Category: #TOLC

  • Participatory Culture

    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

    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”…

  • Top of the league!

    Top of the league!

    Yay! Top of the league! What… for rote learning? <heart sinks> Here’s Jim Knight talking OECD: ‘England is bottom of the league when it comes to deep learning. And top for drill and practice. It’s no coincidence’

  • Changing your world view

    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

    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

    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…

    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?

    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…

  • The Confidence Gap

    The Confidence Gap

    At the Digital Leaders recent conference, I took part in a discussion about young people and Digital Skills. As you might expect, there was lots of talk about “the skills gap”, which is already here (check out programmers salaries in London) and predicted to result in many thousands of unfilled jobs. In my experience, the mini-journeys…

  • Digital DNA – women in tech

    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…

  • Future of work

    Future of work

    Whilst speaking at OEB15 in Berlin recently, I managed to catch John Higgins (DG of Digital Europe) pose this question. Not that these two positions are actually mutually exclusive. Maybe one is the process by which we arrive at the other…

  • Lifelong learning

    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…

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