Month: March 2020

Weeknote 13/2020

Posted on March 27, 2020March 27, 2020 by Doug Belshaw

This week was the same as last week. I’m tempted to leave it there, but of course the devil is in the detail, and the interest is in the nuance; the gaps and the cracks are what make us human.

I think you can read a lot into the fact that I dusted the desk in my home office on Friday morning. My office isn’t overly-dirty or untidy, but suffice to say that I managed to move around enough dust that I sneezed myself through my next video conference.

For me, Lent is now receding into the distance, despite the fact that, at the time of writing, there’s still two weeks until Easter. After all, when part of my family’s homeschooling curriculum involves baking cakes, and my wife buys me a bottle of whisky ‘just in case’, it’s fair to say that all bets are off.

Talking of my wife, I’m sure you can imagine the look on her face when an Oculus Go arrived at our house this week. Initially, I thought her shock was from me having bought something made by a company now owned by Facebook. It turns out that I was mistaken! Instead, she was concerned about the frivolous nature of VR and me buying another screen to look at.

I informed her that I didn’t pay full price but, instead, bought it from an eBay seller who had rarely used it. However, instead of being pleased by my cost-saving, she pointed out that buying something that works by attaching it to your face during a pandemic is… well, I don’t think I caught the end of her sentence. Back in the doghouse.

Like many people, I get emails from Google Maps showing me where I’ve been over the past month. I sincerely hope they’ve switched this service off for the foreseeable, as otherwise it’s going to be rather depressing.

My pandemic routine, such as it is, is like a parody of my normal day. Up at 06:30; breakfast with the children while my wife gets ready; start work in my home office at 08:00; work until 12:00; lunch; start again at 12:30; finish at 16:00. Rinse and repeat.

This means, on average, I walk 652 steps over the course of the working day. So it’s imperative that I do some form of exercise. I’ve been running; either hill sprints or my usual route around our town’s bypass, which is around 6.5km. It was just a little dispiriting when I left my smartwatch charging when heading off for a run the other day. I know the thing is having actually done the steps rather than record them, but I don’t like my smartphone to be yet another thing to be disappointed in me.

I went to visit my parents last Sunday for Mother’s Day, and then during the week to deliver some items that they hadn’t been able to get. Talking through a pane of glass, with the window cracked open slightly, felt like either they or I was in prison. It was pretty surreal, as is everything in this situation. It’s like being part of an alternative reality game where the daily arrangement of Joe Wicks’ shelves gives clues on how to escape.

Other than that, my only non-exercise activity was taking my children up to a WWII ‘pillbox’ that is less than a mile away from our home. I’m trying an enquiry-based approach to teaching them History, starting with an era neither of them have studied yet. They’ve come up with some great questions so far, which we’ll dive into over the coming weeks.

There’s something completely different about walking and talking, and being out in the open air when teaching and learning. I know it’s not ‘saleable’ but perhaps not everything needs to be? I think education is potentially going to look very different post-pandemic, especially if the lockdown lasts months instead of weeks.

We bought a picnic table to go on the patio at the end of our (small) garden. When it arrived, my wife was concerned it was too small, that it was one meant for kids. In the end, everything turned out alright and, after we put it together, we enjoyed a beer while wearing coats and hats. It’ll be good when the weather gets a bit better and the kids can do some of their schoolwork outside.

There’s not much to be said on the work side of things. The stuff I’ve done for the co-op would require a lot of context to make any sense, but we’re continuing to do work for Red Hat and Greenpeace.

With MoodleNet, we’re now very close to having a version ready for federation. There’s a showstopping bug in some of the code we depend on from another project that needs fixing. But other than that, we’re talking small tweaks and configuration. It’s pretty exciting being this close to releasing something for testing that we know is going to be so useful to so many educators.

Next week, let’s see… yes, I’ll be at home. Doing pretty much the same things as I’ve done this week. I’m all for routine, but this is ridiculous!

Photo of WWII pillbox taken by me on Thursday.

Weeknote 12/2020

Posted on March 21, 2020March 21, 2020 by Doug Belshaw

I’m not sure what can be said that hasn’t already been said about the last few days. Schools are now shut in the UK, along with pubs, restaurants, etc. While we’re not on imposed lockdown like Italy or Spain, we decided to keep the kids home early, and I’ve persuaded my parents to limit the amount they go out.

I just wish we’d listened to Bill Gates back in 2015.

It’s hard to imagine a global pandemic when everything is fine, I guess.

As usual, I split my week between MoodleNet and working on things for the co-op. This week, however, I added into the mix contributing a small amount to the homeschooling of our children.

With everything that’s going on around educational institutions pivoting to online learning, now would be the perfect time to launch MoodleNet. Teachers across different institutions could be sharing collections of resources and engaging in pedagogical discussion via the platform.

However, we only have a small, part-time team working on this. In addition, we’re essentially inventing a new category of social networking. It’s complicated, and we’re a few weeks away from federation testing, never mind user testing.

That’s why, this week, I brought forward work on a crowdfunding plan. Doing so means we should be able to increase the capacity of the existing team, and/or hire more people to work on the project. More details on that soon.

On the co-op front, we all worked on a very productive short pre-mortem for joint ventures that we enter into. I always enjoy doing these kinds of activities, as they’re so enlightening and collaborative. I also did a little bit of work on our collaboration with Greenpeace. Our planned in-person work is currently being re-scoped to online.

Overall, though, my life hasn’t been so different to normal. To be honest, at times it’s felt more like me working from home while the kids are on half-term rather than living through a life-threatening pandemic.

A decade ago, I would have been a ‘key worker’, a teacher and senior leader in schools. My life, like so many people’s I know, would have been turned upside down. But over the last 10 years I’ve slowly retreated into spending 95% of my time at home, interspersed with national and international travel.

It’s not such a bad life if you get the right balance of exercise, nutrition, and sleep — what I call the ‘three pillars’ of productivity. What I’m going to miss is mixing up the routine over the next few months through travel. At least my wife and I got to visit Bruges just before all this began.

When we were in Bruges, the Belgian city of beer and waffles, I did put my Lent fast of refined sugar and alcohol on hold. Other than that, however, I have been avoiding them both, and lost a noticeable amount of weight.

Continuing to avoid sugar and alcohol during what could be months at home with one’s family, however, would be a test to anyone’s willpower. So I’ve re-scoped what I’m doing to help me differentiate weekdays and weekends. During the week I’ll avoid refined sugar and alcohol, but allow myself (as I did last night) a bit of cake and whisky at the weekends!

Right now, everyone is so full of advice for what others should be doing. Most of this is well-meaning, some of it is a desperate pitch for work, and a small percentage of it is self-aggrandising. I’m just looking after myself and the people around me. If everyone does that, I think we’ll be OK.

As Seth Godin pointed out this week, panic loves company. He links to a post by Margo Aaron in which she encourages us to disconnect from outrage culture:

The worst possible thing to do for your immune system is to live in a constant state of stress. And if this global pandemic requires a healthy strong immune system in order to fight it, then the most responsible thing you can do if you’re feeling afraid is to stop watching the news.
The story you’re telling yourself is you can’t disconnect because you won’t be “informed.” I’m telling you: You’re not informed as it is. The only thing you have to gain by strategically disconnecting is your sanity.
Margo Aarson

So there we are. I’m not going be disconnecting from Twitter and social media, not during the week anyway.

Next week looks a lot like this week, and so on, and on, into the distance. My aim is to keep spirits up, resources stocked, and exercise done. After an enjoyable Friday meetup via video conference of some of the members of our Slack channel, I may try and make that a weekly thing.

Photo taken by me during a family walk in the wilds of Northumberland earlier this week.

Weeknote 11/2020

Posted on March 14, 2020March 14, 2020 by Doug Belshaw

Never has this quotation been more apt:

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Wow, what a week! My wife and I returned from Belgium on Sunday night, thinking everyone was being more than a bit over-cautious. By today, the next Saturday, we’re effectively tinfoil hat preppers.

Shortages in local supermarkets, handwashing drills, a new freezer in our outhouse, stockpile lists, and we’re seriously considering keeping the kids off school. I’m running outside instead of going to the gym.

I can’t even really remember what I’ve done this week apart from read the news and think about the impact of the pandemic on society. I’m not particularly anxious, it’s more that my brain goes into overdrive thinking about the “what if?” scenarios.

Apart from a couple of presentations on MoodleNet using the slide deck I posted here, I’ve mainly been sorting out GitLab issues and making sure the team is alright. We’re a fully-remote team based in Europe, with two in Italy, two in the Netherlands, and then one in France, Czechia, and Greece.

My co-op colleagues seem to all be alright, but of course any in-person work we were planning to do is a bit up-in-the-air at the moment. Who knows when all this will end?

I cancelled a trip to go walking in the Peak District with a friend this weekend, next week’s FutureFest has been postponed, and likewise next month’s MoodleMoot UK & Ireland. If things return to whatever the new version of ‘normal’ looks like, there are going to be a lot of events in the second half of the year.

One good thing that’s coming out of all of this is that people are being forced to figure out how to do things online. Virtual events, online learning, remote work are all things that should be commonplace in 2020. And in some sectors, and in some organisations, they absolutely are. But in others, all this is brand new.

I’ve worked from home for the last eight years now, with a dedicated home office that’s separate to our house. It contains all of the kit I need, and I’ve got a super-fast mesh network which makes our home wifi fast and stable. It’s easy to take all of this, plus the experience I’ve gained over the years for granted.

The great thing about remote work is that you have to measure results by outcomes, not how hard it looks like people are working. You have to have trust, and processes, and be able to convey human qualities like empathy at a distance.

I wrote something for the We Are Open blog about remote working for leaders and managers. Our co-op is definitely standing by for any organisations that need help in this regard.

It’s now a decade since I was responsible for technology at a large educational organisation. On Twitter, which I can’t seem to turn off at the moment, I thought out loud what I’d do if I had to pivot to online learning from a base of no current capacity.

As I auto-delete my tweets every 30 days, I used Thread Reader to ‘unroll’ my thread. Check it out here.

All of this has made me think that the best technologies are the open, mature, and tested ones. Which is why I wrote an ode to email, explaining why it’s the original robust, decentralised technology. I also reflected on sharing educational resources via bittorrent.

Next week, then, I’ll be at home. Perhaps with all of the rest of my immediate family. We’ll see.

Image by Volodymyr Hryshchenko