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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
