Tag: weeknote

One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead.

(Oscar Wilde)

I’ve spent the majority of this week in Vienna for ePIC 2023. It’s the first time I’ve visited the city, although not my first visit to Austria, as Team Belshaw included Salzburg on an inter-railing trip around Europe five years ago.

Given I’ve got a layover with nothing much to do in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, I’m composing this post on Friday evening. I’ll add to it later.

Earlier today, as I was about to get on a train in Vienna, I received notification that a grade and feedback had been given for my first tutor-marked assessment. As regular readers of this blog will be aware, I’ve recently started the first module of an intended MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice.

I don’t mind sharing that I got 73% which is… fine. I didn’t do so well on the longer question 2, partly because I introduced too much narrative — a cardinal sin in a word limit-constrained environment. To be honest, although my academic pride is at stake, although I get a passing grade on each module (50%) I don’t actually care that much. It’s about the learning and application for me.

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Travelling in post-pandemic (but not post-Covid) times is weird. At least three people at the conference tested positive while we were there, which is unsurprising given how people are coming together from all over the world. Thankfully, people know how to behave these days and so there was masking and self-isolation.

I just hope I haven’t got it, as that would be a not very fun end to the year. The only time I’ve had it was in January 2022 and, although I managed to work through it, I couldn’t run for about 10 weeks after it. In fact, it felt that it added about five years to my life. So I’ve been wearing a mask on the flights and on public transport. I also took a test this morning which was negative.

Unless we decide that we’re not going to meet up together any more, go on holiday, or spend time in enclosed spaces with other humans, I’m not sure what else we can do.

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During the three days of ePIC, I was on stage three times. The first was just a very short heads-up to people that the ORE community has released v0.1 of the Open Recognition Toolkit. The second involved moderating a panel which featured Anne Hilliger, Kelly Page, and Noah Geisel. And then, I jumped on stage a third time to show the posts I wrote about using Open Recognition to map real-world skills and attributes.

It was a smaller gathering this year than in previous years. I think that’s for several reasons, including the location, time of the year, and clash with other events. Despite that, it seemed to have representatives from more countries and continents! There was certainly a fairly large contingent from the US and Canada.

The conference programme was fairly packed and focused mainly on presentations. This was quite tiring, especially in the afternoon, with the heating on and a room filled with warm bodies! I ducked out of a few sessions, in one case heading to the Christmas markets which were truly magical. And I say that as someone who is pretty cynical about such things.

There were many things at the conference I agreed with and applauded. There were some things I actively opposed. But that’s the point of bringing people together in person: it’s a chance to thrash things out a bit and to have the kind of dialogue that sometimes aren’t so conducive within online gatherings.

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I’m now adding to this very early on Monday morning. I slept in my home office for a couple of nights while I made sure that I didn’t start exhibiting Covid symptoms. It seems that I’m fine. The weekend didn’t amount to much: a basketball game and a football match for my son (win and a loss); getting drenched while taking my daughter up to practice some football after most of her activities were called off this week; tidying and cleaning the house; playing the demo of Football Manager 2024.

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Next week, I’m pleased to say, is my last working week of the year. The thing to keep reminding myself is not to start anything new. I’ve got a couple of short proposals to get to clients, a bit of work to do with Laura, and some things to finish off.

Other than that, I’m going to cruise into the end of the year and then take three weeks off. I’m very much looking forward to that, although I’m still going to have some MSc work to do!

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Original version of photo of me wearing a festive t-shirt in an Irish pub in Vienna taken by Julie Keane. I upped the contrast and made it black and white.

I thought I’d bash out my weeknote before cracking on with some MSc work this morning. But then, a wintery Sunday morning when family sporting activities are cancelled seemed like a good time to do things I’ve been putting off for a while.

So, after trudging through the snow to run on the gym treadmill, I’ve been updating this site’s PHP version from 7.3 to 8.2. Although it seemed to work fine on the backend, there was a ‘critical error’ on the front end, meaning I had to go through each plugin one by one until I got it back working.

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Anyway, here we are at the end of another week. All things being equal, this time next weekend I will have been to Vienna for ePIC 2023 and will only have a four days’ work left this year. As suggested in my recent weeknote, a break would be more than welcome. Embarking on further postgraduate studies and moving house may both have been good decisions, but they coincided with half-term when we often head on holiday.

Also, after a very quiet September and early October, things picked up on the work front. We’ve kicked off a new project with the Digital Credentials Consortium, hosted by MIT, and are the midst of doing so with Toro Impact, a project of CSUDH. Another project with long-term partners Participate picked up steam with Community Conversations and work on the Open Recognition Toolkit. We’re talking to Badgecraft about helping them with their Cities of Learning network, to workers.coop about some further work under the auspices of the Member Learning Group, to Greenpeace about some more work around digital leadership training, and to NCS about bidding for some work to review and map their services to young people.

The study I’ve been doing for my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice is already beginning to have an impact on my client work. For example, I was talking to one person earlier this week about the difference between social learning and (traditional) corporate learning and didn’t feel like I was getting anywhere. I drafted a blog post that I will probably still publish on the WAO blog, but then, later in the week, found the perfect way to explain what I was trying to get at after completing an MSc activity on DAD vs EDD.

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Talking of my studies, I submitted my first Tutor Marked Assessement (TMA01) this week. It’s such a well put together module. I can tell by how motivated I am to work on it, and as you can probably tell by the number of blog posts I’ve written about it.

Question 2 of TMA01 asked me to reflect on a situation of concern and apply the PFMS heuristic to it. After some thought, I chose to discuss how and why we pulled out of buying a house a couple of months ago. I realised that the frameworks and models I use to be able to make decisions and maintain constant forward momentum in my day-to-day life rely on systematic (i.e. step-by-step, procedural) approaches. However, when I was called to make a decision which required a more systemic (i.e. holistic, interconnected) approach, I struggled.

I’m now into Part 2 of TB872, which is the first of two foundational Systems Thinking modules for MSc. I’d highly recommend it based on my experiences so far. I just need to figure out how to manage my studies over the Christmas period. I’m taking three weeks off work, so I should be fine.

It’s a bit of a relief that it’s now December. I can legitimately close down Thought Shrapnel for the year, back off from social media, and consume my own weight in mince pies. I’ll be 43 in less than three week’s time and, after going to a Christmas party for my daughter’s football team last night, for better or worse, I feel very much middle-aged…

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Image: charging our car, a Polestar 2, at a service station (we can’t charge it at the property we’re renting, and using public chargers is both a hassle and an unnecessary expense)

It’s rare that I forget to write a weeknote; rarer still that I realise I haven’t written one, and then don’t bother even writing a few sentences. But that’s what happened last week.

After driving most of the journey to and from Manchester, predominantly in the pouring rain, last Sunday for the women’s derby game, I was knackered. And then on Monday I was straight into WAO work, and then MSc stuff. The latter has taken a lot of my time this week, I guess because I’m being extremely conscientious about my studies. To be honest, this is because I’m finding learning about Systems Thinking fascinating. You can tell because, at the time of writing, I’ve published 23 posts on the topic this month!

I’m ready for a break. I’ve always found October and November difficult, as the light wanes, the temperatures decrease, and people retreat into their houses. It’s become slightly easier as I’ve gained more control over my working patterns, but this time of year still batters me. Despite my best efforts, I get more migraines, find it more difficult to find the motivation to exercise daily, and am generally grumpier.

This year was particularly difficult as we moved house during half-term. Everyone was already tired going into that week, and the move, which we did ourselves by renting a van, took almost the full week, all told. When I write it down like that, it sounds ridiculous, as we were only moving around the corner. But… it did. We’re aiming to move again in early 2024 once we find a house to buy which meets our requirements. We’ll be getting people in to help, that’s for sure.

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What the experience of moving has meant, though, is that we didn’t go on holiday — or even have a chance to recharge our batteries — over the half-term period. In fact, the experience had the opposite effect, and thanks to some amazing planning on my part, coincided with starting my MSc. Had I not enjoyed my studying so much, I would have already given up, as we’ve kicked off a couple of new projects at work as well.

So Hannah and I are going away tonight, just for one night, for dinner and to stay in a hotel in Newcastle, while the kids go to my parents’ house. We all need a proper holiday, but as I pointed out to them, their mother and I both work from home; even going to school is a change of scenery and vibe for the kids. That being said, ideally we’d go away on a sunny family holiday after Christmas. The place I’d like to take everyone, Yas Island in Abu Dhabi (which I’ve been to before with my dad and sister) is eye-wateringly expensive during the school holidays.

One small mercy is that I’ve only got a small bit of work left to do on Part 1 of my MSc module next week before handing in my assessment, and then heading to Vienna for ePIC 2023 the following week. We’ll then be into December, when it’s legitimate to get out the Christmas decorations and start eating mince pies. I almost need to go on a pre-emptive diet for the latter, as I am rather partial to them.

After ePIC, I’ll only have a week left at work for the year before taking three weeks off. I’m pretty sure my fellow WAO members and collaborators are doing likewise, so I’ll be able to turn my out of office on, guilt-free. That week before Christmas, I’ve got some walking booked in with Aaron and then Bryan, as well as dinner with my sister and her kids. Then, of course, it’s my birthday and into the big day itself.

So, as you can see, I’ve got it all planned out in my mind. What I’d really like to do is to find somewhere warm to go for five days or a week before the kids return to school on January 8th. Given that Newcastle airport is no longer an Easyjet hub (thanks, pandemic!), my aversion to flying Ryanair, and the cost of Emirates flights, that might prove difficult.

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Being so busy with MSc stuff meant that I didn’t publish anything at Thought Shrapnel this past week. That’s a bit awkward, given that this morning’s newsletter was supposed to be the last one of the year. So, instead, I sent out some recommendations of other newsletters to follow. You can read it here.

I keep thinking that I should write Thought Shrapnel in ‘seasons’ as Dan Hon and some other people do. I’m not sure if that would work, though. The practice of publishing three posts a day based on the things I’m reading depends very much on me (a) reading three or more things outside of regular work stuff, and (b) prioritising writing about them over and above the other things I’ve got to do in my life.

What I find with Thought Shrapnel is that it’s all down to momentum. That is to say, it can be hard to get into a routine of publishing posts and the newsletter, but once I’m in that routine, it’s easier. But then, for whatever reason, if I fall out of it at the start of a week, it’s really hard to pick it back up again.

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Well, this weeknote turned into even more of a stream-of-consciousness than usual. Now that it’s light, I’d better get out for a run and on with my day. Thanks for reading this far 👋