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Weeknote 30/2020

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

I’ve written quite a bit this week as part of my #100DaysToOffload challenge:

Over and above what’s detailed in these posts, I’ve been splitting my time between working on projects for We Are Open and Outlandish this week. For the former, my ‘home’ co-op in the CoTech network, I’ve been mainly focusing on work for Catalyst and the Social Mobility Commission. We’re working with Erica Neve and Pedram Parasmand on three contracts, helping charities who are rapidly undergoing digital transformation. We had a really successful retrospective on Friday with UpRising, who we’ve been helping in more depth.

With Outlandish, I’m helping with some productisation of similar projects they’ve worked on for a range of clients. I find this really interesting as it’s simultaneously about meeting user needs and about organisational development. I’m also advising around ways in which they can develop the workshops they offer.

I’m fortunate to work with organisations which are so emotionally intelligent, and which go out of their way to be so. One of the reasons for working with Outlandish is to give them some short-term help with project management while they’re a bit stretched. But another reason is to learn from their processes and procedures; although they’ve only been a co-op for as long as us (four years), they’ve been together and honing things for a decade.

When I was at Jisc, one thing that always impressed me was their internal knowledgebase. They used PBworks for that, while Outlandish uses a WordPress installation with a theme called KnowAll. I’ve been wanting to experiment with wiki.js and so this week Laura Hilliger and I set up an instance at wiki.weareopen.coop and copied over existing pages from our GitHub wiki. I’ve set user permissions so that only logged-in members can edit the wiki, and indeed see any pages that are ‘internal’ only.

We finally got sign-off from Greenpeace for one of the best things I think I’ve written for a while: HOWTO: Create an Architecture of Participation for your Open Source project. As Stephen Downes mentioned when mentioning it in OLDaily it’s perhaps applicable to wider contexts than just open source projects.

Other than that, I’ve just been reviewing a document Laura put together for some work we’re doing with Red Hat, doing a small amount of work for our ongoing work with Greenpeace, and contributing to a ‘playback’ of some recent work we did for Catalyst.

Next week, I’m tying up work for We Are Open on Monday, and for Outlandish on Tuesday, before turning everything off and going on a family holiday for 10 days. As my therapist said in our meeting on Friday, as I’m a bit of a perfectionist, there’s no guarantee that I will actually relax during my holiday just because I’m away from home. So I’m actively trying to cut myself some slack. I deliberately went for a slow run this morning and I even had an afternoon nap yesterday. Small steps.

Header image is a selfie I took on a family walk in the Northumbrian hills last Sunday. Inspired by Low-tech magazine’s solar powered website, I loosely followed this guide to create the ‘stippled’ effect. This reduced the size of an 8.6MB image to a mere 36.6KB.

Working for an Academy vs. working for JISC infoNet [visualisation]

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Back in 2009 when I was Director of e-Learning of The Northumberland Church of England Academy I started tracking my own activities.

Using a private WordPress-powered blog with the P2 theme, I quickly logged what I was up to, adding tags as I went. Below is the tag cloud after one month of using the system as a Senior Leader in an newly-minted Academy:

Doug's work record - search for 'Google Apps'

As you can see, the following tags were prevalent (I don’t think I included teaching in there for some reason!):

  • Google Apps (I was responsible for deploying it across the 9-site Academy)
  • Elearning (obviously)
  • Meetings (lots and lots of these)
  • Email (a necessary evil)
  • Dan Brooks (an M.Ed. student from an Australian university whom I mentored during extended teaching practice)
  • Training (I led plenty of sessions)

Doug's work blog (2012)

The above screenshot is from yesterday, soon after finishing my two-year stint as Researcher/Analyst at JISC infoNet. Apart from changing my avatar and tweaking the colour scheme, what’s changed?

  • The email tag is much larger in this cloud. I was working in an office rather than a school, after all.
  • JISC, JISC Advance and JISC infoNet unsurprisingly figure a lot.
  • Google Apps remains there as I implemented and supported the system for the 19 JISC Advance services.
  • Mobile Learning infoKit is there as it was a major piece of work for me during my time at JISC infoNet.
  • Digital literacies features due to my work in the area and programme support for the JISC Developing Digital Literacies programme.
  • Patrick Bellis was my boss at JISC infoNet and Sarah Knight the JISC programme manager with whom I had the most dealings.
  • Other people’s names feature as well – interestingly Dan Brooks (M.Ed. student at the Academy) is still there three years later. Just goes to show how intense that period was!

Finally, you can see that wiki and Skype are small but significant in the tag cloud. I’ve never worked for an organisation that had better knowledge management and procedures than JISC infoNet. The internal wiki had everything you needed to work effectively and was an active, living repository of information. Skype is used extensively throughout JISC, sometimes for calls, sometimes for ‘backchanneling’.

If you’d done something similar which tags would YOU expect to show up?

Two presentations (#TELIC1 & #iDragon) [VIDEO]

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

[If you’re reading this in an RSS reader or by email you may need to click through to view the embedded media]

[vimeo 43719938 w=595 h=372]

TELIC1: The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies from Doug Belshaw on Vimeo.

I was asked to do virtually keynote for Sheffield Hallam University’s TELIC student conference. You can see the result here or embedded above. Slides can be found here (over 10,000 views in 24 hours after being featured on the Slideshare homepage!)

In addition, I presented on Open Badges at the JISC RSC Scotland conference on Friday. It was livestreamed so I’m guessing there’ll be a video recording somewhere. Until then, slides here or embedded below!

Moving into uncharted waters: are open badges the future for skills accreditation? [slideshare id=13234414&style=border-style: solid; border-color: #cccccc; -moz-border-top-colors: none; -moz-border-right-colors: none; -moz-border-bottom-colors: none; -moz-border-left-colors: none; -moz-border-image: none; border-width: 1px 1px 0pt;&sc=no]

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