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Weeknote 34/2013

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

This week I’ve been:

  • Taking Monday off. I’ve found taking a few long weekends over the summer (giving me 3-day working weeks) has meant I’ve kept on top of stuff. It also means I keep more PTO/holiday days for later in the year when I really need them.
  • Meeting with UNESCO again, this time to talk specifically about the Web Literacy Standard.
  • Registering for the Scottish Learning Festival. I believe this will be my fifth year in a row (in four different jobs!)
  • Putting together my slides for the eAssessment Scotland conference.
  • Attending my first new calls/meetings since moving teams within Mozilla.
  • Meeting with various people interested in getting involved with Open Badges and/or the Web Literacy Standard.
  • Contributing to the Open Badges Community and Badge System Design community calls.
  • Clarifying (in my mind) the difference between Open Badges as credentials, rather than ‘qualifications’.
  • Meeting with Chris Lawrence to thrash out the first 100 days in my new role.
  • Travelling up to Dundee to present at eAssessment Scotland as part of MyKnowledgeMap‘s Open Badges session. My slides and an interview with Karen Strickland and me can be found in my write-up of the conference.

Next week I’ll be observing the Summer Bank Holiday – except for 4-5pm when I’ll be hosting the Web Literacy Standard community call. Other than that, it’s a pretty quiet week just getting ready for normality when everyone goes back to school in September!

My next 100 days at Mozilla

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Last May when I was just about to start working at Mozilla, Nick Dennis gave me some great advice. He said that I should thrash out with my line manager what I should focus on during my first 100 days, defining what ‘success’ looked like at the end of that period.

Boom!

For whatever reason, I didn’t take Nick’s advice and, indeed, felt a bit lost at sea by Christmas. That’s not anyone’s fault, particularly, it’s just that I was used to working in an institutional environment (schools/universities) and Mozilla’s, well… different.

sea

So I thought I’d take the opportunity when changing teams within Mozilla to belatedly take Nick’s advice and discuss with my new line manager Chris Lawrence what I should be doing from now until Christmas. Admittedly, that’s a little over 100 days, but it’s close enough. Here’s what we came up with – and what that includes, in no particular order:

1. Release the Web Literacy Standard v1.0 at MozFest

  • Work with Michelle Thorne to encourage session leaders to tag their sessions with skills and competencies from the Standard.
  • Work with Laura Hilliger on relevant session proposals relating to the Standard
  • Propose a facilitated version of the community work from calls.

2. Transfer the Web Literacy Standard to webmaker.org

  • Work with the Webmaker team to integrate the Standard across webmaker.org.
  • Liaise with Chris Appleton on the design work around the Standard.

3. Prepare for a Web Literacy Standard alignment contest

  • Aim for January 2014 and announce at MozFest.
  • Work with organisations who are interested in aligning before then.
  • Find people to judge competition.
  • Work with MozLegal and other people who will be able to help (like Chloe Varelidi)

4. Dive into Mentor Team-related stuff

  • Focus on breaking silos and making links with other teams.
  • Be a thought leaders post-Mozilla Summit for ‘One Mozilla’.
  • Work with the Mentor Team to bring Open Badges into their projects.

5. Set up a cross-Mozilla Foundation community working group

  • Focus on sharing good practices.
  • Systematise internal and external-facing processes.
  • Potentially take over running of the weekly Webmaker call.

Obviously, there’s other things that are assumed (like building up a collection of animated GIFs and deploying them appropriately) and other things that will emerge but, for now, I think that’s a great starting point!

Main image CC BY quapan

Weeknote 32/2013

Posted on by Doug Belshaw
This week I’ve been:
  • Taking holiday on Monday and Friday. We spent the weekend at a family party and at Legoland (which was awesome), driving back on Monday. I took Friday off as I had a migraine on Wednesday and a day full of calls on Thursday.
  • Talking with UNESCO about a range of ways they can work with Mozilla, including Firefox OS, Webmaker, Open Badges and the Web Literacy Standard. Exciting times!
  • Hosting the weekly Open Badges community call. While I had a migraine. I could hardly see the screen because of the aura I get!
  • Persuading Decoded to align their learning activities with the Web Literacy Standard – and be judges for part of an upcoming contest we’re planning to align with the standard.
  • Planning an eAssessment Scotland session with Steve Sidaway on Open Badges.
  • Sorting out my move to the Mozilla Mentor team with Erin Knight and Chris Lawrence I’ll explain what’s happening in a separate post soon.
  • Sending my Mozilla-provided Nexus 7 to Jade Forester as I use my iPad Mini all the time now.
  • Getting new colleagues Meg Cole-Karagoy and An-Me Chung up-to-date with the state of Open Badges in the UK/Europe.
  • Talking to Telefonica about how they can use Open Badges and the Web Literacy Standard.
  • Planning an updated version of the School of Webcraft with P2PU.
  • Liaising with OCR and Computing At School about next week’s meeting on Open Badges for professional development. I’m looking forward to catching some of MozPub afterwards, too.
Next week I’m planning to work from the Ignite100 co-working space in Newcastle on Monday, spend Wednesday in London for the OCR/CAS meeting, and then it’s Maker Party Newcastle next Saturday!
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