Weeknote 14/2018
This week I’ve been:
- Sending out Issue #298 of my Thought Shrapnel newsletter. This one was called ‘Easter treats’. As of this week, I have 25 people supporting me via Patreon and some backers via Gumroad.
- Sick. Ignoring my own advice (for which Laura scolded me) I worked through the weakness. Instead of taking my laptop to bed, I should of allowed myself time to get better.
- Curating interesting things I came across on the Thought Shrapnel blog. This week I collected some quotations and commented on the following:
- Microcast #012 (supporters only!)
- “All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”(J.R.R. Tolkien)
- The death of the newsfeed (is much exaggerated)
- Absentee leadership
- Social internet vs social media
- The ‘1, 2, 3’ approach to organising your working day
- “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” (Mark Twain)
- Blockcerts mobile
- Automated Chinese jaywalking fines are a foretaste of so-called ‘smart cities’
- What’s the link between employment and creativity?
- Mozilla’s Web Literacy Curriculum
- Sending out the agenda for the next 6th Morpeth Scouts Executive Committee meeting. I also made a small tweak to their website.
- Messing about with my family, as they’re all on Easter holidays. I have never seen children consume so much chocolate. We made collages using cut-up bits of newspaper and magazine (mine is at the top of this post!)
- Working on Project MoodleNet:
- Talking with smart people, including Mark Pegrum, Stephen Downes, and Mike Larsson.
- Finalising the job advert for a Technical Architect to help me out. It will be a six-month position, initially, and should be posted before the end of the month.
- Leading the first monthly community call. The agenda, notes, and recording can be found here.
- Working with Paul Greidanus on testing some potential solutions for the MVP. Unfortunately, they didn’t work. It’s always useful to bear in mind that Edison quote when that happens…
- Hanging out with my We Are Open co-op colleagues for our monthly co-op day. We talked about the new website we’re building, GDPR, upcoming work, the Co-op College conference, our involvement in the CoTech network, and other silliness.
- Writing:
- No easy answers (Open Educational Thinkering, 4th April 2018)
- My takeaways from Stephen Downes’ talk on personal learning (Open Educational Thinkering, 3rd April 2018)
Next week, I’m taking a short break to go on holiday with my family in Jersey at the start of the week. After that, I’m doing a couple of days with Moodle and then spending a day finishing off some of the IDB work for the co-op.