Weeknote 17/2018

This week I’ve been:

• Sending out Issue #301 of my Thought Shrapnel newsletter. This one was called ‘Endless’. Thanks to the 31 patrons who back me via Patreon plus who continue to lend their support via Gumroad!
• Attending OE Global 2018 in Delft, “a canal-ringed city in the western Netherlands, is known as the manufacturing base for Delftware, hand-painted blue-and-white pottery”.  I arrived on Monday afternoon and returned Thursday night. While I was there I had dinner with Martin Dougiamas, Moodle’s Founder and CEO to discuss the MoodleNet project I’m leading. I also went to some great sessions at the conference, made some useful new connections, and met up with some old friends.
• Recording, editing and releasing Episode 100 of the Today In Digital Education (TIDE) podcast with my co-host Dai Barnes. We entitled this episode ‘A century! (not out)’ and discussed what we’ve been up to over the last month, Albert Camus, intimate data analytics in education, Mozilla’s web literacy curriculum, becoming an intellectual, redesigning the hardware Kindle, social media, and more!
• Curating interesting things I came across on the Thought Shrapnel blog. This week I collected some quotations and commented on the following:
  • What can dreams of a communist robot utopia teach us about human nature?
  • “Today I escaped from the crush of circumstances, or better put, I threw them out, for the crush wasn’t from outside me but in my own assumptions.” (Marcus Aurelius)
  • The benefits of reading aloud to children
  • You need more daylight to sleep better
  • On the cultural value of memes
  • The résumé is a poor proxy for a human being
  • OEP (Open Educational Pragmatism?)
  • Microcast #017 (supporters only!)
  • Everything is potentially a meme
  • How to be super-productive
  • “We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors — walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)
• Attending our monthly We Are Open co-op day. We were joined by Grainne Hamilton who, I’m delighted to announce, was formally inducted into our co-op during the meeting. More on that next week!
• Updating the 6th Morpeth Scouts website. I’m trying to keep it as simple and straightforward as possible.
• Finishing off some co-op work for the Inter-American Development Bank with Bryan Mathers . We’re making use of Badge Wiki for the outputs.
  • Writing:
    • (None, other than Thought Shrapnel)

Next week, I’m at home working on the business case for the MoodleNet project, recruiting a Technical Architect, and improving the documentation.