This week I’ve been:
- Sending out Thought Shrapnel, my weekly newsletter loosely structured around education, technology, and productivity. Issue #263 was entitled ‘Sizzle’. Don’t forget you can sign up to Thought Shrapnel Live! using Telegram to receive links as I come across them.
- Giving the closing keynote at an Open Badges event up at the University of Dundee. My slide deck can be found here. I enjoyed catching up with Grainne Hamilton from Digitalme while I was there (we were former colleagues at Jisc).
- Redesigning the landing page of dougbelshaw.com on the train home from Dundee. I’m much happier with how it looks now!
- Making progress with Badge Wiki, from a technical and policy perspective. With the assistance of Web Architects we’ve sorted out the login workflow, and I’ve drafted Terms of Use and a Privacy Policy for community feedback.
- Meeting with Sarah Horrocks from London CLC about some research around international teacher professional development that we’re doing for the Education Development Trust.
- Issuing badges to more of those who have completed Badge Bootcamp. We’re actually going to shut it down at the end of the month to tweak it a bit over the summer, so be quick if you want to go through it!
- Catching up with Rhys Kidd-Scannell who works for Frog, and is also the father of my daughter’s friend. I also spoke with a reporter from EducationInvestor magazine about badges, Eva-Marie Costello about her plans for digital literacy-related apps for underserved populations, and Bryan Mathers about visualising ways in which badges can be ‘dynamic’ with v2.0 of the Open Badges specification.
- Attending the local Scout group’s AGM. It looks like I may have upgraded my role from Executive Committee member to Secretary.
- Compiling, editing, and sending out Issue #13 of Badge News, a regular newsletter for the Open Badges community.
- Looking after my children due to a teacher training day on Friday.
- Spending time with local pharmacists, opticians, and doctors at the RVI in Newcastle after a mystery eye infection. I can see fine, but it’s painful. They’ve put it down as viral conjunctivitis, but that’s because they weren’t sure what else it could be…
- Writing:
Next week I’m working from home at the start of the week, then heading to London on Wednesday to take part in an SQA expert group on assessment on Thursday. I’m itching to get away up a mountain again, but that might not happen until August now.
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]
Earlier this year, I wrote about the importance of thinking about a project’s architecture of participation when encouraging contribution from a new or existing community of people.
In that post, I included a checklist containing eight points to consider. I think I’ve got another one to add: get your policies right by soliciting feedback on them.
We Are Open Co-op is currently in the first phase of creating Badge Wiki, a knowledge base for the Open Badges community. It’s a project made possible through the support of Participate.com.
As part of this process, we have to come up with several policies, perhaps the two most important of which are the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. We decided to use the Wikimedia Foundation’s openly-licensed policies as a starting point, adapting them to our needs.
This has thrown up some interesting issues and considerations from an architecture of participation point of view. After all, if people don’t agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, they can’t use Badge Wiki. There are three important ways in which our draft policies differ from the original Wikimedia Foundation source policies:
- CC BY – we propose that Badge Wiki use a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license instead of the CC BY-SA license used on other wikis, including Wikipedia. Although we would encourage them to do so, we recognise that some people may not be in a position to share material they reuse and remix from Badge Wiki under an open license.
- Register to edit – we propose that, in order to edit Badge Wiki, you must have a registered user account, approved by an administrator. This is to prevent valuable contribution time being taken up by wiki vandalism, trolling, and other anti-social behaviours caused by anonymous editing.
- Real name policy – we propose that members of Badge Wiki use their real names on their profile pages, as well as provide a short bio. This is to prevent accusations of sabotage, given that the Open Badges ecosystem includes commercial interests.
You can access the draft Terms of Use and Privacy Policy for Badge Wiki at the links below:
You’re welcome to leave feedback on the posts themselves, in relevant Open Badges Google Group thread, or directly to us: [email protected].
Thanks in advance for your participation and contribution. Remember, comments expressing support and broad agreement are as valuable as expert nitpicking!
I wrote my own HTML and CSS for dougbelshaw.com back when I was at Mozilla. It was originally a template to be used with Thimble, and a few people ‘forked’ it to use it for their own site.
Although it had some nice features, however — like a JavaScript library that swapped out text, a custom DuckDuckGo search engine, and one of my photographs of Druridge Bay — it wasn’t responsive and, quite frankly, it looked a bit old-fashioned.
So, on the train on the way back from Dundee today, I thought I’d do something about it. I knew that I wanted something pretty simple and minimalist, yet with just enough to ‘delight’ visitors. It needed to serve static files, not rely on a database back end (as with WordPress).
I also wanted to link to something I’ve been tinkering around with that allows me to surface my most recent writing. I’d already put that together at dougbelshaw.com/feeds in response to people complaining that they miss my stuff because I post it in different places around the web.
For those interested, I’m using the LazyGuy personal landing page template (cheap!) and the Font Awesome Favicon Generator (free!)
Please do tell me what you think: http://dougbelshaw.com
(note that this redesign doesn’t affect the look/feel of this blog)
