Weeknote 21/2017
This week I’ve been:
- Sending out Thought Shrapnel, my weekly newsletter loosely structured around education, technology, and productivity. Issue #259 was entitled ‘Wonk(y)’.
- Running a virtual thinkathon with my We Are Open Co-op colleagues Laura Hilliger and Bryan Mathers for the team behind Passbolt, an Open Source team-focused password manager. It’s pretty awesome that 2017 has delivered seamless realtime collaboration between people based in Goa, Luxembourg, Germany, England, and the Canary Islands!
- Accompanying my son as he attended an invited training session at St. James Park, home of Newcastle United. As a Sunderland fan I wiped my feet on the way out…
- Signing up at social.coop, and switching Mastodon instances, for reasons I outline here.
- Catching up with various people, including Erica Neve, Rosie Clayton, Jim Knight, John Bevan, Will Bentinck, Sam Morgan, and Wayne Skipper.
- Co-operating with Cetis on a Ufi VocTech Seed Fund bid on behalf of We Are Open. We’re aiming to create a semi-structured learning platform to enable people to credential digital employability skills, in particular around collaboration and co-operation.
- Guest editing Offscreen Dispatch, a great weekly newsletter that’s a “hand-picked selection of great apps, accessories, and articles”. My issue goes out next Tuesday.
- Attending the Freeformers Future of Work Summit. Many thanks to Bryan Mathers and family for letting me stay over at their house on Wednesday night. Always a pleasure.
- Recording and releasing Episode 83 of Today In Digital Education (TIDE), the regular podcast I record with Dai Barnes. This episode was entitled ‘Controlling the Internet’ and we discussed Twitter’s new privacy settings, Doug’s experiments with Mastodon, Chrome’s dominance of the browser market, surveillance states, cognitive load theory, and more!
- Drafting a post for DML Central. I’m not happy with the way it flows, so not going to share it yet.
- Sending out Issue #11 of Badge News, the bi-weekly newsletter for those interested in keeping up-to-date on what’s happening in the world of Open Badges.
- Writing:
- Badge Wiki: creating a knowledge base for Open Badges (We Are Open blog, 26th May 2017)
- Do we have a problem with ‘evidence’ in education? (Discours.es, 26th May 2017)
- Why I just switched instance on Mastodon (Discours.es, 24th May 2017)
Next week it’s half-term for the rest of my family. As a result, apart from a bit of research for London CLC and for Rachel Hammel, and some preparatory work for Badge Wiki, I’ll be taking it a bit easier. We may go away for a night or two.
One thing I will need to prepare for, however, it the virtual conference on the topic of Digital Literacy and Fake News. I’m a keynote speaker, and the resources I’ll be pointing to can be found here.
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]
