Between Wednesday and Friday this week I’ve been at PELeCON in Plymouth. It’s the third time I’ve been to the conference, but was the first time I’ve been invited to keynote it.*

Day 1

It used to be possible to fly down to Plymouth from Newcastle, but since they closed Plymouth airport getting there is a bit more of a trial. I flew from Newcastle to Bristol (meeting Steve Bunce on the way) and then took the train (where we met Helen Crump) from Bristol to Plymouth.

Steve was running a workshop in the first session of the conference on the Wednesday afternoon. Entitled Knitting, thimbles and programming: how does it all stitch together? it was a great overview of computational thinking and the first steps towards ‘hacking’. Indeed Steve had us finger knitting and showcased Mozilla’s Hackasaurus tool. I missed the sessions after that as since I’d been up early and needed to rest.

Derek Robertson unfortunately couldn’t make it down this year so Steve filled in admirably for him talking about a range of current issues in education. I also caught the end of headteacher Karine George’s presentation about the technology initiatives at her school.

In the evening we went to the TeachEat, where I met Joyce Seitzinger for the first time (and her partner Mark Smithers) and had fun talking to Grainne Conole and others. After that I hit the pub with Zak Mensah, Matt Lingard and Steve Bunce to watch Barcelona vs. Paris St. Germain.

Day 2

I was expecting the number of people to increase dramatically on the second, main day of PELeCON but that didn’t really happen. The size of the conference, I estimate, was about half the size it was last year. I’m particularly bad at estimating numbers, but I reckon there were only about 100 people there. That’s a shame as it’s always an enjoyable conference to attend.

Grainne Conole was the first keynote on Thursday morning. I was furiously finishing off my presentation while she was talking, even after being up since 4.45am I had real issues with the wifi which kicked me off literally every 30 seconds on my MacBook. I got there in the end, however, and managed to line up my presentation while listening to Grainne’s engaging thoughts on learning design.

Grainne’s keynote fitted well with mine, I thought, as even though I organised in a fairly gimmicky way around animated GIFs it was, in essence, about how important learning design is when designing Open Badges. My presentation, entitled A History of Open Badges through the medium of animated GIFs is on Slideshare – although the animated GIFs are not so animated on there, unfortunately!

A video of me giving my keynote.

It’s always a pleasure to see Catherine Cronin present so I was delighted to catch her talk about digital identities in a session that also featured Nadja Guggi from the University of Reading and Clare Spiret from the Worldwide Association of Girl Guides. They all need badges, obviously.

After lunch I caught most of Matt Lingard’s session on improving Moodle through user testing as well as Brian Whalley’s session on tablets and personal learning environments. The latter wound me up a bit as Brian (perhaps unintentionally) was seeming to suggest that tablets are ‘the future’ rather than one of a number of different devices learners can choose to use. He got both barrels from me for focusing on their affordances and not really mentioning their constraints. I should probably shut up more, to be fair.

I changed room and caught Ian Jamison’s talk on Faith to Face, an initiative of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation (which he works for). It was really interesting to hear how video conferencing can be used not merely to connect people but to encourage them to engage in dialogue with people from alternative world views.

Following that session I caught Palitha Edirisigha and Arunangsu Chatterjee’s presentation on Problem Based Learning, which was interesting. What I was really in that session for, however, was to listen to the ever-entertaining and insightful Miles Berry talk about Computing and the new curricula. What’s great is that we have something important like the stuff replacing ICT being looked after by thoughtful guys like Miles. This makes me happy.

I skipped Steve Warburton’s keynote as, again, I’d been up early. I had a nap in my hotel room then met a group of delegates to head over to the National Maritime Aquarium which, unusually, was where the conference dinner was held. Needless to say, the combination of good company, sharks, and Graham Brown-Martin’s after-dinner speech made for a fantastic evening. Afterwards we headed back to the  hotel bar, but I turn into a pumpkin after midnight so I didn’t last long!

Day 3

Originally I was down to run a workshop on digital literacies on the final day of PELeCON. However, I’m so immersed in Web Literacy these days, and there was such an obvious thirst for Open Badges, that I switched to a badge design workshop. I spent the time when the first sessions of the day were on to ‘hack the space’ and organise it in a way that would foreground participation.

I was expecting maybe 15 people along but 27 people came altogether, which was nice. We only had an hour but there was some important conversations going on which gladdened me. The focus really was on learning design rather than (for example) creating badges for extrinsic motivation. People really are beginning to see the power of badges as metadata-infused credentials you can use for pretty much anything.

After resetting the room to how I found it (with the help of some kind participants) and having some conversations during the break it was time for the final keynotes, Joyce Seitzinger and Donald H. Taylor. Both were engaging with takeaway messages that are still reverberating with me. Joyce talked about the changing role of those in learning technologies with some very practical suggestions for moving forward. Donald gave the ‘big picture’ of how changes over recent years are likely to impact his particular part of the sector (Learning & Development).

I had to leave right after that, catching the train with Zak Mensah. In fact, although I’ll publish this later I’m writing up the conference on that train right now via Evernote. I’ve got one call with my Mozilla colleagues later and a flight back to Newcastle before I can declare MFBT.

(more images in this Flickr set)

* Interestingly, at the conference my ever-increasing beard proved to be what Hugh McLeod would call a ‘social object’ at the conference. It was an object of discussion both with those who know me well (“Wow, you look really different!” / “Here comes hobo Doug”) as well as those who don’t (“I’ve been following the progress of your beard!” / “I’ve donated to your #LettingGrow campaign”). I wonder what I can do next year…

On Saturday I was in Edinburgh running a Mozilla Webmaker workshop as part of Nesta’s One Day Digital event. I took my family up with me who spent time at the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh Castle and the wonderful park alongside Princes Street.

The event was held at Our Dynamic Earth which was a great venue. It was great that O2 supported the event with laptops – indeed Martyn Wallace really entered into the spirit of proceedings and took a video with his Parrot AR drone. 13 children turned up to the workshop (7 boys, 6 girls) all aged 12-15. They had a range of experiences and backgrounds, which always makes things interesting. I was ably assisted by Alex, a fourth-year Computer Games student at the University of Abertay, Dundee.

To get started I asked the participants to navigate to the place on the Web with which they most identify – be it their own blog/website, a social network or other site. Interestingly, most of them brought up Facebook, YouTube or Tumblr.

As you can see from the agenda, the first activity was using Hackasaurus. Once they had used the X-Ray Goggles to hack a website, I gave them some Mozilla swag in the form of an orange wristband. They’re now Webmakers!

Once they’d done that the next step was to learn how to use Popcorn Maker. I believe that one of the best ways to learn things is to mess about and to remix other people’s stuff. So that’s exactly what we did. We took existing Popcorn videos and remixed them. The results can also be found listed on the etherpad under Activity 2.

Given that we started late, this took most of the time before lunch although some people started Activity 3 – hackable games! We used hackagame.org to tinker with the HTML, CSS and JavaScript making up the classic game Pong.

The final thing we did was to storyboard and create our own Popcorn videos. Interestingly, some preferred to keep on hacking games. There were some great contributions but I think my favourite Popcorn video was this one made by Georgina and Joanna (pictured above):

I had a great day and think the participants enjoyed it too! I awarded this Open Badge to them for their efforts:

I was too busy presenting and talking to people at the OER13 conference in Nottingham this week to talk to take notes and photos. Slides, however, can be found above.

This week I’m at the DML Conference 2013 in Chicago, IL. Here’s what I’ve been up to – more photos are available in this Flickr set.

Day 0

My flight from Newcastle to Chicago (via London Heathrow) got off to a good start when I was upgraded to a Premium Economy seat. Space for my legs! The luxury! I sat next to Nicoletta Di Blas during the flight who, serendipitously, was also headed to DML2013 with her colleague. I made sure she knew all about Open Badges and the v1.0 launch by the time we go to Chicago!

Unfortunately, Chicago O’Hare airport decided to chronically understaff their border protection booths and it took four and a half hours to get through immigration. Shocking. It meant I was up for 24 hours and only got about four hours sleep; not the best preparation for the conference! Thankfully, I’m not presenting here but have the luxury of simply meeting and listening to smart people.

Day 1

After introductions from Connie Yowell, David Theo Goldberg and S. Craig Watkins the opening keynote was from Ethan Zuckerman. It was a great presentation looking at protest and activism and I’m guessing he’ll eventually upload the slides to his Slideshare account. He talked about a matrix with an axis featuring ‘Symbolic’ and ‘Impactful’ and one with ‘Thick’ and ‘Thin’ kinds of activism:

Zuckerman talked of post-state, heavily-mediated movements such as the Tea Party, Occupy, Anonymous and Wikileaks introducing his ‘four levers’ for activism: Legislative, Authority, Public opinion and DIY infrastructures. He made a good point about if you want change through public opinion it can be a 20/30/40 year long-haul, using the examples of drink-driving and smoking in public spaces.

After the keynote I caught up with some people I know from the DML worls – too many to mention individually – but then was flagging a bit after my lack of sleep so went to rest in my hotel room. It’s one of the advantages of staying in the place where the conference is hosted!

At midday I was joined by Paul Oh, Christina Cantrill, Paul Allison and virtual participants for this week’s Web Literacy standard community call. You can catch up with that by listening here. I’m really pleased with the way this work is going.

The afternoon saw the official launch of v1.0 of the OBI (Open Badges Infrastructure) with a range of people, including my colleagues Mark Surman and Erin Knight. There then followed a Q&A panel where Mitch Resnick re-iterated some of the reservations he had about badges from last year’s conference. Happily, I felt that most people now understand the difference between the infrastructure itself and good/bad learning design.

I caught a couple of the Ignite presentations (I did one last year) and then headed to the Science Fair where various organisations were showcasing their work:

The evening ended with a celebratory dinner with my Mozilla colleagues. Hilariously, Ryan Merkley and others performed a modified version of Gangnam Style called ‘Badger Style’. I headed back after dinner with Mike Larsson as I was struggling to keep my eyes open!

Day 2

On Friday morning I attended a session entitled DML: Broadening Participation in the Maker Community featuring contributions from Kylie Peppler, Mitch Resnick, AnnMarie Thomas, and Elyse Eidman-Aadahl. There was a really great focus on ways to get boys and girls involved in the Maker movement – including fantastic ideas around conductive playdough and creating circuits with conductive thread and fabric.

The plenary panel that followed the morning session was entitled Remixing Citizenship, Remixing Democracy and featured S. Craig Watkins, danah boyd, Astrid Silva, Biko Baker and Cathy Cohen. There were some great moments in it, but it probably went on a little long and danah’s intelligent, fast-speaking, forceful contributions felt a bit like an assault on my ears. Every time I hear her talk I feel like I need to listen to a recording to have time process her insights!

I missed the rest of the conference sessions as I had meetings with the Mozilla Open Badges team and then the Web Literacy team. We had lunch (actually second lunch for me…) at Eggys Diner which comes highly recommended. I had ‘breakfast poutine‘. After those meetings we had a party (for Mozilla employees and special guests) celebrating the launch of v1.0 of  Open Badges. Happy days.

Day 3

As Rafi Santo reminded me when I finally got a chance to catch up with him, post-structuralists understand that people’s experience of the same event can be vastly different. So I’ll not say that this year’s DML Conference wound down objectively speaking on the Saturday, but that’s certainly what it felt like for me. But then I only dipped in and out of the café sessions with people explaining their projects/ideas/organisations.

I went out for lunch with Katie Davis and Sean Fullerton who interviewed me for their DML research competition project on Open Badges. They asked me some awesome questions, some of which really made me think. Our conversation covered everything from organisational metaphors to where we might have got to with Open Badges in five or ten years’ time.

Overall, I did feel like I should have booked my flights for Saturday night rather than Sunday night; much as Chicago is a great place, the best place in the world is with your family! That being said, it was great to head out for dinner with Carl Malartre and JP Choinière from BuzzMath, Lucy Neale (DigitalMe) and Cliff Manning (Makewav.es). It was the Saturday night before St. Patrick’s Day so, as you can imagine, there was much wearing of green and general carnage all around us!

I’ll leave you with this picture of the Chicago river being dyed green (more about that tradition here):

I’m at SXSWedu this week, presenting on Monday with Kathleen Stokes from Nesta on Supporting a Generation of Digital Makers. Here’s what I’ve been up to…

Day 0

I flew on Sunday from Newcastle airport to Austin, Texas via London Heathrow and Dallas. It was reasonably uneventful, but checking in late meant I sat behind two families with babies. :-/

Day 1

Unfortunately jetlag kicked in straight away and I was awake from 2.30am on Monday. Given that I was presenting at 3pm that afternoon, this was far from welcome. However, everything was surprisingly OK. The plus side was catching up on email and writing a blog post, as well as reviewing the presentation slides.

I met up with Kathleen Stokes (Nesta, my co-presenter) for breakfast and we got some great breakfast tacos from Austin Java where we finalised the presentation. We headed over to registration straight after, which turned out to be a good idea given the length of the queues we saw later on!

From 10am to 12pm I was on a couple of calls with my colleagues at Mozilla, and then afterwards caught up with my family. Lord Jim Knight asked to meet up with me to talk Open Badges leading to an enjoyable hour discussion English education, technology and alternative credentialing. Lunch I found at a Vietnamese street food van (delicious!) and then I headed to the Green Room an hour before our presentation.

The session (Supporting a Generation of Digital Makers) went reasonably well with lots of good feedback afterwards. We did, however, experience a bit of PowerPoint fail. Also, being in the Maker Space meant that there were conversations happening at the back; I was very close to asking them to please shut up. But I’m too polite to do that.

After a lot of great conversation post-session, I headed to the SXSWedu Lounge (heavily sponsored and branded by Google) before heading off to dinner with Ryan McCormack. We went to this awesome Brazilian steakhouse and talked about everything from Philosophy to MOOCs. Great stuff.

Day 2

Tuesday is a bit of a blur. I can remember an engaging panel session featuring Jim Knight, Audrey Watters and Richard Culatta and, of course, I attended the session run by my colleagues Sunny Lee and Emily Goligoski. I also tried (and failed) to find a place to watch the Manchester United vs. Real Madrid game. Oh well.

I do remember having an enjoyable dinner with Sunny, Emily and my new colleague Kathryn Meisner at Austin’s South Congress café.

Day 3

I woke to the tragic news about Chris Allan. It took me a while to pull myself together and get out of my hotel room after that. In the end I had to dash to the Austin Convention Center as Rafi Santo got in touch to say Connie Yowell couldn’t make her ‘Distinguished Speaker’ slot. Could I, as a member of the DML community, fill in? Thankfully, by the time I got there they had a replacement (phew!)

I then attended an awesome session by Christian Long and co-conspirators entitled Hack Class. Christian’s a very engaging teacher and the work they’re doing around design thinking for schools is a refreshing change to almost everything else at SXSWedu being about profit and ‘scale’.

Lunch was spent in the company of Kate Stokes and Janet Laane Effron (we hit the Vietnamese place again) and then I headed to Melissa Techman‘s session. I already know how fantastic Melissa’s work is, but I was surprised not to have come across her co-presenter, Joelle Alcaidinho, before. Check out my Thought Shrapnel blog for some of the links I got from that session!

The final session of the day for me (before catching up with people in the bloggers lounge) was Jaime Casap from Google. He was talking about the Web as the platform. It’s hard to argue against that. After that I went to the receptions and met Stephanie Sandifer in person for the first time. Stephanie and I used to be part of the ‘edublogosphere’ as it was c.2007.

I was intending to head out to dinner with Stephanie, Melissa and others but when I got back to my hotel room I suffered a migraine, ordered room service and went straight to sleep. :-/

Day 4

I made sure I set my alarm on the last day of SXSWedu for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to make sure I got my stuff together for packing, but I also wanted to ensure that I got to the Convention Center in time for Ewan McIntosh and Tom Barrett’s session. As I expected, it was a fantastically run session exploring design thinking. You should check out their newly redesign NoTosh website.

After that I attended the weekly Mozilla Web Literacy standard community call before heading back to my hotel and then the airport. I’m pretty glad I missed Bill Gates’ keynote given the vitriol on the backchannel.

The trip home was fairly uneventful and I managed to sleep pretty much all the way across the Atlantic. Win.

I’m writing this whilst waiting for my delayed flight first to Amsterdam Schipol airport and then (hopefully, fingers crossed) onwards to Newcastle and home. I’m been at the University of Porto for the European Union Children’s University conference, co-hosted with SIS Catalyst (an EU-funded project). I ran a workshop on Open Badges with the help of my colleague Laura Hilliger.

This conference is the first I think I’ve ever been to where the only sessions I attended were those which I was leading. This was for a couple of reasons. First, the tight timescale dictated by flights meant we had to set up the room for our workshop during the opening keynotes. Second, the workshop we ran was over two days, four sessions and almost six hours. I’ve never had so much time to work with the same group of people! It was great.

Although I could have done the workshop by myself (that was the original plan) I was really glad Laura came along to help out. Not only is it always better to tag-team workshops but she introduced some great ideas for making the workshop participatory and fun. We had sparkly hands, metaphorical hurricanes and spectrograms on the way to getting those who attended issuing badges of their own.

We’ve documented the workshop at http://etherpad.mozilla.org/EUCU. There’s some great links and ideas in that etherpad. I encourage you to go and take a look!

For the third time in 10 days I was down in London today. This time it was for the third annual Whole Education conference. For those who don’t know, Whole Education is “a partnership of like-minded individuals, schools and organisations that believe that all young people should have a fully rounded education, developing the knowledge, skills and qualities needed to help them thrive in life and work.”

I didn’t want to be down in London overnight, nor did I want to leave my house before 6am, so I ended up missing (‘the real’) David Cameron’s opening keynote. I did, however, catch Mick Waters’ entertaining session on ways to approach the curriculum. As you can see from the image above, Mick was talking about how we focus on academic pursuits in schools to the exclusion of other, equally important stuff. I first came across Mick when he was working at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and I was teaching History. He said today what he said back then: that the national curriculum is actually a lot smaller and less prescriptive than most people realise. Teachers, very real constraints from headteachers and governors nonwithstanding, don’t need permission to innovate.

Mick’s session was unexpectedly curtailed towards the end by a fire alarm. I have to say the organisers dealt with it very well and it just meant the rest of the session were pushed back by ten minutes.

From what I could gather most of the delegates at the conference were senior leaders in schools and academies. The great thing was that many of them hadn’t heard about Open Badges and, when Tim Riches (from DigitalMe) or I told them they were palpably excited. I’m looking forward to following up their interest with a design day at the Mozilla London office.

I attended a session about High Tech High in the US and how schools over here in the UK are implementing their approach. One such school is Cramlington Learning Village (CLV), a school not too far away from where I live. I’ll be getting in touch with Mark Lovatt from CLV to see if badges could help with what they’re up to. I also heard Lord Jim Knight talk about models of educational reform. I agreed with most of what he said, but suggested he might want to read some books written by educators and not just policymakers.

The session I was involved in was billed as a ‘debate’ but turned out to be a series of four presentations with a few questions. I kind of winged it going last and talking about why we need e-learning staff tutors, the importance of working in the open (using my thesis as an example), and Mozilla’s Webmaker stuff. Oh, and BADGES.

What I really like about Whole Education is that they’ve got a sustainable model that isn’t dependent upon whoever’s in government. It’s a network of forward-thinking schools and school leaders who want to move beyond reductionist league tables and meaningless data.

Amen to that.

(images from MozFest)

This is the story of two festivals. I’m doing it this way instead of separate posts for two reasons: first, for the very pragmatic reason that I’ll never get round to writing more than one post; and second, it’s interesting to compare and contrast two education-related festivals.

I’m writing this in Kings Cross station with one eye on my laptop’s battery indicator so apologies in advance if the end of it seems rushed! Increasingly, my job means having to travel to and from London from my home in Northumberland. It’s a bit of a bind to do the journey there and back in a day but it’s doable – as I’ll be demonstrating when I’m here again for the Whole Education annual conference on Wednesday.

The Mozilla Festival (MozFest) was at Ravensbourne College (the one opposite the O2 arena) between Friday and Sunday last week (9-11 November). The inaugural London Festival of Education (LFoE) was at the Institute of Education today (17 November). Both had a really good mix of people, but each had different emphases. Today the focus was primarily upon education as delivered within formal education contexts, whereas MozFest was more about informal learning. What was striking about both festivals was the informal, upbeat and interest-based approaches. Instead of the usual plodding conference schedule, a festival format allows for serendipity, chance encounters, and (I don’t exactly know how) a sense of solidarity.

I really enjoyed both events, but for different reasons. I enjoyed today’s LFoE was because I felt a connection with those around me, as though we had a national common cause. There was actually less backlash against Michael Gove in the opening session than I’d expected. Although there was some resistance, it’s hard to accuse him of lacking conviction: this man really believes what he’s proposing. Most of that, of course, is ridiculous and shows a complete lack of understanding of education. Take, for example, his assertion that making exams harder ‘raises standards’. This may sound plausible to Middle England but is so ridiculous (in a you-can-weigh-the-pig-but-it-doesn’t-make-it-fatter way) that it actually makes Gove the subject of ridicule by educators.

At MozFest I still felt a connection with those around me but it was for a different reason. The common cause that we’re all committed to is a free and open web, a platform for creativity, democracy and expression. This is manifested in different forms, hence the Journalism, Webmaker, Hackable Games and Mobile floors. There’s an unrivalled energy at MozFest that really blew me away last year before I’d joined Mozilla. This time last year MozFest was four floors and 400 people. This year we took over the entire building (nine floors) and had over 1,000 people passing through. I’m not sure if we’ll be able to fit everyone into Ravensbourne next year…

I was involved in a few sessions at both events. I’m perilously close to battery drainage now so I’ll do this as bullet points:

• Open Badges in the Wild – this was a very well attended conjunction of two one-hour sessions on the Saturday of MozFest. The first part was all about the ‘yack’ (talking about applications of Open Badges) with the second all about the ‘hack’ (actually making badges).
• Skills and Literacies: what do you need to know about the web? – a smaller and more conversational session on the  Sunday of MozFest focused on the Web Literacies framework and white paper I’m working on at the moment.
• Mozilla Open Badges: rewarding skills digitally – this was a ‘fireside chat’ (complete with video of a campfire on a plasma screen!) in the Digital Making room at LFoE. There were a range of people there including teachers and a reporter from the TES. It’s always good to talk about Mozilla’s work in various context – later, for example, I showed some journalists from The Independent’s i newspaper how to use Thimble. Thanks to DigitalMe and Makewaves for organising this!
• How learning technologies are changing teaching – this was a bit of a platform to discuss Nesta’s new report entitled Decoding Learning: proof, promise and potential of digital education. I had a chance to discuss some of my thoughts on a panel that included Rose Luckin, one of the authors of the report. You can see my notes from this session here.

Were you at either of these events? I’d love to hear what you thought of them!

I’ve spent today in Edinburgh at the Microsoft offices at Waverley Gate participating in the inaugural Computing At School (CAS) Scotland conference. It was a great mix of teachers (predominantly), academics and people from industry. I suppose I’d self-identify as being a member of all three groups, really.

I ran a session on Open Badges, with a bit of web literacies on the side, and attended sessions on Arduino programming, Mozilla’s Thimble tool (run by Charlie Love) and the Royal Society’s exemplar materials for Computing Science. All good stuff.

The keynotes were good as well. Professor Muffy Calder kicked things off, followed by Dr. Quintin Cutts. Both talked about the importance of computational thinking, with Quintin using Carol Dweck’s work around mindsets as a springboard into thinking about some of the pedagogy around apprenticeship models of coding. I was very impressed by both.

I made plenty of notes from both, but two things stuck out for me. First was Muffy’s definition of Computational Thinking as thinking “precisely and unambiguously about data and computation” and thinking considering:

• what a system does and how it does it
• what are the right abstractions
• what you can leave out, what must be considered
• what are the best representations for those abstractions
• what is the power and/or constraints of the underlying machinery
• what are the interfaces (human or otherwise)
• what are the conditions for operation [physical context - e.g. using it in the desert]
• what are solutions for similar systems or components
• when to use recursion or parallelism [and whether the difference matters in the context]
• when is randomisation or approximation is appropriate when will a heuristic help (an experience-based technique, rule of thumb, when you can’t do an exhaustive search)
• when will a reformulation or reduction lead to a known solution
• when should you trade space for time (or vice versa)
• when dealing with ecological fallacy and fallacy of composition [problem of Big Data - 'average user' vs. customer segmentation, general to specific and specific to general]

Second, I really enjoyed Quintin’s analogy of tailoring and becoming an apprentice tailor. He asked (quite rightly)where the button-holes, the cutting, the hemming of programming” are, pointing out that minimal guidance doesn’t work. We ask learners to problem-solve too early before they’re equipped through worked examples and peer instruction.

Jody Grieg’s use of magic with computing was entertaining, and I was heartened by Peter Dickson’s use of examples from Intel, Mozilla, Oracle as well as Google (who he works for) when he talked through some of the issues surrounding industry-provided educational resources. I had a good chat with him and Charlie Love afterwards at the wine reception.

I’d like to thank Katie Farrell and Peter Donaldson for inviting me to talk. I hope some people left knowing more about Mozilla’s work in this area – thanks to both my session and Charlie’s. But it also massively benefitted me to see how I can help teachers more effectively.

And yes, it made me want to move my family up to Scotland even more than before….

(click to see full set)

I’ve just spent an extremely enjoyable 36 hours or so in The Netherlands at the World Design Forum. It was held in Eindhoven just before the launch party for Dutch Design Week, to which I was also very kindly invited by John Thackara and Jill Lauret.

Accompanying me on the trip was Tim Riches, CEO of DigitalMe. We spoke on Open Badges: I did the macro overview stuff and he drilled down into the details of the projects for which he’s using badges, such as S2R Medals. There were plenty of people afterwards who wanted to think through how they could be used in their particular context – from Design students to government agencies wanting to promote certain behaviours.

It was an extremely well-organised event held in possibly the most inspiring and best-equipped venue in which I’ve ever had the privilege to present. As you’ll be able to see from the photograph above, WDF2012 was located in an old factory building with the ‘room’ itself was bounded by long white strings. These allowed you to get in and out at any point of the perimeter, but there was enough material on the ‘walls’ to project images, video, etc. from the multitude of projectors facing out from the centre of the room. Add some atmospheric lighting, spot-on audio/visual work, and you’ve got the recipe for an epic venue.

Thankfully, most of the speakers were engaging, informative and entertaining. There was everything from crowdsourcing a morning rush hour problem relating to the raising and lowering of a bridge in Rotterdam to helping victims of torture and abuse tell their stories anonymously on video. Afterwards we went to what I wan to call a restaurant, but was nothing like I’ve seen before. It was like being round at someone’s house for a party: there were long tables, and a kind of ‘kitchen’ area, and food served out of drawers. You’ll be able to look at the photos of this when I upload them – it was extremely conducive to informal dining and conversation.

The launch party for Dutch Design week was unintentionally hilarious. It was an extremely hip event held in the same space as the World Design Forum had been a few hours earlier. Just like theatre, however, set designers had changed the feel of the place. It was a multimedia extravaganza with us non-Dutch speakers given headsets for live translation. Unfortunately, random phrases like “it was very sticky, you have to work it hard” led Tim and I to cry with laughter. The audience around us looked at us like we were a little strange.

Finally, the hotel we were put up in comes highly recommended: the Best Western Art Hotel. As I usually do, I’d looked on Trip Advisor and saw that one frequent guest recommended asking to be placed in the ‘old factory’ part of the hotel. If I understand correctly, it used to be the Philips lighting factory and it’s got a new, additional bit. It was good advice, as the room I had was magnificent – huge, with a wonderful interplay between its industrial past and the thoughtful, up-to-date, contemporary finish.

In fact, the only thing that didn’t go so well on this trip was a problem of my own making. In my haste when originally booking my flights from Newcastle to Amsterdam (train to Eindhoven) I managed to book the return leg for November 20th instead of October 20th. By the time I realised my mistake the only way I could get there was to fly via London the way there and back. So today, Saturday, instead of taking my son to football and swimming and enjoying the afternoon with my family I’m hanging around airports.

And my flight’s delayed.

Oh well, at least I’ll catch up on my email and get this posted.