Weeknote 19/2020
I think this was the week when it began to sink in how long all of this is going to affect us for. I’m not sure if it was going through the playable simulations in What Happens Next? or realising the extent of the incompetence of the UK government, but either way, the world seems different than it did last Sunday.
Two days on MoodleNet, two days for We Are Open Co-op, and a day’s Bank Holiday — the latter moved from the usual first Monday of May to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe (or ‘VE’) Day. The way some people here were talking about it, I think we need to remember that it was was fighting alongside allies to defeat fascism, rather than some kind of victory over Europe.
I enjoyed working on the co-op stuff this week. We were wrapping up a short project through The Catalyst, which paired us and another organisation with a charity making an emergency pivot to digital. I think there will be plenty more work in a similar vein in the coming weeks and months.
On the MoodleNet side of things, I did a debrief with Johanna Sprondel after her MA students at Macromedia University in Germany worked on a draft crowdfunding plan. I was impressed with what they came up with, and enjoyed working with them over the last few weeks.
Moodle News this week published an article I (mostly) wrote entitled 3 tips for first-time remote educators. Other than that, my time was mainly taken up with management, team and 1:1 meetings. My role at Moodle has largely gone from one that involved a lot of innovation to one that now involves a lot of management.
I’ve agreed to keynote a UK university’s internal staff conference (whatever ‘keynote’ means these days!) I get confirmation that it’s definitely going ahead in the next couple of weeks, and then I can start planning a talk on post-pandemic digital skills.
The most enjoyable thing this week was the socially-distanced quiz we had with neighbours. I live on a row of eight terraced houses, with one detached house at the end. We all share a back lane. In the glorious sunshine on Friday evening, we ate, drank, chatted, and answered questions that we’d each come up with. It was marvellous, and really lifted my spirits.
On the Thought Shrapnel front, I published an article entitled Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony in which I cited Buster Benson’s ‘Codex Vitae’ and came up with 10 aphorisms of my own. I also put together my usual link roundup, this week entitled Saturday seductions.
Next week will be a new normal week, working on Moodle stuff Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, and co-op stuff on Wednesday and Thursday. It will be 20 years on Thursday since, at the university ball, I plucked up the courage to kiss the woman who became my wife. I am a lucky man.
Photo of a tree in Bluebell Wood, near where I live.
