Weeknote 28/2018

This week I’ve been:

• Helping with last weekend’s Scout camp at up in north Northumberland. Both our children were there. I wasn’t feeling great, so despite what my pre-written newsletter claimed, I drove home to sleep in my bed rather than in a tent.
• Sending out Issue #311 of my Thought Shrapnel newsletter. This one was called ‘Under canvas’. Thanks to the 39 patrons who back me via Patreon plus those who continue their support via Gumroad!
• Migrainey to the extent that I took all day Monday and Tuesday morning off work. I don’t know what triggered it, but it all started on Wednesday last week, and took about a week for me to recover. I don’t know where migraines end and I begin at the best of times, and I’m glad to be feeling a lot better.
• Behind on my MoodleNet work due to the above. I did, however, manage to catch up with Mayel on work he can be doing while I’m away this week and next. I also wrote a blog post updating the community on work we’ve done with Outlandish on UX work we’ve done over the last couple of weeks.
• Curating interesting things I came across on the Thought Shrapnel blog. This week I collected some quotations and commented on the following:
  • “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” (Pablo Picasso)
  • On ‘radical incompetence’
  • “When we speak of ‘populism’ today, we sometimes mean nothing more than a politics that is audible as well as intelligible to the man in the street – or, to be precise, the man and woman slumped on their sofa, their attention skipping fitfully from flat-screen TV to laptop to smartphone to tablet and back to television, or the man and woman at work, sitting in front of desktop PCs but mostly exchanging suggestive personal messages on their smartphones.” (Niall Ferguson)
  • Blogging in the Fediverse with Write.as
  • On living in public
  • Problems with the present and future of work are of our own making
• Resurrecting my Discours.es blog after half a year of neglect. I wrote on things that, for one reason or another, didn’t seem to fit elsewhere. I guess I see it as kind of ‘long-form bookmarking’:
  • Catastrophe journaling 
  • The problem of governance in a world of cascading tweets 
  • Moodle social network analysis 
  • Minimalistic blogs 
  • Soft relaunch 
• Running a workshop on digital literacies in Manchester for the Carnegie UK Trust‘s #NotWithoutMe digital accelerator programme. I thoroughly enjoyed it and was very tired at the end, despite it only being a half-day session! My slides can be found here.
• Missing the regular 90 minutes of the England vs. Croatia World Cup football match. From Manchester, I got to Bryan Mathers‘ house just before extra time started.
• Meeting up with my We Are Open Co-op colleagues in London, which I’ve written about on our blog. As ever, I really enjoyed it and it reaffirmed my faith (as meetups always do) in the importance of what we’re doing.
• Visiting the Tate Modern in London. I appreciate modern art, and am a big fan of people using whatever medium they want to express themselves. I do find it hard to get too excited about models of concrete tenement blocks and canvases painted a single colour, however.

Next week, I’m going to be in Montana, USA, for this year’s MountainMoot. I’m running a session on MoodleNet but, more importantly listening to, and learning from, the Moodle community.