Weeknote 38/2016

This week I’ve been:

• Sending out Issue #229 of Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel, my weekly newsletter loosely focused on education, technology, and productivity. It featured links on overselling ‘open’, black boxes, and facilitated thinking. Many thanks to Makers Academy for sponsorship!
• Recording and releasing Episode 61 (‘Open To Suggestion’) of Today In Digital Education, my weekly podcast with co-host Dai Barnes.  This week the main topic was the many facets of open, as well as digital identity, perceptions of online privacy, Google’s AI voices, classroom discussions, and the death of the cyberflâneur.  You can join the community to discuss this episode of TIDE in our Slack channel!
• Co-working at  Campus North in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on Monday morning, and then visiting Shaun Allen of Vector76 (a VR/AR lab) in Gateshead during the afternoon.
• Writing up thinkathons that the We Are Open team have run over the past couple of weeks.
• Meeting with Steve Blanks of the Escher Group to follow up the potential SME-led ‘digital passport’ project for the City of Sunderland. If it happens, it will feature Open Badges. Watch this space!
• Travelling to Jersey for the first of a series of visits to Victoria College (VCJ) for some digital strategy work.
• Talking with staff and students at VCJ about their digital ecosystem, as well as running a training session on Google Classroom.
• Writing:
  • You don’t have to speak the same language to adopt badges (Discours.es, 23rd September 2016)
  • General purpose computers give kids wide walls (Discours.es, 23rd September 2016)
  • The ‘unplugging’ narrative is now a non-fiction genre to itself (Discours.es, 21st September 2016)
  • Robert Greene on the importance of ambiguity in creative endeavours (Ambiguiti.es, 21st September 2016)
  • Competency grids are not the future of HR (Discours.es, 20th September 2016)
  • Creative Commons Thinkathon (We Are Open, 20th September 2016)
  • The revolution will be gamified (Discours.es, 20th September 2016)
  • Bikeshedding (Discours.es, 20th September 2016)
  • Learning styles, heuristics, and employability skills (Discours.es, 19th September 2016)
  • London CLC Thinkathon (We Are Open, 19th September 2016)
  • Why bother doing anything at all? (Discours.es, 18th September 2016)
  • Why we feel ‘overwhelmed’ (Discours.es, 18th September 2016)
  • A better way to choose your Linux distribution (Discours.es, 17th September 2016)

Next week I’ll be in Newcastle on Monday, working from home Tuesday/Wednesday, speaking at the launch of Badgemaker in Glasgow on Thursday, and then heading up a mountain to get in two Quality Mountain Days on Friday/Saturday.