Weeknote 37/2024
Today marks the autumn equinox in the northern hemisphere, the day when I stop wearing shorts by default and when I get my SAD light out in order to save off the incoming winter blues.
At the start of the month, I committed to camping for at least one night away from home. Having met that target last weekend in the Lake District, I managed to sneak in a Brucie Bonus last night on the edge of Northumberland National Park. It was so quiet, with no wind at all. I camped in the location of a medieval village which, according to this website, was abandoned in the 14th century due to a combination of border raids and the Black Death.
The area is covered in bracken with a lot of grouse and pheasants around. I had to be as quiet as possible so as not to disturb them; they’re very loud when taking off in fright/flight!
Arriving just before sunset and leaving before dawn meant that I’ve still managed to spend the majority of the weekend with my family. My daughter had a couple of cup matches, with her football team winning the one yesterday 15-0 and losing the one today 4-0. She played well and scored yesterday. My son’s still recovering from his first bout of Covid, and so was at school on Thursday and Friday, but just watched his team play today.
On Friday, I worked on a plan for my End of Module Assessment (EMA) to module TB871 as part of my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice through the Open University. The structure of the module has been such that my three Tutor Marked Assignments (TMAs) build up to this. So combining my answers to these to the blog posts I’ve written, along with the other notes I’ve made, means I’ve got a plan that I’m happy with. Now all I need to do is write it, and keep the whole thing under 4,000 words…
As previously mentioned, I’m planning to take a break from my MSc studies after this module, which I’m intending to partially fill with participation in Project Studio from School of the Possible. I’ve upgraded my membership to do this, after finding the Campfire conversations so generative. The My current aim is to do something with what I’ve learned during the two foundational modules as part of my studies.
Although I didn’t publish anything here, over on the WAO blog I did press the button on the third post in the Introduction to Systems Thinking series. That one is about leverage points.
At Thought Shrapnel, I published the following:
- Against cyberlibertarianism
- Water use literacy
- Leadership, gender, and ‘abusive supervision’
- A landscape of havoc and fracture
- A countercultural perspective to the capitalist notion of ‘productivity’
On the work front, after a really quiet few months I’ve got a few projects on simultaneously. So I’ve been working on the following:
- Writing a report based on the quantitative data we gathered from surveys and the qualitative data from user research interviews relating to the evaluation project around a Job Readiness Training credential for New Americans. Laura wrote a large chunk before heading off on holiday, which was helpful. More about the project can be found in this blog post I published at the start of the project, and this one by John from more recently.
- Planning a couple of workshops on Open Badges with Bryan to help the N-TUTORR project. Interestingly, they’ve got a microcredentials policy but not a badging one, so we’re helping them think about the other three quadrants of recognition.
- Finishing off a pre-mortem activity and doing some initial desk research as part of our Mozilla-funded Friends of the Earth project around AI sustainability principles. We’re convening a roundtable event, and Laura wrote something about that (as well as about Captain Planet!)
- Talking with representatives from the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework (SCQF) as part of a small project we’re working on with Skills Development Scotland (SDS). We’re on the hook for putting together a proposal for how My World of Work could use something like the Digital Credential Consortium‘s Verifiable Credentials open source technology stack.
- Collaborating with my colleagues as part of one of our monthly co-op days. Among other things, we talked about redesigning AILiteracy.fyi.
There’s another small project in the offing, and I’d hoped to be compensated for my time for some input into a Digital Badging Commission thing, but apparently the RSA don’t have a budget for paying experts for their time. Thankfully, I’ve got a few conversations off the back of all of the links and ideas I put in the chat during the online/offline event they ran earlier this week.
Next week, I’m going to get as much of the report finished as possible, as much of the desk research done as I can, and hopefully some user research interviews booked in with Scottish employers. I’m also planning to go swimming at least once, run the Open Recognition is for Everybody (ORE) community call, and have a chat with a couple of people. If that sounds like something you’d like to do, here’s my ‘coffee’ calendar.
