I just want my data to mean something

Er… hello?

This is a blog of openly licensed thinkery. They are doodles, thoughts and ideas of Bryan Mathers – little curious tidbits which have emerged from juicy conversations. Also, this is a dumping ground for abandoned artwork. But one man’s dump is another’s treasure trove – amirite?

You can include artwork from this site under a Creative Commons CC-BY-ND licence.

  • Is technology addictive?

    Is technology addictive?

    It feels like I’m missing something. I wonder if there’s a record-setting sporting contest I need to witness. Um… nope. I wonder if anybody’s retweeted that awesome last thing I drew. I’d better check. Sheesh, tumbleweeds. Maybe something’s breaking in the news. It’s still snowing in Scotland. It feels like I’m missing something… Inspired by the post – Is…

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  • Shed – ideas worth making…

    Shed – ideas worth making…

    And so it was that we chanced upon the very spirit of makery captured forever in this conversation…

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  • A post-brexit passport

    A post-brexit passport

    So far, the only emerging upside of Brexit is to have a new-in-my-lifetime-but-old-in-others coloured passport. So in order to help out, I thought I’d throw my own design into the mix. This is the third in the facepalm thinkery series, following this and then this. Given the current state of things, I’m sure there’ll be many more to come…

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  • Open Badges 2.0

    Open Badges 2.0

    I attended the badge summit in London last week. I had the opportunity to visually digest the chatter from different speakers regarding V2 of the Open Badges spec. If you have a look at how the standard is described, you hopefully agree that abstract things need all the visualisation help they can get…

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  • Love and hate

    Love and hate

    A story. Of how their life had changed. There’s none so powerful as a story. And this is what I heard him say.

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  • The Principles of Makery

    The Principles of Makery

    As I thought about the making process behind my Raspberry Pi being installed as protector of my shed from overheating, I found myself wondering (as I do) about the principles of Makery. Here are three that came to mind in the building of this project. If you think of others, let me know…

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  • Raspberry Pi – protector of the shed…

    Raspberry Pi – protector of the shed…

    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.

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  • People and Jobs

    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

    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

    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

    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…

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  • ZeroNet – the rabbit hole…

    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…

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