Weeknote 27/2018

This week I’ve been:

• Sending out Issue #310 of my Thought Shrapnel newsletter. This one was called ‘Moodling about in Barcelona’. Thanks to the 39 patrons who back me via Patreon plus those who continue their support via Gumroad!
• Slightly sunburned on a family walk to Linhope Spout.
• Discussing some potential upcoming work for We Are Open co-op with MyKnowledgeMap.
• Running a half-day workshop on non-linear pathways and Open Badges for the National STEM Learning Centre in York. You can see the 112 slides I used here and I’ve also put together a next steps document for them.
• Learning Spanish after setting up a Moodle club in Duolingo.
• Presenting on digital literacies to the European Commission’s Connect University Summer School 2018. My slides are can be found here.
• Working on the MoodleNet project:
  • Working less – Mayel was fighting off the ‘flu and I took Wednesday afternoon off due to a migraine. We’ll both catch up!
  • Responding to feedback from last week’s MoodleMoot Spain session. You can see our answers to some of the questions in this blog post.
  • Reviewing the collections and communities functionality of Google+ in this document.
  • Planning with Outlandish on upcoming UX work. You can see the outputs of their research/discovery phase here.
  • Providing input for Outlandish on the first UX milestone. We created documents to demonstrate the functionality we want for threaded discussions and notifications.
  • Reviewing a document prepared by consultant Phil Barker around OER sources and following up on his recommendations.
  • Meeting with Tom Murdock to discuss integration with MoodleCloud.
  • Drafting community guidelines for participating in the project.
  • Committing code for the first time to our GitHub repository. Mayel created a prototype tool to hash contacts before upload for privacy-respecting social discovery.
  • Considering submitting a proposal for the Mozilla Festival in late October (right before the US Moot) on the theme of ‘decentralisation’.
• Breaking (and then fixing) my WordPress installations both here and at Thought Shrapnel by clicking ‘update theme’ without thinking about it first. I’ve only been using WP for, what, 15 years now? I should know better.
• Curating interesting things I came across on the Thought Shrapnel blog. This week I collected some quotations and commented on the following:
  • “Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.” (Terry Pratchett)
  • “If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture, let
    us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies.” (Albert Einstein)
  • The dangers of distracted parenting
  • Cory Doctorow on the corruption at the heart of Facebook
  • On ‘unique’ organisational cultures

I’m helping out with a Scout Camp this weekend, which means I miss the football on Saturday! Next week I’m at home working on MoodleNet-related things on Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday, I head to Manchester to help with the Carnegie UK Trust’s #NotWithoutMe programme. I’ll then continue my journey by heading on to London for a We Are Open Co-op meetup!