Category: #TOLC

Participatory Culture

I zoomed in to Catherine Cronin’s talk on “If open is the answer, what is the question?” at the recent OER16 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. This thought resonated with me, as it’s something I’ve learning in my journey with Visual Thinkery: our contibutions matter. With a sideways glance at school, I think there’s a massive difference between…
Work culture

A business starts with a culture of one. Every person that joins adds to that culture. Their values, their humour, their work ethic. Every decision, communication, action sets a precedent. Culture can take years to build, but days to damage. A organisation is it’s people – so which part do you play? (Inspired by “The Open Organization”…
Changing your world view

This looks all wrong, doesn’t it? The thing is, it’s not at all easy to change your current world view. In fact, we actively look for things that will confirm our existing world view. This, I now know, is called confirmation bias, which always reminds me of the Simon & Garfunkel line “a man hears…
Digital Skills Sandwich

Sandwich anyone? I do love a good sandwich. If potatoes are the king of carbs, then surely bread is its queen? As an Irishman, I am of course very biased. Anyway, I digress… The Digital Skills Sandwich is an idea that’s been rumbling around in my head for a while now. It’s seed germinates from the fact…
The Four Elements of Studentship

I met John Webber from Sussex Downs College recently, and discovered a number of common interests, including Open Badges. He sent through this thinking on his understanding of studentship, which I’ve taken the liberty of attempting to bring life a little….
Ideation and thinkery…

Oh, the need for a creative process in order to ideate and innovate! In my experience, people have different strengths when it comes to thinking, and without a recognition of this (and a process), one person’s sideways idea is discounted as silly, or even worse, seen as a threat. Tom Barrett’s blog entitled “The ebb and flow between…
What next for Open Badges?

Blockchain, the underlying technology used by Bitcoin, is cool. At least, I think it is, if I could only get my head around it. A group of thinkers (including Serge Ravet) from the Open Badges Community got together to start thinking about how the Open Badge standard could be used inside the Blockchain. What would…
Digital DNA – women in tech

The recent Digital Leaders conference was entitled “Building Digital DNA”. Jacqueline de Rojas (VP at Citrix) spoke about women in tech (or the lack thereof). I was thoroughly impressed with some female students I met a few weeks ago whilst doing some visual thinkery for UCL Academy. They had no problem seeing themselves as future engineers. Sure enough, looking…
Lifelong learning

This thought came as a result of an event organised by NIACE, and was comment made by their CEO, David Hughes. I think he has a point…
PLNs

I came across this thought by @tomwhitby thanks to an Aaron Davis blogpost. I found something comforting it that, possibly due to not really having a title these days…
Badge Taxonomy V0.2

This is version two of the Badge Taxonomy – the purpose of which is not to classify rogue badges – but to understand how badges were being used, and help think through badging solutions.
3DCV

I really liked this idea from the Education Design Lab blog post Are Badges College Ready?. What would a 3D CV look like? What might elevate one achievement over another? Open Badges provide the underlying mechanism, but the value of a badge depends on multiple factors.