Day Twenty Two

Day Twenty Two

I am writing this while listening to the new Iggy Pop album, Post Pop Depression, which was released just few hours ago.  Love it.   

The exact track that is playing is American Valhalla – and the line “Death is a difficult pill to swallow” was just heard, so it seems that death is almost a daily visitor to the blog.  Interesting.

There is a link for the album here,  you really would have had sex, drugs and rock and roll over the last four days.  Enjoy.
 

MOOCs and Studying

A few of you may be wondering how things progressed with the MOOCs that I mentioned towards the start of this challenge.  For the record I lasted almost no time at all in the Stephen Downes course.  I tried for a few days to sort of make sense of what was going on, got very busy, that is to say busier than usual and so stopped trying.  If the start had been more positive then perhaps I would have persisted.  The EMMA MOOC did not fare much better.  I tried twice to register, once using my work email and once with my gmail.  In both cases it told me that an email had been sent to me to confirm my registration and once I did that I would be in.  Neither email arrived, I check my junk folder, no sign, so I gave up trying to get in.  This proves something about how robust systems need to be at the early stages of a course and in the former case, I think something about having some sort of structure, even for an organic and emerging course.

Does this mean I am not studying?  No, good old FutureLearn provided plenty of interesting opportunities for me so that at the moment I am taking part is a course on Digital Story Telling offered by the University of Birmingham and also a MOOC on Innovation from the University of Leeds and also on the FutureLearn platform.

Always busy.

Actually what I really should be doing right now instead of writing this is preparing some materials for meetings that I have tomorrow, I guess?  But when I say “I should be doing”, I then have to ask myself why do I feel like that?  After all it is 22:20 at night, I worked all day long and all evening and this blog post is the first thing I have pretty well done all day that is not work related.

It is sometimes interesting to step back and reflect on this internal dialogue and to think about whose voice it is who says these things like that “I should be doing”.  Is it my own, or do I hear my mum or dads voice, or a teachers voice from the past?  Perhaps I won’t answer that publically in a blog post.  Interesting exercise though.

The intention when I started this one was to return to drugs in sport but it seems my brain and my fingers had other ideas.  I must do other work, goodnight.