WomensLearningStudio

free tool for making timelines, have great examples of finished products

interesting, short blog post on positioning yourself for success

IFTF explains blockchain

helps define project-based employees, Sam Ashe-Edmunds

Randstad offers four contract types: temp work, permanent work, project basis, freelance. Looks like each carries different conditions.

Envision is a company specializing in contract workers, right to hire contracts, or direct hire contracts

pros and cons of contract jobs

Godin commends this 1998 book by Kevin Kelly (Wired), said those who read got ahead of others in the connected marketplace

new book by Kevin Kelly (Wired) praised by Godin, coming out June 7. Looks like equivalent of new "digital literacies" to me in terms of understanding how our futures will be affected by technological forces

like this assessment of value of gap year by Abby Falik

by Next Avenue on where grown-ups keep growing

Good history of Mozilla's open badge project, a joint venture between the Mozilla and MacArthur foundations. The open badge system is now called Badgr and is launched by a new entity for this purpose, Concentric Sky in partnership with edX. It is still open source and badge criteria still displays with the badge when awarded and displayed on a web site, profile, etc.

Mozilla wiki page on their open digital badge system. Good graphic of how it works.

Ron Thomas's blog from April 25, 2016 on how it is up to each individual to keep their skills up to date and follow the trends of their career industry. This was highlighted in Jane Hart's blog this week.

Brad Zomick of skilledup for learners did a series on proving your skills to employers which included digital badges and certificates, credentials, and traditional degrees.

Interesting blog on skilledup for learners by Nick Gidwani from 9/14/13 on the Team Treehouse, an onlline course site for learning web design, coding, and more. Their approach includes using digital badges for incentivizing learning.

Another in the blog series by Brad Zomick for skilledup for learners from 9/14/13. He discusses whether digital badges and certificates mean anything to employers, and what their actual worth is. Badges are mostly used for incentives along the way in a course, and are often not very meaningful. Same for certificates of completion. Most valuable are online certifications if they are associated with a company such as Microsoft, an accredited school, or other recognized entity. Zomick states that online badges, certificates, and credentials are most valuable when embedded in an online portfolio that shows your work and the skills you learned to do the work.

resource page of a creative community that shares colors, palettes, patterns, trends, and articles.

critique of poor visualizations of data by Kaiser Fung with examples

"Data is the new soil."  instead of "Data is the new oil."  "titanic amount of data" "dormant design literacy" "need relative figures related to other data" to understand data "scraping data" "Data visulization is form of data compression" "douche" is term he uses to show implosion as well as creation or combinations of data well worth watching