Thinkery - Open Visual Thinkery

Here is the archive of open visual thinkery in chronological order.

Glasgow

I used to live in Glasgow, Scotland – and it remains my favourite city. A warmth and humour despite (or possibly due to) the dreich weather. We lived in a top floor tenement flat next to a boisterous Celtic-Football-Club-supporting family. We soon figured out that if Celtic won a big game, we needed to sleep in…
Credentials big and small…

Every time I find myself on a beach, I’ll be looking for a pebble that catches my eye. I’ll pick a few contenders, and over the course of a two week holiday will end up with maybe 100 pebbles. At the end of the holiday, I’ll take maybe two or three home. I have attached…
Flares*

It was Irish farmer practicality meets home improvement engineering. My gran grew the flowers. My mum dried them. And I, yes I, arranged them in little pots filled with cement. Pretty flowers now with added permanence… Having said that, the same practical engineering had us making rafts every summer for the river. A few of…
The Pi-clopedia

I don’t know about you but I’ve been tinkering in my man-shed. Curiosity-driven, soldering iron out, YouTube at the ready. The spirit of McGyver runs deep through my veins, and given enough time there is nothing I cannot make. The Raspberry Pi? It’s a thing of beauty. Now then what shall I make it do?…
Open Badges (P.S. there’s data inside…)

Open Badges seem so simple, don’t they? But wait – don’t make assumptions – ask questions! They’ve got stuff inside. Data. Authenticated data. But the big news? – you can take them with you because they’re built on an open standard. They can be connected together to form a learning pathway. The data structure inside the…
A subjunctive mood…

Primary schools in the UK have gone grammar mad. Essentially, although a kid may be dynamite in other areas, they can be labelled “below age related expectations”. What does that even mean? In actual fact, we are natural grammarians. Kids sponge-brains can soak up new languages amazingly quickly, without any formal learning. It seems we are…
A teacher’s mission

This Will Richardson talk really resonated with me. He quotes Dewey. You should really watch it.
Offline

Oooh. Was that a buzz from the phone in my pocket? It’s probably someone tweeting me. Probably someone sharing an illustration of mine to their followers. They’ve probably got a bijillion followers… let me just check. Nope – must of just been a tingle in my leg – back to reading with the kids… (This…
Diffusion of Innovation

Aha! So it’s not just me… When I first saw this, it face-slapped me like an un-hinged double hi-five. At the time, I was pitching an e-portfolio solution to different training organisations, which was really quite hit and miss. After a while, I realised the product I was selling was actually “Change” – and that…
ART!

An empty page. Create something. But what? I can’t think of anything. Why are you asking me? It’s your brain… But it’s so daunting. It’s too clean. I’ll just mess it up. And anyway, I can’t draw. An empty page is daunting. But it’s also an opportunity. You used to draw when you were a…
Let’s just badge everything

This week, the team at the University of Southampton organised an excellent Open Badge conference, which I really enjoyed taking part in. Doug Belshaw (his slides are here) and Carla Casilli were keynoting. “Let’s just badge everything” is probably not the best strategy in getting up and running with micro-credentials. Here are two questions worth…
Reading – World Book Day

When it comes to reading books as a youngster, my experience was one of homework, context, someone else’s knowledge, questions and comprehension. I thought of reading as something that belonged to school. A tedious necessity. Not something I would do for kicks. My kids experience is somewhat different. It’s choice, interest and curiosity driven, fascinating,…