Month: March 2018

This week I’ve been:

• Sending out Issue #297 of my Thought Shrapnel newsletter. This one was called ‘Springing Forward’. Are you a Patreon supporter yet?
• Participating in the MoodleMoot UK & Ireland in Glasgow, which I MC’d. In addition, I presented on Project MoodleNet and ran a workshop. Slides and outputs from those can be found here. It was great to catch up with colleagues while I was there, as well as Grainne Hamilton and Dave White (briefly!)
• Putting together a ‘job landscape’ for a Technical Architect for Project MoodleNet.
• Curating interesting things I came across on the  Thought Shrapnel blog. This week I collected some quotations and commented on the following:
  • Not everyone is going to like you
  • Microcast #009 (supporters only!)
  • No-one wants a single identity, online or offline
  • “Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress.” (Epictetus)
  • The spectrum of work autonomy
  • “The greater the ig norance the greater the dogmatism.”(Sir William Osler)
  • Every part of your digital life is being tracked, packaged up, and sold
  • Survival in the age of surveillance
  • How to get hired
  • Alternatives to all of Facebook’s main features
  • Microcast #008 (supporters only!)
  • Microcast #007 (supporters only!)
• Chilling out on Friday. It’s funny how our family doesn’t really know how to do nothing as we’re always busy, busy…
• Writing:
  • Project MoodleNet overview (v0.4) and workshop (27th March 2018)

Next week it’s the Easter holidays, so I’ll be at home and not be working on Monday. From Tuesday to Thursday I’ll be working on Moodle-related stuff, and co-op things on Friday.

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Photo of the University of Strathclyde’s Technology & Innovation Centre taken by me on Monday.

This week I’ve been:

• Sending out Issue #296 of my Thought Shrapnel newsletter. This one was called ‘Goodbye Winter Blues’.
• Looking after my children, with the occasional help of my parents, while my wife was in Birmingham at the start of the week for a co-op secretary course.
• Curating interesting things I came across on the  Thought Shrapnel blog. This week I collected some quotations and commented on the following:
  • The only privacy policy that matters is your own
  • “Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds.” (Alexander Graham Bell)
  • Support Thought Shrapnel on Patreon
  • OERu has a social network
  • “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” (Søren Kierkegaard)
  • Moral needs and user needs
  • On struggle
  • Going deep
  • Derek Sivers has quit Facebook (hint: you should, too)
  • “To know things well, we must know the details, and as they are almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect.” (François de La Rochefoucauld)
  • Bridging technologies
  • How to choose an open license for your project
  • “The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.” (Frank Herbert)
  • Decision fatigue and parenting
  • Tech will eat itself
• Recording, editing and releasing Episode 99 of the Today In Digital Education (TIDE) podcast with my co-host Dai Barnes. We entitled this episode ‘Partying Like It’s…’ and discussed the Cambridge Analytica revelations, Facebook, warrant canaries, slow thought, browser extensions, and more!
• Working on Project MoodleNet:
  • Talking with smart people, including Martin Hawksey and Alan Levine.
  • Finding out more about Gluu, which we may use for authentication and identification.
  • Starting to draft a job landscape for a Technical Lead who we hope to hire in the next few months.
  • Creating a couple of updated iterations to a video overview of what the MVP could look like.
  • Planning for the UK & Ireland MoodleMoot next week in Glasgow. I’m MC’ing, presenting, and running a workshop.
• Travelling to and from Berlin to present at the Goethe Institute’s Startklar?! conference. My slides and a Periscope recording of my presentation on digital literacies can be found here. I also got the chance to go for a traditional German beer with Geoff Stead and Sarah, a former colleague of his at Cambridge English.
• Creating a new Patreon page for Thought Shrapnel. I’m moving existing subscribers over to it from Gumroad. My aim is to get 100 backers, and support starts from $1.
• Visiting the Brandenburg Gate in the snow. I was underwhelmed, but perhaps it’s better in the dark. I tend to walk everywhere in new cities, whatever the weather, which meant I happened across the
  Deutsches Historisches Museum’s exhibition on the 1917 Russian Revolution. It was great.
• Meeting with potential clients about potential work for We Are Open Co-op. I also put together a draft proposal for a digital literacy MOOC, which could be interesting!
• Working with Bryan Mathers and Bert Jehoul on a new proposal for the Open Bages community. More on that soon.
• Writing:
  • The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies (Startklar?! March 2018)

Next week I’m in Glasgow from Sunday afternoon until Wednesday evening for the UK & Ireland MoodleMoot. I’m working from home on Thursday, and then taking the long Easter weekend off!

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Photo of the Berlin Cathedral Church taken by me on Thursday using my OnePlus 5. Postprocessing in Snapseed.