Open Thinkering

Menu

Month: March 2017

Badges, Proof and Pathways [DML Central]

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

My latest post for DML Central has now been published. It was originally a commission through our co-op from Concentric Sky late last year, so I’m glad to finally have it published! It features a great header image from Bryan Mathers.

The focus of the article is on a new open standard for badge pathways that is available in Concentric Sky’s Badgr platform. I’m hoping other platforms adopt it quickly, as it makes a lot of things possible that until now have only been hypothetical.

An excerpt:

It just happens that all of these badges are issued via Badgr, but they could be issued by any badge platform. Interestingly, the Open Pathways standard has the flexibility to require all badges, or just some badges to earn before the ‘parent’ badge is completed. These pathways can then be stacked almost ad-infinitum leading to nested “constellations” of badges. The opportunities are endless.

Click here to read the article in full.

(Note: I’ve closed comments here to encourage you to comment on the original article!)

Weeknote 10/2017

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

This week I’ve been:

  • Doing different and diverse kinds of work. I’ve really enjoyed the variety of this working week in particular. I’m self-employed so I get high levels of autonomy and agency in my work anyway, but the focus of the things I’ve done for three different clients has been vastly different. It’s also involved a nice mix of working from my home office, travelling within the region that I live, and travelling further afield.
  • Sending out Thought Shrapnel, my weekly newsletter loosely structured around education, technology, and productivity. Issue #249 was entitled ‘Ain’t no time like the present’.
  • Catching up with Thomas Steele-Maley, who’s currently doing great things in Dubai.
  • Failing to record an episode of the TIDE podcast, as Dai and I couldn’t align our schedules this week. Still our episodes are quite long, so it will give people a chance to catch up!
  • Sad to see the Azure Window in Gozo (an island off Malta) collapse into the sea. My family visited it on a number of occasions, as Gozo is one of our favourite places to go on holiday. It’s going to be a very different place as a result.
  • Helping facilitate a Story Hack event at Gateshead Central Library. We used the Booktype platform to create a book in less than seven hours. The quality of the book wasn’t the important part; the focus was on collaboration and framing an interesting topic. We chose to question Wikipedia’s guidelines around ‘notoriety’.
  • Interviewed for E-180 magazine. I really enjoy their regular newsletter, so was pleased to be able to answer some of the questions they had about Open Badges.
  • Working with Laura Hilliger to install Discourse, an open-source forum platform for a client of our co-op. We’re configuring it so each user chooses a pseudonym and so can be as anonymous as they want to be to other users. However, those in charge of the forum will know who each individual user is. It’s reasonably high-stakes in focus, so you can’t access it without a login to the forum itself.
  • Running a thinkathon for the NCCA in Dublin, Ireland with Bryan Mathers. We stayed in an apartment that was quiet, yet also right opposite the famous Toners pub! It was good to help Fred Boss and colleagues think through Open Badges.
  • Writing:

Next week, I’ll be finishing off that discussion forum piece of work, recording a new chapter of my audiobook on productivity, and preparing for a couple of upcoming trips to record some ‘quality mountain days’ in preparation for my Mountain Leader course.

I make my living helping people and organisations become more productive in their use of technology.  If you’ve got something that you think I might be able to help with, please do get in touch! Email: [email protected]

 

My sites are now hosted in the European Union

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

I host my websites through Reclaim Hosting. I’ve been with them for a few years now, ever since they were known as ‘Hippie Hosting’ and an offshoot of the amazing work done by Jim Groom and team at the University of Mary Washington’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies.

Companies often talk about their commitment to customer service, but I’ve never known anything like that which receive from Reclaim Hosting. It’s insane. For example, in the last six months, amongst other things, they’ve:

  • Responded within a minute to a query about my wiki being down, and had fixed it for me within five minutes.
  • Worked with me to rectify a persistent spamming problem on my sites (that was my fault, not there’s)
  • Migrated my sites from US servers to ones based in the EU within 24 hours of me tweeting that I’d like them to do so.

On top of that, they charge me a very low price. I’m a huge fan, as you can tell.

The last of the bullet points is an important one as President Trump continues to rip up the good work carried out by his predecessors. For example, earlier this month, The Register reported on a joint letter sent by Human Rights watch and the ACLU which outlines in detail how Trump’s executive orders are underming the US-EU Privacy Shield. Bloomberg reckons that the EU are ready to pull out of it.

It’s 2017, so it seems strange to be talking about things that seemed more important in the early days of the web, such as where your server is located. But, of course, given the nationalist turn we’ve taken in the west, these things matter.

They matter because he location of your server is still of vital importance, despite recent protestations, that data in transit through the US makes it subject to US law. What you put on your own web space isn’t just the front end stuff that everyone sees, it’s the backend stuff as well — family photos, private emails, and the like.

Some people have asked why I’ve chosen to host my data in Germany, rather than in the UK. Well, for a start, I still consider myself as more European than British, despite ‘Brexit’. Second, Germany has stronger privacy laws than the UK (and certainly the US). Finally, and more pragmatically, it’s the EU option offered by Reclaim Hosting (mainly, I believe, because Digital Ocean offer block storage in that zone)

I perhaps spend more time thinking about these things than most, but that’s because it’s something I deem important. Ironically, most of my readers are in the US, so this move actually adds a few milliseconds to their page load times. Sorry about that…

Image CC BY Jeff Ddevjet

css.php