Wednesday Wisdom | Open Educational Thinkering

May 27, 2015

Wednesday Wisdom #38: Foundations

Over the last few weeks I’ve been helping City & Guilds work on a ‘direction of travel’ for Open Badges. I’m going to spend the next week or so digging into some of the details to focus on over the next six months.

Stumbling across the above quotation, therefore, was rather serendipitous! It serves as an introduction to Chapter 2 of Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel.

The whole set of Wednesday Wisdom images can be found in my Creative Commons-licensed Flickr set.

Image CC BY-NC Tom Blackwell

May 20, 2015

Wednesday Wisdom #37: Confluence

Today I had the pleasure and privilege of meeting Uri Gonda, who showed me around the Wayra UK startup accelerator. During coffee afterwards he imparted a lot of wisdom, some of which I wrote down.

This particular quotation really struck me as he talked about the conditions required for startups to thrive. It reminded me of the ‘slow hunch’ Steven Johnson talks about in this RSA Animates video.

The whole set of Wednesday Wisdom images can be found in my Creative Commons-licensed Flickr set.

Image CC BY-NC mgaloseau

May 15, 2015

Weeknote 20/2015

This week I’ve been:

In London for two days. I stayed at 41 Albany House. I won’t be staying there again as I didn’t like being on the lower ground floor (I didn’t have a choice), and the place to pick up the key was a way away from the accommodation itself.
Meeting with various people at City & Guilds about Open Badges and digital strategy. I also met with Henry Morris from Performance in Context, Hung Lee (again) from workshape.io, and had a nice lunch with John Potter from the Institute of Education.
Giving feedback to Helen Beetham on her (excellent) digital capability work for Jisc.
Inducting my first hire for Dynamic Skillset. Perhaps inevitably, it’s my super-organised wife, who’s going to spend ~7 hours a week sorting out my admin. She rolled her eyes at some of my idiosyncratic workflows…
Putting together a proposal for some potential upcoming work.
Welcoming my Dad back home from his stint in Qatar.
Agreeing a topic for the CELT conference in Galway next month.
Investigating extensions as part of the new v1.1 update to the Open Badges specification.
Releasing #TIDE Podcast Episode 10: Boring Timelapse.
Turning down a couple of requests for me to speak for expenses only. Imagine me rolling my eyes while reading that last sentence.
Writing my latest post for DMLcentral about the v1.1 update to the Open Badges specification. You can have a sneak peek here (feat. image from Bryan Mathers!
Making a short video about how to enable low light mode on an iOS device. Lifesaver.
Running another ICT Club session for Year 4 at my kids school. A bit of differentiation this week – the more able ones who have been each week have moved onto basic CSS whereas the others are still practicing HTML tags.
Publishing TWLTW #173 – this month kindly sponsored by C-Learning.
Arranging travel for the ePIC conference in Barcelona next month.
Confirming my involvement as workshop leader for a Scottish Social Services Council event around digital literacies.
Writing:
- Wednesday Wisdom #36: Cats
- How to subscribe to (and sponsor!) my weekly newsletter

Next week I’ll be in London on Tuesday/Wednesday as usual. I’m looking forward to visiting Wayra.

Image CC BY-NC Nico Hogg

May 13, 2015

Wednesday Wisdom #36: Cats

Storytelling is everything.

The whole set of Wednesday Wisdom images can be found in my Creative Commons-licensed Flickr set.

Image CC BY-NC-SA Grant MacDonald

April 29, 2015

Wednesday Wisdom #35: Copyright

I had the privilege of seeing Cory Doctorow speak at Newcastle City Library on Monday night. He was almost otherworldly-eloquent and clear about copyright and wider digital issues. That a New York Times bestselling author and internet celebrity still finds time to address a small room full of people with free admission makes him even more awesome in my eyes.

The whole set of Wednesday Wisdom images can be found in my Creative Commons-licensed Flickr set.

Image CC BY-NC-SA ptufts

April 22, 2015

Wednesday Wisdom #34: Promises

Actions, as they say, speak louder than words. Don’t trust people who trade in promises rather than deeds.

The whole set of Wednesday Wisdom images can be found in my Creative Commons-licensed Flickr set.

Image CC BY Vlastimil Koutecký

April 15, 2015

Wednesday Wisdom #33: Uncertainty

Umair Haque wrote a post entitled Ambiguity and the Art of Meaning recently. While I don’t agree with the main thrust of the post, I thought this bit was great.

The whole set of Wednesday Wisdom images can be found in my Creative Commons-licensed Flickr set.

Image CC BY Patrik Jones

April 8, 2015

Wednesday Wisdom #32: Quality

I’ve noticed an increase recently in people using the word ‘quality’ rather indiscriminately. It can be a filler word, something people use when they actually mean “the way things have always been done”.

Reading Eric Ries The Lean Startup has convinced me that you need to know who your ‘customer’ is when designing products, systems, workflows, and tools. There may be no monetary exchange, but the value proposition needs to be strong.

It’s only then that you can start talking about ‘quality’.

The whole set of Wednesday Wisdom images can be found in my Creative Commons-licensed Flickr set.

Image CC BY Laura Dinneen

April 1, 2015

Wednesday Wisdom #31: Context

Dan Hon, Director of Content at Code for America, has a daily newsletter to which I recently (re-)subscribed. I was struck by the above couple of paragraphs as it reminded me of a post I wrote a couple of years ago entitled Reading books in front of kids is not enough.

Something I try and make sure I do is always tell my family what I’m doing when I’m on a screen. If it’s during working hours and I’m at home then it’s enough just to say ‘work’ but outside those times, whether I’m on my phone, tablet, or laptop, I try and tell them what I’m doing and why.

The whole set of Wednesday Wisdom images can be found in my Creative Commons-licensed Flickr set.

March 25, 2015

Wednesday Wisdom #30: Robots

I wrote a whole blog post around this quotation, linking to Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Steve Wozniak’s warnings about unchecked advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Unfortunately (and unusually) WordPress ate it. My main point was that it’s actually the human-created algorithms and worldviews behind robots that are the main problem.

Still, the post from which this quotation comes from chills me to the bone.

The whole set of Wednesday Wisdom images can be found in my Creative Commons-licensed Flickr set.

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