Weeknote 32/2024

I returned to work this week after holiday on Monday and was straight into a celebratory webinar with Participate and the Digital Credential Consortium (DCC) at MIT about Open Badges v3. You can catch the recording via the DCC Knowledge Base (which we helped set up!)

We had meetings with JFF and IRC as well as running user research interviews on a project which has been well-stewarded by Laura, with help from John, while I’ve been away. We’ll be working on this one until the end of September, with our brief to provide both quantitative and qualitative data to evaluate a new Job Readiness Training credential for ‘New Americans’ (i.e. immigrants and refugees).

It’s looking like we might pick up some more badge-related work up in Scotland after a couple of exploratory conversations this week. More on that once we’ve signed a contract 🙂

On Wednesday, I had the absolute pleasure of catching up with a former student of mine from my teaching days. The last time I saw or spoke with Oran Kenyon was just before I left the school he attended in Doncaster in 2009. He would have been 13 or 14, I guess, and would regularly come and ask me geeky questions about History and IT during breaktimes or lunchtimes. He’s now lecturing in Computing at Barnsley College, and wanted my professional opinion on something he’s working on.

Our two teenagers are still on school holidays while my wife, Hannah, and I are back to work. She’s taking next week off, and it’s a Bank Holiday on the Monday, but there’s a surprising lack of holiday clubs and activities for 17 and 13 year-olds these days. I didn’t have this opinion when I was a teacher, obviously, but as a parent I definitely think six weeks is too long; it would be much better to have more holidays, or longer breaks at half-terms.

I’ve written some things this week, here, on the WAO blog, and I’ve started putting a few things on Thought Shrapnel too:

• 14th August: TB871: “The Systems Approach is Not a Bad Idea”: the ethical and philosophical legacy of C. West Churchman
• 14th August: TB871: “Objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer”: the life and work of Heinz von Foerster
• 14th August: TB871: “Anything said is said by an observer”: Humberto Maturana’s impact on Systems Thinking
• 16th August: TB871: Critical System Heuristics
• 16th August: Demystifying User Research: A step-by-step guide from WAO
• 17th August: Doing things that don’t scale in pursuit of things that can’t scale
• 17th August: 14kB
• 17th August: Give readers a break

I’ve also planned out, and almost finished the diagrams for, a three part series of introductory blog posts about Systems Thinking for the WAO blog.

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Outside of work, I’m still reading the Dortmunder series of novels by Donald E. Westlake, listening to a BBC Radio 4 series by Rory Stewart on ignorance, watching the 2023 reboot of Frasier, starting a 2017 series called Taboo featuring Tom Hardy, and enjoying that the football season has started again!

I did some more ‘chainsaw gardening’ yesterday, spending most of the day in our back garden while my son was working his part-time job, and my wife and daughter were watching he football team win a tournament. She’s still returning from an MCL injury she sustained almost six weeks ago.

Next week, I’m hoping to get everything signed for the opportunity I mentioned earlier, do some business development, continue working on the JFF/IRC project, and start publishing the blog post series on Systems Thinking. Speaking of which, I need to start thinking about planning answers to my third tutor-marked assignment as part of my MSc module…

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Photo taken by me during a walk near where we live on Tuesday. Given AI-assisted smartphone photography, it would be disingenuous for me to say ‘#nofilter’ but this is what the sky looked like, and I haven’t done any manual post-processing!