last week today (week of 27 April 2015)

05 May 2015

(with apologies to John Oliver.)

money earnin'

• I can honestly say that - for money - I spent a day and a half at least 50% engaged in contemplative activity that I legally cannot talk about. It is not nearly as shady as my previous phrasing will have led you to believe.
• Got the registration site for the xAPI Bootcamp 2015 up and running; looking to announce it in a few days.
• Spent a fair amount of time thinking about how to create a graduated xAPI kiddie pool experience for US federal government employees...and then Will Constantine comes out here with this tweet and then I'm all I mean, he's right, but it really got me thinking about how hard and under which circumstances I should be trying so hard to evangelize. (Kinda messes with the day job, but I really do want to be true to my people.)
• Getting ready for my eLearning Guild Online Forum session (with Robert Gadd)

book learnin'

• The Bone Clocks, is finished. Admittedly, I was kinda like No more David Mitchell until the end of October, unless I want to hunt down the short stories.
• I've been a big fan of Dr Meredith Clark for a minute - probably since I started seeing her retweeted in that one Tweetdeck hashtag column (you know the one). Was interested to read her sharing her take on a common concern:

Donovan X. Ramsey: How do you define Black Twitter?

Meredith Clark: I define Black Twitter as a temporally linked group of connectors that share culture, language and interest in specific issues and talking about specific topics with a black frame of reference. ... I break Black Twitter down into three levels of connection: personal community, and that reflects the people that you are connected with in some other dimension other than Twitter. And I take that personal community from Barry Wellman's work. The second level I find is thematic notes, and that's where individuals specifically tweet together about certain topics, so they keep returning to this subject matter. And those thematic notes could be anything from television shows, to ideologies, topics of religion. They might be centric to where these individuals are in a certain part of the country. It just kind of all depends on what topic we're interested in. And then that third level of connection, where we see a lot of conversation about these networks and how they're linked, is when those personal communities and the thematic notes kind of intersect around a specific topic.

blunt burnin'

• Re-read The Golden Chain for a little side thing I have going on.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates vs Non-violence (well, not really, but you'll get what i mean). Good stuff.
• Avengers huddle, stat!
• A Ciença Que Eu Faço

how far are willing to go?

05 May 2015

How far are you willing to go to make your learning meaningful? #xAPI

— Will Constantine (@willconstantine) April 30, 2015

this should be emblazoned above whatever threshold one should cross to even get at #xAPI https://t.co/nwAcf3pBjP

— craig wiggins (@oxala75) April 30, 2015

Sometimes when I step back from being an xAPI evangelist to survey the landscape, I am reminded that not only can you not make a horse drink, some horses really weren't meant to drink from anything but the trough. If we're sticking with the metaphor, xAPI is for those willing to follow rivers to their sources.

Here's the thing, though: I kind of don't blame the trough horses. There's a wide world of opportunities, risks, and incremental rewards and failures that sit between the stable and the river in the valley. Even fewer horses defy reins and veer toward the source, however sweeter the waters might be there.

.@kb95bm01 here you go, Brian :) #xapi pic.twitter.com/ozHZVUGQVu

— craig wiggins (@oxala75) April 3, 2015

For a good many horses the trough is enough. Until they get restless, all we can do is clear a path.

what I did last week (week of 20 April 2015)

26 Apr 2015

I don't know what to say about this week. Kind of feeling like I'm falling off.

money earnin'

• Lots of video editing. I've been trying to get at a lot the questions that people have (well, that I think that they should have) about what ADL does. For example, what is cmi5?
• Writing! Made it back to the keyboard to try to finish something. Writing in narrative takes some time (for me, anyway), but I hope that I'll have something to share with you all soon.
• xAPI Vocabulary Working Group. TBH, this is really led by Jason Haag, but I tagged along :) Really, it's important work for the specification, and I'm looking forward to seeing what comes up at the end of the two month stretch.

book learnin'

• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is finished. In the hour (!) that it took me to realize that there's another Mitchell book before The Bone Clocks, found out that there is a subreddit dedicated to David Mitchell. This is my new life goal: I want a subreddit.
• Koding University. Yep.

blunt burnin'

• I...actually have nothing here. Well, except for this.