Weeknote 34/2024
This has been a busy week, which started with my wife and I waking up in Durham on Bank Holiday Monday after a night away celebrating our upcoming wedding anniversary. She took the rest of the week off work, which coincided with the last full week of our teenagers’ summer holidays.
Meanwhile, along with everything else, I was working on my latest Systems Thinking module assignment. I wrote ~4,900 words for the first question, which has a word limit of only 1,200. Given that the Open University now have a policy of penalising students one mark for every 1% they go over the word limit, I had some work to do. I’m almost there, with the judicious use of appendices and stripping back a lot of analysis.
Other than writing lots of words for my assignment, I’ve also published the second part of an introductory series on the We Are Open Co-op (WAO) blog about feedback loops. Here, I published about the importance of context in digital credentials, which was even before listening to an excellent episode of the WorkLife podcast featuring Trevor Noah talking about the important of context in general. I also sprinkled a few posts over at Thought Shrapnel to hopefully make the digital soil more fertile.
Work-wise, I’ve been doing the following:
- Continuing with user research interviews for the Job Readiness Training credential pilot with JFF and IRC. We’ve finished with the IRC staff interviews, so I did a first pass of using GPT-4o via the OpenAI API in RecurseChat to pull out themes and insights.
- Collaborating with Simone Ravaioli on a ‘concept note’ to funders about a potential Phase 2 of the above project.
- Working with my WAO colleagues on getting our new website out of the door as part of our August co-op day. We’ve still got some finishing touches to make, but I’m pleased it’s now live!
- Receiving notification that we’ve been successful in our bid for Friends of the Earth‘s ‘Greening AI policy – an influencing agenda’ research contract. This Mozilla Foundation-funded programme “will translate high-level recommendations on the environmental harms of generative AI from the climate and technical community to inform fellow allied organizations and provide practical policy guidance for civil society and government.”
- Meeting with Ken McCarthy and Bryan Mathers about a couple of potential upcoming N-TUTORR workshops around Open Badges.
- Running the monthly Open Education is for Everybody community call.
- Working on a business development proposal for a charity, which we’ve decided now not to go ahead with as the project timeline was too long and budget too small. (We’re probably going to make a custom version of Story Cube’s Pitch or Ditch Scorecard for this in future.)
- Attending the Digital Credential Consortium‘s latest AMA with Kerri Lemoie, and asking some questions. It’s nice to see them making good use of the DCC Knowledge Base, which we helped them set up, by sharing the recording there.
- Having a chat with Ivan and Mayel about the (bright!) future of Bonfire. I think I’m going to help them in the short term refine the value proposition and do interim product manager-type things.
My sister and nephew were up in Northumberland, staying over at my parents’ this weekend. It was good to see them as it was the first time they’ve come over to visit our new house. They’ve got an incredibly cute 12 week-old sausage dog which is the most adorable and excitable thing I’ve seen in a long time!
The final thing to note is that there’s been a pretty huge influx of new users to Bluesky this week. I’m happy about this, because it’s a federated social network, and one that takes trust and safety seriously. If you’re new to the platform and need someone to follow, my sardonic takes on the world can be found here.
Next week, I’m working at home from Monday to Thursday afternoon, before heading down to London for the Systems Innovation Network conference on Friday and Saturday. I’m hoping to meet with the aforementioned Bryan and Mayel on Thursday and Friday nights, respectively. My daughter is starting high school on Wednesday, and my son’s back to his last year of Sixth Form on Thursday. She’s got four football matches this week, which is a lot given she’s coming back from seven weeks out through injury. He’s back to basketball and football, too.
Image: The vaulted ceiling of Durham Cathedral bathed in purple light, with 15,000 paper ‘peace doves’ hanging down on chains. Each one contains a written message of peace from the public.
