Weeknote 47/2017
This week I’ve been:
- Sending out Thought Shrapnel, my weekly newsletter loosely structured around education, technology, and productivity. Issue #283 was entitled ‘Stop watching the news’. If you enjoy my newsletter, I reckon you’ll really like my Thought Shrapnel Live! where I share links (some which don’t make the cut for the newsletter) as soon as I come across them. Thought Shrapnel is made possible thanks to the awesome people who support support my work.
- Recording and releasing Episode 93 (‘Camelizer Craftsman’) of the Today In Digital Education (TIDE) podcast, which I record with Dai Barnes. This week, we discussed reframing the traditionalist vs progressive debate in education, Pearson’s land grab on badges, personalised learning, computer science, the teacher as DJ, postcapitalism, Mozilla ending its web literacy work, and more!
- Facilitating the latest Badge Wiki barn raising. I wrote up the meeting here, and we’re due to launch on December 1st, at the European Badge Summit!
- Working for Moodle on the early stages of MoodleNet, a new project I’m leading for them. If you follow the above link, hopefully you’ll find a way to get involved in the white paper I’m writing. I could particularly do with assistance around definin the five scenarios that form a central piece of it!
- Curating Badge News #22 on behalf of We Are Open Co-op. This is a newsletter that keeps the Open Badges community up-to-date around the latest news in the community.
- Visiting the only mosque in Northumberland with my son’s Scout troop. It was really interesting the way that the Imam re-framed the media narrative for these young people who, given the monoculture up here, have possibly only ever seen a Muslim on TV.
- Buying things on ‘Black Friday’. Like everyone else. I was quite pleased that I managed to get the discount on FIFA 18 I’d been waiting for, along with a few Christmas presents.
- Writing:
- Badge Wiki: getting ready to launch in 3…2…1… (We Are Open Blog, 24th November 2017)
- Mozilla Foundation ending its web literacy work (Discours.es, 21st November 2017)
- Pearson, WTF? Badges, patents, and the world’s ‘least popular’ education company (Open Educational Thinkering, 20th November 2017)
Next week I’m joining my co-op colleagues at a retreat being held at Wortley Hall by the CoTech network. I’m there from Monday night to Thursday morning. I’ll then being working on MoodleNet on Thursday and Friday, before flying to Amsterdam with my wife for a weekend of Christmas markets and the famous light festival. She flies back on Sunday, while I’ll be staying behind to do some work with the National Library of the Netherlands.
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]
Image CC BY Michael Thomas
