Open Thinkering

Menu

Tag: Centre for Life

Weeknote 28/2013

This week I’ve been:

  • Booking travel/accommodation for what my team are calling ‘Badge Camp’. It’s a work week up in the mountains in Maine, USA where ‘yoga’ and ‘sleeping in’ sit alongside ‘strategy discussions’ as official agenda items. Win.
  • Setting up the Eventbrite for Mozilla Maker Party Newcastle at the Centre for Life on Saturday 17th August. Tickets have been going pretty quickly so I’m going to see if there’s scope for extra room.
  • Running three Open Badges workshops at the ePIC eportfolios and identity conference in London. Slides here.
  • Talking to Robin Raymond, the lead developer of Open Peer about Firecloud.
  • Discussing aligning with the Web Literacy Standard with Paul Allison. I’ve realised there’s an issue for those without developers: most (all?) of the third party platforms lack the ‘alignment’ field in the latest version of the OBI specification.
  • Encouraging people to sign up for MozFest. It’s the best decision you’ll make this year.
  • Editing and posting the audio from the Web Literacy Standard community call that I missed this week. Thanks again to my colleague Carla Casilli for hosting it!
  • Sorting out my expenses for June. It was a busy month. 😮
  • Purchasing the firecloud.co domain name and setting up a blog. It’s trivially easy to do these days, it really is.
  • Inviting the major contributors to the Web Literacy Standard to ‘half-hour hackfests’. They worked really well and I’m thinking of running some more next week!
  • Meeting with Carla to discuss what’s left to do with the Web Literacy Standard before the beta launch. Also, plans for some kind of ‘contest’ for people to align with the standard in various ways between MozFest 2013 and MozFest 2014.
  • Attending the weekly Mozilla Open Badges and Webmaker community calls.
  • Talking with people about integrating with the Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI) as I do every week. 🙂
  • Taking Friday off to look after my two year-old daughter.

Next week I’ve got meetings but no travel so I’ll be cracking on with getting the Web Literacy Standard ready for the beta launch on July 26th. I’m flying to Maine on Sunday 21st so it needs to be pretty much finalised by close of play next Friday!

Mozilla Maker Party Newcastle (17 August 2013)

I’m delighted to announce that after the success of MozParty Newcastle last summer there will be another this year called Maker Party Newcastle. It will be held at the Centre for Life and is part of a worldwide programme of events between June 15th an September 15th.

https://makerpartynewcastle.eventbrite.co.uk

You can sign up for the event at the link above.* Note that spaces are limited and children need to be accompanied.

Come and make something awesome with the Web!

* It would be amazing if you feel you’ve got the skills to come and help out with being a mentor.

Weeknote 25/2013

This week I’ve been:

  • Hosting the Web Literacy Standard community call. Audio and etherpad here.
  • Communicating with the people behind Grimwire and +PeerServer about potentially contributing towards Firecloud.
  • Interviewed for a potential upcoming piece in PandoDaily about the Web Literacy Standard.
  • Talking to Sara Mörtsell about Open Badges for her upcoming MOOC.
  • Presenting at the Learning & Skills Group conference in London. Slides here.
  • Moderating a session – and feeding back from it to the EC Digital Agenda Assembly in Dublin.
  • Messing about with, and getting used to, my new Geeksphone Keon running Firefox OS. It’s a developer preview but I’ve got it on the expectation that I’ll be ‘dogfooding’ – i.e. using it as my ‘daily driver’.
  • Trying (and failing) to set up my new 24″ Dell monitor. The different digital display technologies are confusing (e.g. Thunderbolt and Mini-DisplayPort same physical size but are incompatible?)
  • Answering questions from the community about Open Badges and the Web Literacy Standard.
  • Talking to Erin Knight about a potential new role for me at Mozilla.
  • Tidied up and added questions to the Web Literacy Standard FAQ wiki page.
  • Meeting for coffee with someone who is thinking of joining Mozilla and wanted to know what it’s like working inside the belly of the beast.
  • Putting together a short slidedeck on Firecloud with Vinay Gupta.
  • Enquiring about the possibility of running another Maker Party (as I did last year) at the Centre for Life.
  • Meeting up with a teacher at my wife’s school to talk through how they can use Webmaker tools to deliver part of the new Primary Computing curriculum.
  • Checking out some books that MIT sent me in their Essential Knowledge series. They’ve asked me to put together a proposal for one on digital/web literacy.

Next week I’ve got a bit of a three-day tour of the UK. I’m in Sheffield to run an Open Badges workshop for the White Rose Learning Technologists’ Forum on Monday. On Tuesday I’m in Glasgow to speak at an SQA event entitled Innovations in Assessment for Schools before an epic train journey to Bath to speak at IWMW13 on Open Badges and the Web Literacy Standard. I’ve another three events the week after next as well…

css.php