Month: November 2017

This week I’ve been:

• Sending out Thought Shrapnel, my weekly newsletter loosely structured around education, technology, and productivity. Issue #282 was entitled ‘Water so clear you can see to the bottom’. If you like that, you’ll love my Thought Shrapnel Live! channel on Telegram that features all the links in the newsletter and more. Thought Shrapnel is made possible thanks to my valued supporters.
• Recording and releasing Episode 92 (‘The edge of algorithm’) of the Today In Digital Education (TIDE) podcast, which I record with Dai Barnes. This week, we discussed Moodle, digital literacies, algorithmic ad-fuelled dystopias, whether the Amish have the right approach to new technologies, habit fields, and more!
• Replacing OxygenOS on my OnePlus 5 smartphone with the fully open source LineageOS. I’d meant to do this as soon as I bought it, but there wasn’t an official build of LineageOS until a couple of months later, by which time I’d become accustomed to the slickness of OxygenOS. However, recent news of OnePlus devices phoning home and then revelations of a backdoor prompted me into action.
• Getting started properly on leading work on MoodleNet for Moodle. I’m pretty excited about it, and will be writing a white paper over the next few weeks. I particularly enjoyed researching stuff around crypto-decentralisation on Thursday!
• Rolling my eyes at Pearson’s attempts to patent digital credentials. I need to write an angry blog post. They’re quite possibly the world’s worst education company. I don’t know why anyone does business with them, to be quite honest. Although, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised as they’ve got form.
• Drafting a post for DML Central about some work I discovered at the Miami MoodleMoot which might (finally!) help us get beyond the progressive vs. traditionalist debate in education. You can view the draft here. Comments welcome.
• Writing:
  • (nothing other than the DML Central draft)

Next week I’m again at home all week. On Monday I’ll be doing We Are Open co-op work and starting to plan for a week’s worth of consultancy in December for the National Library of the Netherlands. From Tuesday to Thursday I’m working for Moodle. I’m taking Friday off as a Doug day.

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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]

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Photo taken by me during a walk with my (recuperating) wife around Morpeth on Friday.

I’ll return to the regular bullet-point format next week, but this week has been another unusual one. It’s revolved around two events: a MoodleMoot in Miami, USA and the Innovate Edtech Conference in London. I was in Miami from Sunday until Thursday, then London from Friday evening for 24 hours.

I’m pleased to announce that I’m working with Moodle until the end of this calendar year, in the first instance, scoping out a new platform which is currently known as MoodleNet. This is a brand new product, distinct from the LMS, and something I’m pretty excited about. If all goes well, I’ll continue doing a bit of consultancy through We Are Open Co-op, but dedicate the majority of my time towards MoodleNet. Much more on that soon, I hope, as I put together a white paper.

I learned a lot in Miami, from the great people I’ll be working with at Moodle, to the advantages of taking Melatonin to stave off jet lag. It great to finally meet Mary Cooch after a decade of us following each other online! There was also a great presentation by Elizabeth Dalton that I need to revisit as I think it will help us get past the reductive and unhelpful ‘traditional vs. progressive’ debate in education.

Although it’s always great to be in a room full of people you know, growth comes when you’re in a rooms filled with people you don’t know, and that was certainly the case in the two events I attended this week. The Innovate Edtech Conference was a good opportunity to re-connect with wonderful people such as Joe Dale, Sophie Bailey, and Geoff Stead — but the majority of poeple weren’t part of my existing network.

I was humbled to learn that students had come from various universities around the country to hear me speak, on the recommendation of their supervisors. It was my usual stuff about digital literacies and Open Badges (see slides) but I tried to package it in a way that was useful. We started with a short exercise that surfaced and problematised some of our everyday practises. From there, I went on to introduce the eight essential elements of digital literacies, and then explained how they can be credentialed using badges.

Over and above those two events (I ran a 2.5 hour workshop at the MoodleMoot as well), I’ve only really sent out Badge News #21 on behalf of We Are Open Co-op. On the personal front, since deciding three weeks ago to experiment with not eating meat, I’ve managed to persist with what is, essentially, pescetarianism — although I’m not a fan of being pigeonholed.

Next week I was supposed to be in Washington DC, doing some work with Bryan Mathers, on behalf of our co-op, for the Inter-American Development Bank. However, that’s been pushed back to February 2018, meaning that I can catch up on some pending work for other clients, and get started writing that MoodleNet white paper!

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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]

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Photo taken by me in Hackney Wick, London, which is a place going through some intense gentrification at the moment. There was some great grafitti and flyposters around the place.