Weeknote 18/2015

Open Thinkering Weeknotes, job, work

This week I’ve been:

  • Continuing to advise City & Guilds on badges, agile processes, etc.
  • Watching Cory Doctorow in action at Copying: Right or Wrong?
  • Playing with my new drone – a £35 Syma X5C with lots of extra batteries:

My first drone photo. So proud. pic.twitter.com/rqbmdYH3oW

— Doug Belshaw (@dajbelshaw) April 27, 2015

  • 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 .

  • Collaborating with Bryan Mathers. We’re working on a number of things, including:

    • a document setting out a potential direction of travel for Open Badges at City & Guilds
    • improving my initial community alignment model work (especially the images!)
    • various things to do with productivity and workflow

  • 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:

    • Experimenting with Twitter ads for my ebook
    • Web Literacy Map v1.5 is now live at teach.mozilla.org
    • Guiding Students as They Explore, Build, and Connect Online
    • Wednesday Wisdom #35: Copyright
    • Open Networked Learning webinar

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.