Weeknote 09/2018
This week I’ve been:
- Sending out Issue #293 of my Thought Shrapnel newsletter. This one was called ‘Making cheese grate again’ and featured curated links from the Thought Shrapnel blog (where you can also sign up if you don’t yet subscribe!)
- Jet lagged. I thought I’d beaten it with Melatonin tablets, but it came back to bite me on Tuesday — three days after I got home! I took the day off to get back into the groove.
- Recording an episode of the Today in Digital Education (TIDE) podcast with my co-host, Dai Barnes. Unfortunately, the recording didn’t work properly and only Dai’s side of the conversation was captured after the two-minute mark. It’s disappointing, as we’ve only just moved to a paid account on Cast after experiencing some issues with Zencastr. Not the best present for Dai, whose birthday it was this week!
- Buying a Chromebox (Asus CN62) for my office, as I’m sick of having to connect and disconnect my laptop every morning. I just want something where I can turn it on and go straight into a video conference. It’s obviously not as powerful as my laptop, but does the job.
- Snowed in. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much snow in Northumberland, where I live!. The snow was lying 22cm deep outside our house, which meant no school for three days for the children, no travel, and most shops either shut or on reduced hours. I work from home, so the only way it affected me was reducing my options for exercise and having to do some childcare.
- Booking travel for upcoming events in Berlin, Glasgow, and Bristol.
- Working on Project MoodleNet:
- Catching up with stuff I’d missed while away last week, including the recording of the all-hands meeting and (always!) emails.
- Revisiting my notes from the leadership week in Australia and feeding them into my planning.
- Adding new scenario images and tidying up the white paper.
- Talking with lots of smart people, including: Jim Groom, Tom Salmon, Clint Lalonde, Grainne Hamilton, Nitin Parmar, Greg McVerry, and Ian O’Byrne. I very much appreciated their insights and have some more conversations lined up next week!
- Scheduling the first community call (15:00 UTC, 4th April)
- Putting together a milestones document for planning and resourcing.
- Finishing off the Futurelearn GDPR course I’d started. It’s possibly the first online course, other than Learn Moodle Basics, that I’ve ever completed!
- Participating in our monthly We Are Open Co-op day. We discussed and worked on a bunch of things, including our new website (coming soon!)
- Writing:
- IDB Digital & Alternative Credentials workshop (We Are Open blog, 2nd March 2018)
- Community call: save the date! (Project MoodleNet blog, 1st March 2018)
- Final steps in my GDPR journey (Open Educational Thinkering, 26th February 2018)
Next week I’m working five days for Moodle as I took a day off this week. I’ll be digging into the Project MoodleNet milestones planning and overview document (initially for internal use) and talking to more smart people!
Image by John Johnston used under a Creative Commons license
