Weeknote 14/2018

Open Thinkering Weeknotes, weeknote, work

This week I’ve been:

  • Sending out Issue #298 of my Thought Shrapnel newsletter. This one was called ‘Easter treats’. As of this week, I have 25 people supporting me via Patreon and some backers via Gumroad.

  • Sick. Ignoring my own advice (for which Laura scolded me) I worked through the weakness. Instead of taking my laptop to bed, I should of allowed myself time to get better.

  • Curating interesting things I came across on the  Thought Shrapnel blog. This week I collected some quotations and commented on the following:

    • Microcast #012 (supporters only!)

    • “All that is gold does not glitter,

      Not all those who wander are lost;

      The old that is strong does not wither,

      Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

      From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

      A light from the shadows shall spring;

      Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

      The crownless again shall be king.”

      (J.R.R. Tolkien)

    • The death of the newsfeed (is much exaggerated)

    • Absentee leadership

    • Social internet vs social media

    • The ‘1, 2, 3’ approach to organising your working day

    • “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” (Mark Twain)

    • Blockcerts mobile

    • Automated Chinese jaywalking fines are a foretaste of so-called ‘smart cities’

    • What’s the link between employment and creativity?

    • Mozilla’s Web Literacy Curriculum

  • Sending out the agenda for the next 6th Morpeth Scouts Executive Committee meeting. I also made a small tweak to their website.

  • Messing about with my family, as they’re all on Easter holidays. I have never seen children consume so much chocolate. We made collages using cut-up bits of newspaper and magazine (mine is at the top of this post!)

  • Working on Project MoodleNet:

    • Talking with smart people, including Mark Pegrum, Stephen Downes, and Mike Larsson.
    • Finalising the job advert for a Technical Architect to help me out. It will be a six-month position, initially, and should be posted before the end of the month.
    • Leading the first monthly community call. The agenda, notes, and recording can be found here.
    • Working with Paul Greidanus on testing some potential solutions for the MVP. Unfortunately, they didn’t work. It’s always useful to bear in mind that Edison quote when that happens…

  • Hanging out with my We Are Open co-op colleagues for our monthly co-op day. We talked about the new website we’re building, GDPR, upcoming work, the Co-op College conference, our involvement in the CoTech network, and other silliness.

  • Writing:

    • No easy answers (Open Educational Thinkering, 4th April 2018)
    • My takeaways from Stephen Downes’ talk on personal learning (Open Educational Thinkering, 3rd April 2018)

Next week, I’m taking a short break to go on holiday with my family in Jersey at the start of the week. After that, I’m doing a couple of days with Moodle and then spending a day finishing off some of the IDB work for the co-op.