A Partial History

• 2004–2010

  Classrooms and corridors

  I started as a history teacher, before moving into senior leadership as Director of E-Learning for a multi-site Academy. The early blog posts track classroom experiments, from iPhone mishaps to thoughts on the BECTA era. The focus even then was how technology shifts the conditions for learning. I was less interested in gadgets and more concerned with the power structures they change or support.

  Start here (2011)

• 2010–2012

  Jisc and the move to higher education

  This period covered mobile learning, digital literacies, and Open Educational Resources. The "Things I Learned This Week" series began during this time, which was the first real evidence of my link-blog habit. Moving from schools to sector-level infrastructure meant thinking about scale, but also noticing how institutions can quieten radical ideas.

• 2012–2015

  Mozilla: Open Badges and Web Literacy

  Three years of working in the open. I served as Badges and Skills Lead, then Web Literacy Lead. We worked on the Web Literacy Map and the Open Badges specification. The main lesson from this time was that the mission matters more than the individual. I also learned that remote work can sometimes feel transactional if you are not careful.

  By 2015, I moved towards consultancy. Dynamic Skillset soft-launched in March. Weeknote 13/2015 marks my departure from Mozilla, including a memory of an inflatable dinosaur in a party hat.

• 2015–2016

  Going independent

  The consultancy years started with work for City & Guilds and DigitalMe. I began to realise that being an independent consultant meant choosing which problems to own. I adopted the /now page habit to mark time without needing a job title to explain my work.

• 2016–2026

  We Are Open Co-op

  We founded the co-op in 2016 as a flat, consent-driven organisation. We spent ten years working with Amnesty International UK, the BBC, and MIT. The co-op was a way to put the lessons from Mozilla into practice, working openly and sharing by default as a collective. The co-op closed in May 2026. It was a continuation of the work, rather than an ending.

• 2018–2020

  MoodleNet

  I worked on taking MoodleNet from an idea to a federated social network for educators. This involved two years of management and team-building. I noticed the slow drift from innovation to administration that often happens with large projects. Weeknote 19/2020 captures the shift during the pandemic.

• 2020–2024

  The polycrisis turn

  The pandemic made it clear that old models of working were gone. My writing shifted from classroom technology to the reliability of wider systems. The graph of my writing from this time shows more concepts and fewer reviews of tools. I spent more time reading James C. Scott and Jenny Odell, and less time looking at software updates.

• 2024–present

  Productive friction and the zine experiment

  My current work involves unbundling from large platforms and self-hosting. The first Cognitive Wallpaper zine is part of this. I am now asking how to make things that do not just feed the attention economy. This archive is part of that effort; it is a refusal to let twenty years of writing vanish into an algorithm.

This is one way to read the archive. The graph and the posts themselves offer many others.