Tag: weeknote

This week, I listened to a fantastic episode of Adam Grant’s WorkLife podcast featuring Lisa Feldman Barrett. I immediately shared it with several people, and even got my kids to listen to it. The reason I’m sharing it right at the top of this post, other than as an encouragement for you to listen to it, is because it directly relates to my understanding of this week. Both the notions of ’emotional granularity’ and telling yourself “it’s all just electrical signals in my brain” are incredibly useful concepts to have up your sleeve. Resilience is as much self-care and strategies as it is grit and determination.

The image at the top of this post is from Tuesday night, when I took our two teenagers to go e-karting thanks to my sister’s Christmas present. They had a great time, to the extent that my son would like to go to celebrate his birthday, which is next week. It fits with the driving theme, of course, because when you turn 17 in the UK, you’re allowed to learn to drive cars on public road. His birthday present this year? Two magnetic L-plates, driving lessons, and the oh-so-expensive insurance.

I’ve done a fair amount of MSc work this week. Almost as much, in fact, as the amount of paid work that I’ve done. I’m not sure whether that says more about the amount of business development we need to do, or how interesting I’m finding my studies. Probably both. I published the following MSc-related posts this week:

• TB872: Juggling the C-ball (Contextualising)
• TB872: Juggling the E-ball (Engaging)
• TB872: Juggling the B-ball (Being)
• TB872: Purposeful and purposive framing

If you take a look at the category archive for my MSc, you’ll see that I’ve written 42 posts already, most of which probably weigh in at more than 1,000 words. So it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that I’ve probably written ~50,000 words over and above my assessment so far for this module!

---

The conference proceedings for ePIC 2023 are now online. I attended this in Vienna at the start of December and enjoyed my time there, doing a (very) short talk and chairing a panel. My colleague Anne, who couldn’t present due to Covid, recorded her presentation on Open Recognition — A feminist practice for more equal workplaces.

Laura published a post which I helped with this week relating to the mental models and metaphors with which we’re trying to help the Digital Credentials Consortium. I created the image stacking mental models, metaphors, and symbolism, which I’m pretty happy with. It’s all about, as Bryan Mathers often says, ‘cognitive ease’.

I had a chat with Ivan about running workshops to help with the adoption of Bonfire in settings related to Open Science and Open Pedagogy. He’s got an upcoming session with students at UCL which I helped him plan. I also talked with Andrea Niosi, who I met at ePIC, and who wanted to talk about implementing the ideas in my posts around using Open Recognition to map real-world skills and attributes. She’s still looking for a budget for this, and I’m still searching for someone to help me built out a proof-of-concept.

WAO submitted a proposal responding to an invitation to tender from NCS around journey mapping young people’s experiences. We don’t usually respond to this kind of thing as it’s a massive time-suck, but we were asked to do so and had a really productive meeting with a couple of people at NCS. We’ll see. It would be great to get involved.

We also had a co-op half-day this week where we did a bunch of things including talking about events we might want to go to, inventing more budget calculators, and outlining some workshops we might want to offer. More on the latter soon, hopefully. Laura and I recorded an impromptu podcast episode as a potential first offering for Season 9 of The Tao of WAO. It’s a bit of a ramble chat about all kinds of things, somewhat in the vein of how Dai and I used to record TIDE.

---

Other than that, I’ve spent a lot of this week trying not to be cold (it’s been bitter outside), doing exercise, taking people places (many sporting practice/fixtures), and finishing the DLCs for Sniper Elite 3 on my Steamdeck. I’m also playing Sniper Elite 5 on my PS5 —when I can get on it.

Next week, as I’ve already said, it’s my son’s birthday. We should have some sort of clarity about buying a house; I would love to say we’ve had an offer accepted in my next weeknote. Other than that, I guess I better get my gameface on and get started on my second Tutor Marked Assessment (TMA02) for my MSc. Oh, and some business development…

We lack the sense of our own visibility, as we lack that of distances, imagining as quite close to us the interested attention of people who on the contrary never give us a thought, and not suspecting that we are at the same moment the sole preoccupation of others.

Marcel Proust

I have almost never planned to be awake at 01:45. I’m a morning person, but not this early in the morning. I’m the kind of morning person that requires a good night’s sleep and a routine. I’ve always been this way, so being up at this time does not signify good things. I’m either coming down with something or I’ve consumed something that doesn’t agree with me.

This week has involved returning to work, our daughter’s 13th birthday, and us putting in an offer on a house. I spent time working on my MSc, including attending a tutorial. I showed up to a Future Trends Forum featuring the dream team of Bryan Alexander and Helen Beetham, had a virtual coffee with a couple of people, got back into client work, and collaborated on a response to an Invitation to Tender (ITT) that we probably won’t win.

Strava tells me I’m currently ahead of my goal to run 1,000km in 2024. I celebrated by purchasing more running shoes that I don’t need, which are now in a queue behind the last ones I bought which are still in a box. What is it with men over forty and footwear? It’s a thing. I also went to the gym and lifted weights and told teenage boys to stop dicking around and spot each other properly.

I had planned to move Thought Shrapnel to micro.blog, but that didn’t go to plan. So I’m a little in limbo as I see other former Substack users primarily moving to Ghost. Perhaps I’ll do likewise, but with everything else going on, and the fact that doing so without the concierge migration service sounds… involved, I’m doing my best emu impression and putting my head in the sand.

Next week we’ll ramp up the client work a bit. We’ve got some spare capacity, but winning the ITT would take all of that. So we’ll see. Right now, as the clock ticks past 02:00, I just want to publish this and get back to sleep. Let’s see if that’s going to happen 😴

---

Image: Pawel Czerwinski