SOMEONE left the heater on in my shed.
You can read all about it here in the most recent dollop of thinkery to your inbox.
Author: Bryan Mathers
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People and Jobs
I attended a Cities of Learning event recently, hosted by the RSA. I’ve long been interested in this project, and how it is interwoven with a local use of micro-credentials. The day was teed up by Kirstie Donnelly, MD at City & Guilds, who framed this problem.
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Data: it’s personal
Meaningless, meaningless, all is meaningless! It’s just 1’s and 0’s after all…
Unless, that is, I can get some insight from your habits, or predict what you might do (or want) next. You are part of a herd after all…
This thought came from a thinkery conversation with the API Evangelist, Kin Lane.
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Pathways
Gold, Silver, Bronze, yawn…
This (standard) approach prevents the issuing organisation from having to think too deeply about how learners might interact with what they’ve got to offer.
There’s more than one way to string together some badges.
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The Seven Co-operative Principles
You may not know that there are Seven Co-operative Principles. Yesterday, I was at Mozfest, hosted by Ravensbourne College in Greenwich, facilitating a visual conversation all about co-operatives. In fact, Mozfest is so chock-full of conversations, you can easily spend an hour getting to the right floor, bumping into interesting people you half-know. And that’s not because the lift/elevators are confusing. Which they are, but anyways…
I’m a founding member of WeAreOpen, a worker co-operative set up to help a few of us combine our skills, networks and voices.
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ZeroNet – the rabbit hole…
Doug Belshaw has been experimenting recently with ZeroNet, a way of hosting a website, distributed amongst peers (using BitTorrent and BitCoin technologies). Essentially, such a website would become decentralised, with no single point of hosting, should someone want to target it in order to shut it down, or deny others access by overloading the server. Resilient hosting…
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Curiosity
What if I just tweak it a little? Change the colours slightly, or make it into a repeating pattern? Or a character? If it could speak, what would it say? Curiosity is creativity’s playful little cousin (Tinker?) – always getting up to mischief…
I came across this quote on curiosity doing some work for Ada College, the UK’s National College for Digital Skills (I’m a big fan). I was invited to come along to the first day with the first cohort and create thinkery from conversations had with staff and students, who were, and are, brilliant.
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Eye
It’s a two way deal.
Once you’ve seen something, you can’t unsee it.
Equally, the interpretation of what you see is a product of things you’ve seen and experiences you’ve had so far.
Eye. Even the english word is a palindrome; it’s a two way deal.
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Self Portrait
If self expression affords you a sideways glimpse at your own self, then a self portrait allows you to briefly hold its gaze.
Deface your face. Go on; I give you full permission…
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Artificial Intelligence…
So I’ve been meeting with Kin Lane recently (aka API Evangelist) trying to get a deeper hold on all things API (or Application Programming Interface for what it’s worth). As an ex-programmer, I’m interested to understand the evolution of how APIs are being used. A number of insights emerged from our conversation, including this aligned view of artificial intelligence albeit from contrasting positions…
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Being a leader
There are a grazillion lists of leadership qualities compiled by those who seem to be able to exactly define what it takes to be a leader. Yet, in my experience, the ability to lead is a shape-shifting un-bottle-able mist.
Nevertheless, here are four very general qualities that I reckon a good leader does indeed require, which I found myself think-doodling about during a presentation given by Hogan Assessments at the recent e-ATP conference in the Netherlands.
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The future of testing
I read this guardian article recently where a woman asked Tinder for all her personal information. They sent her 800 pages worth of data. Apply this to the world of testing, which is increasingly data rich, and it doesn’t take much to make a pessimistic prediction.
This thought was originally from a town hall discussion at the E-ATP conference, which I had the pleasure of participating in.