Weeknote 48/2019
I’ve been really tired this week, partly because I’ve been sleepwalking so much. That, in turn, is a function of this time of year (when I get more restless in general) and possibly my decision to rebalance my focus a bit in 2020.
Lack of sleep triggers my migraines, so I ended up taking Friday off work as I couldn’t really think properly. Despite that, I still had to work on last-minute contracts for the MoodleNet team.
Having time off is actually a pretty difficult thing for a remote worker. There have been times when I definitely wouldn’t have gone into an office, but have nevertheless been heavily dosed-up on painkillers, lying in bed using my laptop. You also never feel properly “off-duty”.
I talked about these kinds of things, as well as the obvious massive upsides to remote work, in a short presentation I gave at my son’s school this week. In addition, I discussed the importance of keeping your options open, and the benefits of working for yourself or with friends instead of for big corporates.
Other than that, because last week was so intense, I only worked two days this week. My main focus was on ensuring the MoodleNet team performed a retrospective, and then let everyone following the project’s progress know what’s going on. Some of that is captured in this blog post.
On Monday, ostensibly my ‘day off’ I attended We Are Open‘s monthly co-op day, my first for around six months while I was a ‘dormant member’. There’s plenty for me to get my teeth into there, and I’m looking forward to getting more involved in some very tasty client work soon.
Finally, I’ve been preparing for my trip to New York next week to speak at ITHAKA’s Next Wave event. I realised that I’ve been putting off reading Shoshana Zuboff’s epic book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism because I know it will mean making some changes in my own digital life. I’m about a quarter of my way through it, and it couldn’t be a better way to ensure I’m informed for my session.
The title and description I’ve been given is:
Truth, Lies, and Digital Fluency
The internet and social media apps are integral to society, research, and learning today, but increasingly we are questioning the trustworthiness of digital information. How bad is it today, and how much worse can it get? What can and should educators, researchers, information professionals and the companies whose sites enable information sharing do?
The person going following me on the programme is from Facebook and talking about data and elections, so I couldn’t be a better warm-up act, really…
So, yes, next week I’m doing MoodleNet work on Monday and Friday. I’m in New York from Tuesday to Thursday. There’s then two weeks left until Christmas, during which time the MoodleNet team should be able to start some form of federation testing.
Team Belshaw will be in Iceland just before Christmas (including for my birthday) so I’m very much looking forward to that.
Photo of anti-fascist posters in MNAC, Barcelona taken by me last Sunday morning.
