Weeknote 19/2015

Open Thinkering Weeknotes, job, work

This week I’ve been:

  • Despairing at the outcome of the UK General Election. I must live in an echo chamber – everyone I know claimed to be voting for Labour, the Green Party, or the SNP. Perhaps I should check out Nomad List – and then check my family out of the UK?
  • Involved in a traffic accident after someone took out the side of my car as I was coming off a single-track bridge. My kids were in the back. Everyone was OK – including the driver at fault. Our car’s been written off.
  • Travelling to and from London – this time with my wife. We stayed at the Mondrian hotel.
  • Delayed on the way back home from London on the train. Coupled with an early morning it meant I slept for 12 hours on Thursday night!
  • Collaborating with Bryan Mathers on a v0.5 update to the Community Alignment model. His drawings really bring it to life!
  • Continuing to work consult for City & Guilds around Open Badges. I’ve found the recently-published report, Four Scenarios on the Future of Credentials [PDF] incredibly useful.
  • Creating a new signup page for my Things We Learned This Week newsletter, this month sponsored by C-Learning. It goes out every Sunday and this week, for the first time, it will be delivered at 6.30am to inboxes – no matter where in the world you are!
  • Swimming for the first time for a couple of weeks. Water-based fitness fades much faster than land-based fitness!
  • Purchasing the tidepodcast.org domain for the regular Today In Digital Education (TIDE) podcast that Dai Barnes and I produce. I also bought us decent microphones with some of the proceeds from C-Learning  sponsoring my newsletter this month.
  • Releasing TIDE Episode 9: Hackstage Class.
  • Moving to Google Apps for Dynamic Skillset‘s email, docs, calendar, etc. I’m still using Fastmail for my personal email.
  • Running another ICT Club session at my kids’ school. I got them to zoom out on their favourite website and then stick Post-It notes all over the screen, identifying different parts of a web page. Then I introduced them to some of the HTML tags that make up those different elements.
  • Looking forward to my Dad coming home next Friday from his seven-month stint advising the senior leadership of Aspire Academy in Doha, Qatar. We shall drink much whisky.
  • Helping my mother set up her Microsoft Lumia 640. She’s delighted with it as an upgrade from a third-hand iPhone 4. I have to say, I was impressed with it as an integrated package.

  • Writing about:

  • A conversation with Helen Beetham around digital literacies

  • Young Digital Makers: Reaching the Nation
  • Community Alignment model v0.5
  • My Twitter ads verdict: a waste of time and money

Next week we’re getting a Nest learning thermostat installed on Monday, and I’m down in London on Tuesday and Wednesday as usual.

Image CC BY-NC Duncan Toms