Tag: work

I’m composing this sat under an electric blanket on a relatively low setting, watching Brighton & Hove Albion come from 2-0 to score three goals after half-time. They’re currently winning 3-2. Waking up after half-time is something my daughter’s team is good at doing. They won 9-1 on Saturday, with her scoring a hat-trick, and lost 7-2 on Sunday.

We spent the afternoon at Six BALTIC, the restaurant on the roof of the centre for contemporary art. It was my dad’s 75th birthday earlier in the week, so I took him to Sunderland’s win against Derby County on Tuesday night, and arranged for our family to meet at the restaurant. It was great to see my sister and her two kids, and the food was lovely.

Both occasions were supposed to be surprises. With the football match, because of digital ticketing, I had to allocate the ticket to my dad’s digital wallet, meaning that he found out at least a week in advance that I was planning to take him. With the restaurant, he’d planned to have his Covid and flu jabs this morning, and I didn’t want him feeling rough. Thankfully, after I told him, he managed to move the jabs to next week.

My son’s toe and ankle, which I was quite concerned about last weekend, are much better. We gave him a lift to and from school from Monday to Thursday, and then he managed to walk himself on Friday. I think he should be OK to do his driving test next week, and hopefully start getting back to sport.

On the work front, Laura’s still been away, so I’ve been working with John and Bryan on various projects. Here’s a quick overview:

• Friends of the Earth (WAO) — we’re helping them on a Mozilla-funded project to generate some AI sustainability principles. These will go into a report, once we’ve finished our desk research, got back responses from email-based interviews, and run an online roundtable event.
• Jobs for the Future (WAO) — we’re evaluating a Verifiable Credential for ‘New Americans,’ refugees and immigrants to the USA. It’s based on the International Rescue Committee’s Job Readiness Training, and we’ve almost finished the report and slide deck. The project has run over the last few months and involved quite a lot of user research with various stakeholder groups.
• N-TUTORR (Dynamic Skillset) — I’m working with Bryan and his award-winning Remixer Machine to run a couple of workshops relating to digital credentials for staff CPD.
• Skills Development Scotland (WAO) — we’re putting together a proposal for how SDS could use Verifiable Credentials with their My World of Work platform. The SCQF have been helping connect us with forward-thinking employers, who we’ve been interviewing to see how badges/credentials might be able to help with the hiring process.

We also put in a couple of responses to RFP’s for the N-TUTORR project around horizon-scanning reports and should find out about those next week. One was relating to microcredentials, the other to do with AI.

Other than the above, I’ve been working on an end of module assessment (EMA) for module TB871 of my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice. I’ve started using Scrivener again after over a decade away from it, and it’s an absolute delight for writing anything that’s based on research. It comprises a 3,400-word report about my system of interest, and a 600-word practitioner statement. I’ve written about half of the former, and pretty much finished the latter. It’s due on the 15th, so I’ve still got next week to work on it.

Last week, I complained about my back, putting it down to my running shoes. Although the Strava screenshot might show that my above-average ‘relative effort’ might have something to do with things, I gave them a couple more chances, and then retired them. I’m just going to use them as casual trainers from now on.

I’ve therefore started running in my new running shoes, which apparently take around 50km to ‘bed in’ so I’m going to withhold judgement about how they currently feel. I’m three-quarters of the way to 1,000km for the year which is decent progress. If and when I meet that target, I’m not sure what I’ll do next year — the obvious thing would be to up the goal to 1,200km/year (or 100km/month). I’ll see how I feel at the end of December.

My wife and I re-joined the spa at our local leisure centre and went together on Saturday. As the weather gets colder, it’s not only a great place to unwind, but it really warms your bones. There’s nothing quite like the sauna.

Next week, I’m delighted to say that Laura will be back to contribute her large brain to our projects, along with her creativity and enthusiasm. My son’s got his driving test, I’m finishing off my MSc assessment, and it’s the first session of School of the Possible’s Project Studio, which I’ve signed up for.

I’ve put Thought Shrapnel on hiatus for a bit, probably just for a few weeks, mainly because everything I’m working on at the moment involves writing. I’ve called myself into the office again so have some stuff to get on with. Also, it’s October, or more accurately (to my mind) Vendémiaire, which is the most ‘meh’ month of the year. While it contains my wife’s birthday, it’s also a time when I lament the passing of the light, and feel like an anxious little squirrel hiding his nuts for winter (stop sniggering at the back!)

Photo: my dad and me before kick-off at the Stadium of Light

Today marks the autumn equinox in the northern hemisphere, the day when I stop wearing shorts by default and when I get my SAD light out in order to save off the incoming winter blues.

At the start of the month, I committed to camping for at least one night away from home. Having met that target last weekend in the Lake District, I managed to sneak in a Brucie Bonus last night on the edge of Northumberland National Park. It was so quiet, with no wind at all. I camped in the location of a medieval village which, according to this website, was abandoned in the 14th century due to a combination of border raids and the Black Death.

The area is covered in bracken with a lot of grouse and pheasants around. I had to be as quiet as possible so as not to disturb them; they’re very loud when taking off in fright/flight!

Arriving just before sunset and leaving before dawn meant that I’ve still managed to spend the majority of the weekend with my family. My daughter had a couple of cup matches, with her football team winning the one yesterday 15-0 and losing the one today 4-0. She played well and scored yesterday. My son’s still recovering from his first bout of Covid, and so was at school on Thursday and Friday, but just watched his team play today.

On Friday, I worked on a plan for my End of Module Assessment (EMA) to module TB871 as part of my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice through the Open University. The structure of the module has been such that my three Tutor Marked Assignments (TMAs) build up to this. So combining my answers to these to the blog posts I’ve written, along with the other notes I’ve made, means I’ve got a plan that I’m happy with. Now all I need to do is write it, and keep the whole thing under 4,000 words…

As previously mentioned, I’m planning to take a break from my MSc studies after this module, which I’m intending to partially fill with participation in Project Studio from School of the Possible. I’ve upgraded my membership to do this, after finding the Campfire conversations so generative. The My current aim is to do something with what I’ve learned during the two foundational modules as part of my studies.

Although I didn’t publish anything here, over on the WAO blog I did press the button on the third post in the Introduction to Systems Thinking series. That one is about leverage points.

At Thought Shrapnel, I published the following:

• Against cyberlibertarianism
• Water use literacy
• Leadership, gender, and ‘abusive supervision’
• A landscape of havoc and fracture
• A countercultural perspective to the capitalist notion of ‘productivity’

On the work front, after a really quiet few months I’ve got a few projects on simultaneously. So I’ve been working on the following:

• Writing a report based on the quantitative data we gathered from surveys and the qualitative data from user research interviews relating to the evaluation project around a Job Readiness Training credential for New Americans. Laura wrote a large chunk before heading off on holiday, which was helpful. More about the project can be found in this blog post I published at the start of the project, and this one by John from more recently.
• Planning a couple of workshops on Open Badges with Bryan to help the N-TUTORR project. Interestingly, they’ve got a microcredentials policy but not a badging one, so we’re helping them think about the other three quadrants of recognition.
• Finishing off a pre-mortem activity and doing some initial desk research as part of our Mozilla-funded Friends of the Earth project around AI sustainability principles. We’re convening a roundtable event, and Laura wrote something about that (as well as about Captain Planet!)
• Talking with representatives from the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework (SCQF) as part of a small project we’re working on with Skills Development Scotland (SDS). We’re on the hook for putting together a proposal for how My World of Work could use something like the Digital Credential Consortium‘s Verifiable Credentials open source technology stack.
• Collaborating with my colleagues as part of one of our monthly co-op days. Among other things, we talked about redesigning AILiteracy.fyi.

There’s another small project in the offing, and I’d hoped to be compensated for my time for some input into a Digital Badging Commission thing, but apparently the RSA don’t have a budget for paying experts for their time. Thankfully, I’ve got a few conversations off the back of all of the links and ideas I put in the chat during the online/offline event they ran earlier this week.

Next week, I’m going to get as much of the report finished as possible, as much of the desk research done as I can, and hopefully some user research interviews booked in with Scottish employers. I’m also planning to go swimming at least once, run the Open Recognition is for Everybody (ORE) community call, and have a chat with a couple of people. If that sounds like something you’d like to do, here’s my ‘coffee’ calendar.