I seem to have lost a week.
I know exactly where it fell apart, and why. Orientation Week in a residential college is brutal. My arguments about time off in lieu, or varied working hours, or flex-time were not successful. I wandered around for two weeks in a miasma of insomnia and unhappiness. A friend died suddenly and her funeral was on last Sunday. It was my birthday. I am now exactly twice as old as our new students.
I did collect things and tweet (thank God for Twitter when you can’t sleep at 3am), so I have retrospectively inserted them into my blog as a reconstruction of the week.
I collated my tweets via Storify. I collected mini-scrapbooks of images, via screenshots, drawings on Paper, and photographs. These images considered nostalgia; alogorthims, furturism, bodies; and bots, spam.
I submitted an essay for Research Methods, and it was late. I finally got around to looking at the Research Methods page for Social Network Analysis, only to find that I’d re-invented the wheel in my blog on MOOCMOOC in the wild, it’s called ‘ethology’ and has been widely used (as I reflect on here).
On the one hand I wonder if I’ve bitten off more than I can chew doing two subjects, but I’m learning so much by bouncing between them, and finding so many parallels in what I’m doing in both. That’s why so many of my blog posts on the Research Methods blog are starting to talk about what I’m doing in Digital Culture and vice versa.
Katherine, Happy belated birthday! Age is relative. If Ray Kurzweil’s vision comes true, we’ll be living longer than we deserve to be. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Life happens. You have online friends / community out here, out on the net. We all have bad days/weeks. Try to put things in perspective, two courses plus work is a lot. It’s not ‘cheating’ to overlap learning between your courses, as they are inter-related. Pace of technology, change, life is accelerating. Take time to breathe. Cheers, PJ
Thanks PJ! This is exactly the advice I would give my peers and students, but I need to hear it from other people to give myself permission to fail in public sometimes! This really helped! Thank you!
Absolutely – two courses, plus a job, is a hard call and sometimes something will have to give. On the upside – it’s useful to be able to place two areas of work together, and my sense is that the work on research methods has actually been very generative for the thinking you’ve been doing around EDC in recent weeks.