Tag: @DAJBelshaw

Piece of Cake

At the recent Creative Commons Summit in Lisbon, I tuned in to all sorts of insight from all sorts of people. But one of my favourite morsels of wisdom was this off-the-cuff comment by Dr. Doug Belshaw, which should serve as hearty wisdom for all future conference organisation teams. But maybe these words were simply…
Eyeball time

Over the last month or two, I’ve taken part in Doug Belshaw’s book group. The book-in-question being Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. As an experiment, I shared my reflections as quick sketches, created whilst listening to the audiobook version. Here’s one of those sketches re-created as a colour artwork using Procreate on the IPad Pro.
Here may lie an Open Badge programme. Time for a pre-mortem…

Last week I was facilitating a Think-a-thon with a WeAreOpen client in Edinburgh alongside co-op member Grainne Hamilton. We were helping our client to think through the integration of an Open Badge programme into their current offering. The Pre Mortem is an extremely helpful way to air intuitive spider-sense discomforts amongst the team, without anyone…
Sparks of Openness

Working in the open – it often feels counter-intuitive. What if someone criticises my half-baked idea? What if they make it stronger? What if someone dislikes the thing I’ve created? What if they really like it? What if they pinch the idea? What if they’re able to use the idea, or add theirs to it? Inspiration comes…
Moodlenet user testing

I’ve been participating in a Moodlenet design sprint (based on this process) all week facilitated by the wonderful people at Outlandish. It was lovely to be on the facilitated side for once, allowing me to focus on the visualisation of concepts. By day 3 we had collaboratively turned our words into wireframes and hacked together…
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…
Computing Badges

Desired Experience: Swift Or Objective C, JavaScript, Cordova, Angular… I’ve always thought that one of the most obvious areas ripe for micro-credentials is Computing skills. It’s a pretty fresh sector, so school credentials are miles behind. However, the speed at which it’s changing also lends itself to recognising small chunks of competency. Most skills in…
POSSEE

Doug Belshaw was the first to enlighten me on this self publishing principle, and encourage me to set up my own site, and publish out from there. Every drawing should have it’s own canonical link he’d say. Unambiguous words, and I’m glad I listened. This rang true again when working with Jim Groom and Reclaim Hosting on…
Issuing Open Badges

What gives an open badge value? Well, apart from the fact that value is a conversation between two parties, I reckon there are a few interesting ingredients – not least the parties involved in the issuing of the badge itself. This thought was created as part of a blog post by Doug Belshaw: Badges, Proof…
Introducing Badge News

If you’re interested in Open Badges, you’ve probably asked the question well who’s using them? The team at We Are Open, lead by Doug Belshaw have assembled a number of interested parties, and put together an awesome fortnightly newsletter for just this reason. Sign up here: badge.news
Who draws the line?

Some days, it’s just not happening. So I remind myself of the process. 1. Go to trello. 2. Organise the things 3. Start at the top – half an hour later I’ve fallen down a twitter shaped rabbit hole…
Future kinds of work

How I work has changed massively over the past ten years. Okay, so now I draw pictures, whereas I used to write programs – or lead others to write programs. Probably the biggest change I’ve had is being exposed to Mozilla’s way of working. They corale creative communities using some very clever practices and technologies. And…