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Weeknote 13/2020

Posted on 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.

On the importance of human agency.

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Update (6 October 2011) I awoke to the sad news that Steve Jobs, visionary former CEO of Apple, has died. If anyone exemplified the power of human agency, it was Steve.

Exhibit A

Thinking back to meetings I’ve attended over the years leads to many different experiences blurring into one. There are, however, a few of these experiences that do stand out and, of these, two in particular are quite memorable. The first was a staff briefing session at a school whilst I was on my first teaching practice in 2003. The second was in April 2010 when I joined JISC infoNet.

Why were they so memorable? Because they involved steep learning curves and made me think. The jargon and acronyms being bandied about were a useful shorthand to others but confused me. A few meetings later in each case and I was au fait with the terminology and, indeed, using it myself. I had built some ‘mental sandcastles’.

Exhibit B

I used to teach History. In fact, after my degree in Philosophy I self-funded an MA in Modern History to get on to the PGCE Secondary History course at Durham University. It’s fair to say I’m very interested in, and enjoy, reading and talking about history.

As a teenager, however, I was very nearly turned off History (as a subject) by reading some A.J.P. Taylor. Why? What really annoyed me was his ascribing human qualties to countries and states (e.g. talking of Germany as ‘She’) whilst abstracting away from individuals to make a point that suited his grand meta-narrative. Here’s an example of Taylor’s prose from Wikiquote:

The worker is by nature less imaginative, more level-headed than the capitalist. This is what prevents his becoming one. He is content with small gains. Trade Union officials think about the petty cash; the employer speculates in millions. You can see the difference in their representative institutions. There is no scheme too wild, no rumour too absurd, to be without repercussions on the Stock Exchange. The public house is the home of common sense.

Some people may like that kind of stuff, but to my mind it’s severely lacking in resonance. I don’t seem to inhabit the kind of world A.J.P. Taylor describes.

Conclusion

As I attempted to show with Exhibit A, jargon and acronyms can be useful if people are using them as a shorthand to express something that has previously been expressed in detail. Nevertheless, I think it’s probably a good idea to have meetings and conversations every so often where jargon and acronyms are banned. In my experience, people build ‘mental sandcastles’ ostensibly made of the same stuff as those created by others but actually differing based on their experiences, prejudices and preferences. Kicking down those sandcastle once in a while (to continue the metaphor) is probably a good idea.

Things don’t just happen. They are made to happen. This can be due to natural proceses but also, more often than not, by individual human agency. Organizations have agency, of course they do. An organization is a group of individuals who have come together around a common cause. That organization may seem to ‘express’ certain traits (e.g. a conservative outlook) but this remains the result of collective individual action.

So, to get to my main point in a rather roundabout way, when I see techno-determinist opinions (for that is what they are) dressed up as inevitable facts I have a similar reaction to that of my teenage self reading A.J.P. Taylor. You may well predict that the biggest trends in 2015 will be x, y and z. But, given that nobody predicted everything kicking off in the Middle East earlier this year, you’ll excuse me whilst I look at what people are actually doing whilst you peer into your crystal ball.

The future is ours to shape. Let’s not forget that.

Hog roasts, Amazon EC2 and traffic lights.

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

I feel that these images, some of the last taken by photojournalists Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington in Libya before their deaths earlier this week, link in some way to the following. I’m just not sure how to work them in whilst retaining any form of subtlety.

Question: What links a hog roast, the recent Amazon EC2 outage and traffic lights?

Answer: The notion of Civil Society.

The London School of Economics’ Centre for Civil Society defines it thus:

Civil society refers to the arena of uncoerced collective action around shared interests, purposes and values. In theory, its institutional forms are distinct from those of the state, and market, though in practice, the boundaries between state, civil society, and market are often complex, blurred and negotiated. Civil society commonly embraces a diversity of spaces, actors and institutional forms, varying in their degree of formality, autonomy and power. Civil societies are often populated by organizations such as registered charities, development non-governmental organizations, community groups, women’s organizations, faith-based organizations, professional associations, trade unions, self-help groups, social movements, business associations, coalitions and advocacy groups. (via Wikipedia, my emphasis)

At lunchtime today my family and I are heading down to the pond and newly-formed wildlife reserve behind the small cul-de-sac in which we live. The pond was formed by some kind of mining-related sinkhole that I don’t pretend to understand. What I do understand is that it’s now a beautiful space that adds value to our life (and to our house). Today is the opening ceremony at which a hog roast will be enjoyed free-of-charge, with people coming together to celebrate the space. More spaces for meeting means a greater likelihood of unmediated interaction.

Last March I was in Turkey with my good friend and collaborator Nick Dennis at the request of EUROCLIO which is doing some work on behalf of the Dutch government. Nick and I helped train History teachers on the use of technology in education (see presentation here), part of a many-pronged strategy by part of the Dutch government aiming to raise the level of Turkish ‘civil society’ in preparation for the latter eventually joining the European Union.

With the Turkish educators, technology was a trojan horse as the whole point of the programme was to get across the ‘multiperspectivity’ of History and, once that was established, equip them to be able to communicate that to the next generation. The only other strategy I can remember from the ten or so mentioned was that of making sure that traffic lights both worked properly and were sequenced in ways that were ‘European standard’ (i.e. enabled a good flow of traffic). It’s the little things that make a big difference.

So far, so obvious. The wildlife reserve and our work in Turkey fairly relate directly to the definition of Civil Society given earlier. But what about the Amazon EC2 outage? What’s that got to do with anything?

First, some context:

Cloud computing is all very well until someone trips over a wire and the whole thing goes dark.

Reddit, Foursquare and Quora were among the sites affected by Amazon Web Services suffering network latency and connectivity errors this morning, according to the company’s own status dashboard.

Amazon says performance issues affected instances of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service and its Relational Database Service, and it’s “continuing to work towards full resolution”. These are hosted in its North Virginia data centre. (TechCrunch)

Having recently considered moving this blog to Amazon EC2 because it’s ‘never down’ I breathed a sigh of relief. Bluehost may be slower at serving up content than it used to be but at least it’s never completely failed me. Outsourcing via set-it-and-forget-it only works if you’ve got a backup plan.

All of this reminded me of Unhosted.org which, no doubt, has received a boost because of the EC2 outage:

Unhosted is an open web standard for decentralizing user data. On the unhosted web, data is stored per-user, under the user’s control. That’s where it belongs.

I’m no fan of privatising everything within society but I do think that sometimes we rely on the state and big businesses a little too much to provide things we can organize through communities and networks. Despite the #fail that is the Big Society in the UK the idea behind it remains sound. Unhosted is one way in which we can developers can come together as a force for good in the online sphere – just as the wildlife reserve and training Turkish educators were strategies in other spheres.

By way of conclusion, therefore, I’d like to challenge you. Be the change you want to see in the world. Small changes can have large symbolic actions and lead to a domino effect. Take next week’s #purposedpsi event in Sheffield, for example. There’ll only be about 50-60 people but, due to networks (and networks of networks) we’ll have a disproportionate effect on people’s thinking and conversation. There’s a few tickets left if you’d like to join us.

So, get out there and do something! Go and make the world a better place.

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