Weeknote 43/2024
I spent the majority of this week cosplaying a confident, shirt-and-jacket-wearing middle aged white guy at a conference where I hopefully made a lot of mediocre first impressions. (You’ll have to excuse me, I started writing this before 6am on a Sunday, full of cold — it’s not Covid, I checked — so I’m in a bit of a sleep-deprived, painkiller-addled haze.)
Paris is a great city, isn’t it? Despite having been there many times before, for some reason I mentally bracket it with London, a place I don’t particularly like. Whereas London feels like a place full of stuffed shirts and people looking to the past, Paris has a swagger and freshness about it which I always appreciate. Yes, its transport system leaves a lot to be desired (1h 20m to get from the main airport to the Eiffel Tower?!) but it more than makes up for it by being unashamedly cool and stylish.
I was there from Tuesday to Friday this week for ePIC 2024. On Monday, given that I watch a lot of football, I had a look at who was playing in the Champions League this week and saw that Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) were scheduled to play Atlético Madrid on Wednesday night. “Hang on, I’m going to be in Paris,” I thought to myself, immediately going to the PSG website for tickets. Long story short, I managed to get myself a seat, went along, and had an incredible time.
The conference wasn’t bad either! Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist, famously said that existence precedes essence, by which he meant that humans first come into existence and then define themselves through their choices and actions (rather than having a predetermined essence or nature). You could view ePIC through this existentialist lens, especially as the page for the Paris Declaration, signed by attendees at the event, includes these words: “Recognition is not just a need, the need to be recognised, it is also an ability, the ability to recognise, a condition for knowing oneself, others and the world.”
I ran two sessions while I was in Paris:
- Wednesday: a 45-minute workshop entitled Human-centric Open Recognition: Synthesis, Mapping, and Badge Creation Using AI Tools which encouraged participants to use a custom GPT to map skills conversationally against skills taxonomies.
- Thursday: a 20-minute presentation called Employer Recognition of Job Readiness in New Americans: A Case Study sharing the findings of a recent project we worked on.
In addition, I led two discussions at short notice. The first, on Thursday, was what one participant described as a ‘group therapy session’ as a result of some comments that had been made about the paucity of microcredential frameworks around the world. I’ll save my comments around that for a separate blog post and report that I’m currently writing, but suffice to say that the ‘therapy’ session, which included around 25 people, reminded me of one that Cathy Davidson convened in the hallway of a DML conference around Open Badges. While my facilitation was nowhere near the quality of Cathy’s, and with fewer people, the point was similar: academia doesn’t get to decide what counts in the world, we do.
The second discussion was part of the World Café session on Friday afternoon. I was asked at short notice by Philippe Petitqueux to run it, with the focus being on how to run a local event to accelerate Open Recognition. As ever when you run these kinds of sessions, some great ideas came out of the groups of participants who discussed the topic. My voice was pretty shafted by that point, as I was surviving on five hours’ sleep after being out until 2am the night before, and was coming down with a cold. How I didn’t get a migraine, I’ll never know.
I always enjoy ePIC, and as it diversifies and evolves, I think it needs to implement recommendations from Anne Hilliger’s presentation from last year:
- Create a Code of Conduct
- Reflect on your own privilege
- Use Open Badges to encourage pro-social behaviours
In addition, I’d like to see ‘messier’, more unconference-style sessions, and longer time periods available for people to really explore topics together. I shouldn’t share too many ideas in this area, though, otherwise someone will ask me to help with the next one, and event organisation really isn’t my strong suit.
I’m not going to name names of the people I enjoyed hanging out with at ePIC, as I’ll inevitably forget to mention someone and they might, if they ever read this, be mortally offended. Instead, I’ll say that the energy of the people in the community reminds me of my teaching days: that is to say, in it for the right reasons, optimistic, enthusiastic, and innovative. Which is exactly the kind of people you need to surround yourself with in a week when the US electorate decided to vote to install Trump for a second term.
I would usually leave a three-day event about halfway through the last day to preserve my energy levels and get back home to my family. However, on this occasion, mainly due to flight times, I stayed until the (not so) bitter end. And I’m glad I did: the after-party in a bar near the venue was the perfect way to end ePIC and say my goodbyes before heading to the airport.
I’d fully intended to work on the report I mentioned above once I’d made my way through airport security, but a couple of things happened which prevented that. The first was that an extremely grumpy Air France employee told me that my carry-on luggage was too heavy, and so I needed to check my small suitcase. When I went to do so, I was charged €70 for the privilege, despite it containing the exact same stuff as on my flight out. The second thing that prevented me working on the report was that I fell asleep almost as soon as I sat down at the gate.
Back in the UK, my son picked me up from Newcastle airport, which wasn’t as straightforward a task as it would usually be, with the road from the A1 closed for roadworks. It nevertheless worked as a great lesson on why you shouldn’t rely on Google Maps for navigation after you’ve been diverted. He went in circles a bit before realising that he needed to figure out the way to the airport manually!
Yesterday, I dosed myself up on ibuprofen and paracetemol and took my daughter to her football match. Her team won against another very strong team who are also playing a year up. In the absence of their usual captain, who is injured, she took the armband and played well. My son’s basketball lost narrowly against a team who they really should have beaten. He also played well, and always gives full effort, which is sadly not something I can always say about his team-mates. Having spent a long time watching youth sports games, it would appear that you can teach skills and tactics, but I’m not sure you can teach the desire to win.
Today will unsurprisingly involve more football, both live, as.my son and daughter are playing again, and on TV. We’re also all going out for Sunday dinner later in the day, which I’m looking forward to.
It’s now that time of year which I consider the long wind-down to Christmas, and thank goodness for that. The Mozilla Festival used to serve as a marker in that regard, and this year it’s ePIC. The real stimulus, I guess, is having survived Vendémiaire, and no longer feeling like I’m in the wrong timezone (Daylight Savings can get firmly in the sea).
Next week, Laura’s on holiday until Wednesday, so I’ll collaborate with John on the NDLN report, as well as ensuring everything’s ticking over with our Friends of the Earth AI sustainability principles stuff. We probably should do some more bizdev, especially for January when things are usually really quiet. Right now, though, I’m just going to pour myself another cup of tea, and cross ‘write weeknote’ off my to-do list. No more jobs!
Photo taken by me in the Parc des Princes on Wednesday night. The white-on-black banner at the bottom translates as “War on the pitch but peace in the world”.