Good Morning Imagine Blue Monday. You wake up and you just feel a bit achy, and a bit mhe, and you really struggle to force you and yourself out of bed. It’s a grey day and the rain hits you horizontally as you leave the house. There is so much water in the lid of […]
Category: Thinking out loud
Is it because the spaces never close?
Just coping, not quite fine In a conversation with my students (who are also peers and colleagues) today we were talking about how we all struggle at the moment. What emerged from the conversation is that we all felt things should be easier this year. We have pivoted online, we know how everything works. And […]
Drawing Focus: ADHD and Productivity Strategies
Stressful (yet effective) ADHD coping mechanism If you are a regular reader you know that I am always trying to hack the ADHD brain–aka The Brain. One of the habits that worked during very stressful times was to jump onto social media for 3-5 minutes and read some headlines, share or bookmark something to read […]
Painting a Diary
My efforts to publish working–out–loud pieces have been thwarted by overwhelm. So let’s step back by a month. There was some learning from this summer’s holiday-domain during which I ran out of words. This is a meandering thoughts blog, I am trying to figure something out–solve a teaching dilemma. Any ideas are welcome! If you […]
SoTL as Strategic Imperative?
I made this a year after setting up the SoTL network in our institution, and this is my visual reflection on the thoughts emerging from this. The first point was that I was wondering if SoTL needs to be a strategic imperative for Higher Education institutions. On one side it fosters evidence based practice, providing […]
Of Writing and Stories
Zwei Seelen wohnen ach in meiner Brust (Goethe) Alas two souls live within my chest, the one trained to shackle words, to make them march in predefined order, command approved phrases to rearrange meaning according to expectations, and one roaming in the wild, finding meaning as stories develop, taking a big stick and poking at […]
A Sense of Future
Today was a strange day, friends and colleagues talking about their struggles to focus, to ‘be on the ball’, to work efficiently. So it was a strange, grey, rainy autumn day that somehow put a sound absorber on the brain. However, the shared experience that unsettles me most is that lack of a ‘sense of […]
Lockdown Adventures
This is one of the blogposts meant to go live a couple of months ago, and then things went head over heels in a thousand different directions, and suddenly it is the end of summer. Anyway, the issue I have been pondering is the relationship between our lockdown micro-adventures and pedagogy. There is learning to […]
You can find Learning Everywhere
Reflections on a summer holiday where almost nothing went as planned My granddad always said: There is always something to learn, in every situation, and in the least you will learn how not to do a thing. Writing some contributions to the Life Wide Magazine* for which the editors asked to reflect on how imagination […]
The Walking Brain #ADHD
An Introduction of Sorts #ETConf20 reflection part two, which again is one of these posts I began writing weeks … or is this months ago now? In this I am pondering three things, Nordic Walking, walking conferences, and the ADHD side of life. One of the things I am constantly working on is finding ways […]
The most obvious insight!
How are you holding up? It’s a grey afternoon in Scotland and it looks as if a thunderstorm is brewing; alas I don’t think it will manifest itself. The announcement that we are still not permitted to travel beyond the 5 mile mark hit us hard this week. It has set wild camping plans back […]
No work-desk no cry
A friend and colleague and I had a discussion today about working spaces and working from home and that reminded me of having seen a tweet about someone using an ironing board as standing desk. So I thought as an interlude to the next proper blog post I share some resources of people and how […]
Working in the garden
Planting a tree is purposeful engagement; putting my winter rosemary into a bigger pot because it became pot-bound is an act of caring. I am pausing to observe the robin curiously observing me. The air is still chilly, and the winged ethnographer quickly loses interest in his subject. Working in my garden is an act of self-care and an act of deep work.
Adventures in Academic Development 