponsorship!
• Interviewed by one of Ben Williamson‘s PhD students about the introduction of the Computing curriculum in England over the last five years.
• Catching up with Wayne Skipper, Nate Otto, and Kim Hammond from Concentric Sky. They demoed the new ‘pathways’ features in Badgr to Bryan Mathers and me, in advance of some work we’ll be doing with them.
• Co-operating with my We Are Open colleagues. Laura wrote up our latest ‘co-op day’ with the great title Are we post-capitalism yet? We ended the day collaborating with Educators Co-op on a webinar entitled Why badges? It was the first time any of us have used YouTube Live, but it went pretty well.
• Recording and releasing Episode 70 (‘Slacking off’) of Today In Digital Education, my weekly podcast with co-host Dai Barnes.  This week was a little different in that we went through, discussed, and attempted to answer questions from the TIDE Slack channel.
• Travelling to Jersey and visiting d’Auvergne Primary School on Wednesday afternoon. Amber Freer was kind enough to show me around and how they’re using G-Suite for Education alongside other technologies provided by the States of Jersey Education Department.
• Discussing Open Badges with with CoderDojo,  the global network of free computer programming clubs for young people. They need to move from BadgeKit (which hasn’t been supported for a good while now) to another Open Source badging platform.
• Consulting with Victoria College on Jersey. I continued departmental training on G-Suite for Education, and created a draft digital skills framework. I’ll be back next week, too.
• Delayed. I’m having to stay overnight tonight (Friday) in Southampton. My flight from Jersey is delayed for ‘operational reasons’, meaning I’ll miss my connecting flight home.
• Writing:
  • Port 443 in a storm (Discours.es, 26th November 2016)
  • Basic digital skills framework based on G-Suite for Education (v0.1) (Discours.es, 25th November 2016)
  • How to create a sustainable web presence (Literaci.es, 23rd November 2016)
  • Change (Discours.es, 22nd November 2016)
  • Use ‘Custom fields’ to Add Context To Your Entire Trello Board (NewCo Shift, 21st November 2016)
  • The fruits of our labours (Discours.es, 21st November 2016)
  • On ‘quitting social media’ to further your career (Discours.es, 20th November 2016)
  • 3 problems Trump’s victory brought into sharp focus (Discours.es, 20th November 2016)

Next week I’m working from home on Monday morning, and then travelling to London in the afternoon. From there, I’ll be working with Sussex Downs College on Tuesday, then heading to Jersey again on Wednesday to work with Victoria College on Thursday/Friday.

A reminder that #BelshawBlackOps16 Pt.2 begins next week. That means that this is my final weeknote of the year!