Weeknote 11/2023
It’s Mother’s Day in the UK today, so I’d like to take the opportunity to thank both my own mother and my wife, Hannah, for being fantastic mums. I spent time with both of them, separately, at Druridge Bay this week. It’s a wonderful place.
Laura‘s been back to work this week which I’ve been delighted about. We recorded the first episode of Season 6 for The Tao of WAO, submitted proposals for The Badge Summit, co-worked on various client projects, and ran community calls. I’ve also done some co-working with John and Anne, did some more work with the workers.coop Member Learning group, and enjoyed my chats with James Polansky, Tim Riches, and Abi Handley.
It’s only a few weeks now until I’m walking the first half of The Pennine Way, going form north to south (Kirk Yetholm to Middleton-in-Teesdale). I think I’ve bought everything else I need now, including the Rab SilPoncho which can double as a tarp. I’m still weighing up whether to replace my cheapo Mountain Warehouse Carrion 65-litre rucksack which I used for Hadrian’s Wall with the latest version of the Sierra Designs Flex Capacitor (60-80l). It’s probably £175 I don’t need to spend at the moment, to be honest, although the buckles on the Mountain Warehouse pack do my head in.
This week I published:
- Applying my digital literacies model to ‘AI literacy’
- ‘Bring Your Full Self to Work’ day
- Verifiable Credentials and Open Badges 3.0: What’s changed?
- The Art of Working Openly: Overcoming Anxiety to Maximise Collaboration
- Identifying and overcoming barriers to user research within organisations
- Climbing the Mountain of Assessment: Comparing Ungrading, Open Recognition, and RPL
- Setting Sail with Digital Literacies: Preparing Students for the Evolving Digital Landscape
Last week I ‘admitted’ to effectively just copy/pasting from ChatGPT to create posts on LinkedIn. I’ve actually found a better workflow:
- Spend a lot of time with the AI trying to get the right kind of content. This can involve feeding it quite a bit in the way of text, or ensuring it ‘understands’ the context. A good example of this is the first post in the list above about AI literacy.
- Where appropriate, ask ChatGPT to use a metaphor or compare/contrast two or more things. It’s particularly good at doing this.
- Take the text and copy/paste it somewhere. Rewrite the entire thing in my voice.
- Choose a relevant image, or make my own (e.g. with the asssessment one above)
- Hit publish
It’s interesting to see just how little some people know what’s going on with large language models (LLMs). There is no ‘there’ there, so anthropomorphising platforms makes no sense. It just makes those doing it look daft.
Next week, it’s a pretty normal week as these things go. I’m taking three weeks off in total in April, so there’s a few things I want to get done so that I haven’t got anything hanging over me, work-wise, before my break.
Photo taken at Druridge Bay on Sunday
