This section of the site is for quick notes, usually to quickly capture the details of something I have found useful at work.
The original motivation was to experiment with what the Government Digital Service call
Make things Open: it makes things better.
The main benefit to me of splitting this from the main blog area is that it helps kill writer’s block :-)
A group of Southern Hemisphere Microsoft experts are running a month of live broadcasts under the hashtag M365May, more info
Helen Blunden ran a session on How to Build Your Personal Learning Plan
Notes Here are my rough notes and links to resources that Helen mentions:
modelling based on most interesting project you have learned from - apply those ways of learning to your work think about filtering content you find using hashtags - in other words the early beginnings of establishing your own trusted sources the things we learned at school and university are often not used at all, and when they are the knowledge becomes obsolete more and more quickly - see Buckminster Fuller Knowledge Doubling (as augmented by IBM), see Half Life of Facts learning through connections and networks - see Microsoft “Where Work Gets Done), see Harold Jarche PKM Create personal learning plan (Helen’s approach, this bit mostly in her words) what’s the problem what do you need to achieve?
And then a whole month had gone without publishing a weeknote.
The lockdown phenomenon of days blending together, combined with deep focus to support colleagues in pivoting to online delivery.
We’re starting to move beyond simple digital replacements of one-day seminars (even though they have been very successful), and have started building out a six week whole-school-staff CPD course into Moodle.
With a much reduced team, my time has been split between operational support to colleagues practising the mechanics of live seminars, configuring new resources in Moodle, minor software upkeep of a couple of applications (including merging new plugins and upstream changes into our Moodle build) and a bigger technical architecture project.
In terms of work this was the first full week of distributed working.
I spent a fair bit of time coaching colleagues on how to work more effectively using Teams. I think one of the hardest things for people who are first exposed to the messaging side of the application is to learn a more considered approach when posting in a channel. The difference between a new post and a comment seems very hard for some people to pick up, and I think the app could do more to signal to people that channel chat and messaging chat behave differently.
Kaizen Compared to the previous week, the reverse trend - higher working hours but lower total focus hours and focus percentage.
PomoDoneAnalysis week 2020-W07 Looking at the year to date the change from the previous week is striking.
Ratio of focus time to working time, 2020 weeks 1-7 I’m clear about the root cause. As I mentioned last week, we had an all-day, all-staff meeting on Wednesday.