This week I’ve been:
- Leading a webinar for Open Networked Learning on digital literacies. My post, with links to slides and the recording, can be found here.
- Travelling to and from London. This week I was due to stay in another serviced apartment, but they had an electrical fault. I ended up at very short notice in an overpriced Holiday Inn beige box <shudder>.
- Collaborating with Bryan Mathers. We’re working on a number of things, including:
- Releasing episode 8 of the Today In Digital Education (TIDE) podcast. Dai Barnes and I entitled this one Alignment Maker.
- Having lunch with Sirkku Nikamaa and her husband. We started off talking about my community alignment model, but then ended up with blockchain-powered assassination black markets. As you do.
- Exploring options for sponsorship of my regular Things We Learned This Week newsletter. I’m happy to say that C-Learning are going to be the first sponsors for the month of May.
- Running the second session of an ICT Club at my kids’ school. We continued to focus on the ‘Hack The News’ part of the Mozilla Club Curriculum.
- Catching up with Helen Beetham about Jisc digital literacies work, Mike Larsson for BadgeCub development, Dan Martin about productivity tools, and Oliver Quinlan to discuss life, the world, and everything!
- Doing more consultancy-related admin than I enjoy. Thankfully, my wife’s starting to help with that…
- Assembling my new office chair from made.com
- Writing about:
This coming Monday is a public holiday (although I’ll be working on proposals) and then my wife is accompanying me to London on Tuesday/Wednesday. I’ll be working as usual down there, and then back home to work Thursday/Friday from my man cave.
This week I’ve been:
Next week I’m in London Tuesday/Wednesday working from the C&G offices, running a webinar on digital literacies for Lund University in Sweden, and reviewing my first month as a consultant. I think I might start calling myself into the office again at the start of each month…
Image CC BY Mark Freeth
This week I’ve been:
- In London for two days and two nights. I stayed at the Atelier apartments next to Farringdon again.
- Helping facilitate some of the Nesta event on Young Digital Makers: creative solutions for the challenges ahead. It was definitely a room full of my kind of people – including Oliver Quinlan, Kat Braybrooke, Bryan Mathers, Drew Buddie, Tom Kenyon, John Bevan, and Cliff Manning. I used Google Ventures’ Note and Vote approach, which worked pretty well.
- Presenting at and helping facilitate an internal City & Guilds product and services conference. It was a lot of fun as I got to hang out with the DigitalMe crowd (Tim Riches, Lucy Neale, Matt Rogers) and talk about Open Badges.
- Going to the dentist. Apparently the only thing I could do to make my teeth any better would be to bleach them. Flossing and regular brushing FTW!
- Working on something around engines of growth for City & Guilds.
- Sorting out the Today In Digital Education (TIDE) podcast while Dai Barnes was away skiing. There’s a new URL for the tumblr blog, and we’re now on SoundCloud. Also, we should show up in most podcast directories!
- Thinking a lot about the learner journey and points at which Open Badges could be useful. Unsurprisingly, these are likely to be transition points such as moving between different educational experiences and then from there into a job.
- Plotting and planning with Bryan Mathers. We’ve identified some behaviours (especially around email) that we want to help people avoid. I’m going to write some stuff and he’s going to draw some of his wonderful diagrams.
- Catching up with Laura Hilliger and Jess Klein via Skype.
- Booking travel and accommodation for the next few weeks. London is so expensive!
- Reading the amazing Remake Learning Corps’ epic Learning Competencies resource. Highly recommended if you’re thinking about badge system design.
- Trying out more Freeletics activities. I haven’t been that sweaty in a hotel room for a while.
- Playing about with Slack. We used it briefly at Mozilla but it wasn’t open enough. However, it could be perfect for an upcoming use case I’m exploring.
- Resurrecting my discours.es blog. I’m using a self-hosted instance of Known. This replaces the Evernote + Postach.io workflow I abandoned in early 2014.
- Catching up with Zak Mensah about some exciting upcoming work around digital skills and badges at Bristol Museums. He wrote a great post this week about his first 100 days as Head of Transformation there.
- Finding out from Martyn Ware (SQA)what’s been going on in Scotland with Open Badges recently.
- Watching and, to some extent, participating via the backchannel in Bonnie Stewart‘s PhD thesis defense. Awesomely, she was allowed to stream it via a Google+ Hangout. Sadly, I wasn’t allowed to back in 2012 (although I must dig out that secret audio recording I made…)
- Writing some blog posts:
Next week I start what I hope to be a regular routine. I’m planning to get the train down to London early Tuesday morning, stay over, and then come back Wednesday evening.
Image CC BY-SA Loz Pycock
