Weeknote 13/2025
As I compose this post, I can hear the sound of birds in the garden. Spring has sprung! It’s sunny. I can also hear the sound of the dishwasher because someone forgot to put it on last night. That person was me.
It’s Mother’s Day in the UK, and the start of Daylight Savings Time, so of course Hannah is reading the weekend newspapers on her iPad in bed, and our two teenagers are still asleep. They’ll both be tired from their exertions yesterday.
My son, Ben, had his first proper shift as a lifeguard yesterday morning and then played a pretty intense basketball game in the afternoon. Thankfully, despite their best efforts towards the end of the game, they won.
My daughter’s football team continues to lay waste to all before them despite playing up a year. They’re currently top of the league and, after winning yesterday’s County Cup semi-final, in the final of two cup competitions. It could be a historic treble-winning season. They’ve already scored 106 goals between them this season.
Ten days ago, if you’d told me that, by today I would have been to the gym three times and started running again, I would have suggested that you might want to put that crack pipe down. However, such as been the effect of the beta blockers that I’ve been prescribed that I would liken it to someone flicking a switch within my body in the direction of normality. My grandmother always used to say, “at least you’ve got your health,” which I thought was just an old person thing to say. And, I mean, it absolutely is an old person thing to say, but it’s also true; when you haven’t “got your health” it sucks.
I’ve spent much of this week working in my new home office. The smell of paint is receding, I’ve made an eBay purchase to extend our mesh network, and I’m getting used to what setting to have the heating so I’m not too hot or cold. It’s a cosy space. I just wish that the birds would pay attention to the fat balls that I have placed for them on the fence opposite the office window.
But what, you might be wondering, have I actually been doing in said home office this week. Well, excitingly, WAO has kicked off a couple of projects. More when I’ve got URLs to share, etc. but suffice to say one relates to AI Literacy for the Responsible Innovation Centre for Public Media Futures, a research centre hosted at the BBC. The other is for Amnesty International UK, who we’re helping with the creation of an online community for their activists.
Over and above that, I co-facilitated an event for National AI Literacy Day with Angela Gunder which featured Punya Mishra and Ian O’Byrne. Punya was one of the originators of the TPACK framework, and I’ve collaborated with Ian on a bunch of stuff relating to new literacies from the Mozilla Web Literacy Map onwards. You can watch the recording, including the very cool 80s-style introduction, courtesy of Reclaim TV, either here or via the embed below:
I love that the preview thumbnail includes Punya’s face being overlaid with the Reclaim TV logo (top-left) and I’m casually drinking from my bright yellow, sticker-laden insulated water bottle (bottom-left).
I’ve also scheduled a couple of upcoming online events, including FAAFO #3, which will be next Thursday and one in a month’s time with Kate Parsley called Feeling the Flux: finding the positives and protecting our wellbeing in times of change. I’m there mainly for rhetorical effect and to lend support; the main input will be from Kate and the confirmed speakers she’s lined up.
Other than that, and taking Tuesday afternoon off to drive my daughter an hour each way to represent East Northumberland against Darlington, on Monday convened a group of researchers in response to a UNESCO call for writing about the future of AI in education. We’re following-up in a couple of weeks’ time. I’ve also vibe coded a career discovery tool, had a couple of bizdev meetings and also 11 virtual coffee calls with people I’ve reached out to over the past few weeks, published the third part of a series about microcredentials, and wrote 10 posts over at Thought Shrapnel.
Talking of vibe coding, I genuinely think that it’s an approach which has the potential to really help people quickly prototype ideas. I’m planning on putting together a course around this, so of course I have vibe coded a website to that end. Behold the magnificence of vibe.horse:
I had a lot of fun making that on Thursday evening 😀
Next week, we get into the two projects I mentioned earlier a bit more earnestly. We’ve still got capacity for more projects, but in the meantime I’ll continue filling my time with interesting side quests such as the ones I’ve already mentioned in this post, and Badge to the Future which I want to return to after talking with Nate on Monday.