Month: July 2018

This week I’ve been:

• Sending out Issue #313 of my Thought Shrapnel newsletter. This one was called ‘Mootivation’. Thanks to those who back me via Patreon plus those who continue their support via Gumroad!
• Hot. This week, it’s been around 30°C at times in the North East of England where I live. That’s pretty much unheard of, and given our bedroom is in the loft conversion, I haven’t been sleeping that well. I also got a bit sunburned watching my son at a football tournament all day last Sunday.
• Working on the MoodleNet project:
  • Finishing off a sprint which was mainly focused on figuring out MoodleNet integration with Moodle Core. There’s still work to be done, but you can see Mayel’s working document here.
  • Collaborating with Outlandish on UX Milestone 2. This has taken up most of my time this week, with daily stand-ups and feedback as to how things should flow from the user’s point of view. We’ll be recording a couple of screencasts next week to show the community.
  • Meeting with Pat Lockley who has project called Solvonauts which searches OER repositories.
  • Writing up an idea around emoji triplets for persistent identity in decentralised networks like MoodleNet.
  • Reflecting on what the MountainMoot organisers do well and what we can learn from them. Also, the notes from the MoodleNet session I ran there are linked from this post.
  • Mocking up what Open Badges in MoodleNet might look like. You can preview them here.
  • Meeting with our Data Protection Officer to discuss what seems like, on the surface, a simple thing to do: add an email address to our draft Code of Conduct. However, there are layers of complexity in decentralised networks — which I think we’ve resolved!
  • Reviewed our use of Changemap (private beta) for community suggestions.
  • Deciding to move from Trello to GitLab issues for planning within the MoodleNet team starting with the sprint that begins on 7th August (i.e. Mayel’s figuring it out while I’m on holiday!)
• Recording, editing and releasing Episode 105 of the Today In Digital Education (TIDE) podcast with my co-host Dai Barnes. We entitled this episode ‘I dunno… Idaho?’ and discussed emoji triplets, Don Norman’s call for more human-centred technologies, Microsoft OneNote integration with Google Classroom, living in public, and more!
• Curating interesting things I came across on the Thought Shrapnel blog. This week I collected some quotations and commented on the following:
  • Introverts, collaboration, and creativity
  • Busyness and value creation
  • Original work (quote)
  • Assassination black markets now available on the blockchain
  • Not my circus (quote)
  • When we eat matters
  • LinkedIn: the game?
  • Data transfer as a ‘hedge’?
• Continuing my streak learning Spanish on on Duolingo. I’m now up to 27 days!
• Writing posts on my Discours.es blog about things that, for one reason or another, didn’t seem to fit elsewhere:
  • The power of naps 
  • Hyponatremia 
• Putting together an introductory guide to Open Badges for a client with other members of our co-op. I’m looking forward to sharing it once complete!

This week I’ve been:

• Sending out Issue #312 of my Thought Shrapnel newsletter. This one was called ‘If it’s not one thing, it’s another. Thanks to those who back me via Patreon plus those who continue their support via Gumroad!
• Working on the MoodleNet project:
  • Travelling – I’ve been in Helena, Montana (USA) at the MountainMoot. There’s lots to learn from this ‘unofficial’ moot in terms of engagement and creating a great vibe. The photo accompanying this post is of Carroll College which is where the moot was held with the Montana mounts in the distance.
  • Running a session at the MountainMoot. The attendance wasn’t high, as you’d expect from an early-stage innovation project up against sessions with more tangible outcomes, but there were some great discussions.
  • Working with Outlandish on the second UX milestone. This one is a bit more tricky as we didn’t discuss many of the features from this milestone at the Design Sprint. Check out our meeting notes from this week’s call. We also came up with the user flow for the screencast demo we’ll produce at the end of this sprint.
  • Updating the MoodleNet white paper to v0.25. This was mainly small tweaks to reflect changes in scope and focus to the project over the last few months.
  • Drafting a proposal for the Mozilla Festival on the theme of ‘decentralisation’. You can see that here.
  • Thinking through an idea around emoji triplets for visually communicating identity when users can change both their username and avatar on a decentralised platform.
  • Reviewing Mayel’s draft document explaining how MoodleNet will integrate with Moodle Core.
• Curating interesting things I came across on the Thought Shrapnel blog. This week I collected some quotations and commented on the following:
  • Childhood amnesia
  • You cant escape your problems through travel
  • Don Norman on human-centred technologies
  • Microcast #27: what people say versus what they do (Patreon supporters only!)
  • “Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.” (Henry David Thoreau)
  • “A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.” (Lawrence Pearsall Jacks)
• Writing posts on my Discours.es blog about things that, for one reason or another, didn’t seem to fit elsewhere:
  • KanbanMail 
  • Money as exchange of energy 
  • In praise of amateurism 
  • On creativity-rich endeavours 

Next week, I’m going to be at home working on MoodleNet, and in particular UX milestone 2.