📰 Read Write Respond #053

The social isolation associated with coronavirus continued in our home this month. However, my wife has progressively ramped up her return to working onsite full time. Our eldest has continued to learn from home. This has been a real learning curb for both of us. I have found it a challenge to know my place and how to best help her. Her school has done a good job structuring the work, but that assumes she cares to do it. She does care about her passion project, Minecraft. We have therefore learnt to compromise and I have learnt to prioritise what I challenge her on. With junior students returning, she heard the bell ring the other day and said she even missed that.

At work, I have been asked to document all of the issues I have supported so that this can be handed over to the wider support team. One of the challenges with this hand-over is that this is intended to distribute the work, but ironically until I actually complete this task (currently up to 140 questions to be documented) I still need to support most calls that come in for attendance and reporting. I must say, finding balance between support, testing, documentation and improvements definitely leaves me busy, but also feeling a little incomplete as I never quite seem to finish anything.

Personally, for another month I have not found the time and space for reading much. Maybe I need to turn off my feeds? Maybe it is because I am not having to travel to work at the moment? Maybe I am just a little depressed like so many of us right now? Or maybe I am just privileged?

With my writing, I reflected on reimagining a new normal, posted a presentation for #pcPopUp2020 on the What If Web and continued with my thoughts on space.

I have been listening to a lot of online mixes while I work, while my daughter and I have been sharing Carly Rae Jepsen’s B Side album and Dua Lipa’s new album in our breaks to stay upbeat. For some escapism, I watched Dark Phoenix, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, The Rise of Skywalker and Solo.

Here then are some of the posts that have had me thinking:

Education

Mining for gold…what have we discovered? And what now?

Kath Murdoch discusses some of the discoveries made during the recent period of online learning and wonders what lessons may remain?

Schools must now ‘build back better’ to free teachers and students from old regimes

Steven Kolber reflects on the return to school and the need to learn from the experience of online learning to build back better.

If I were to start a school…

David Truss asks the question, if you were to start a school, what would it look like?

This principal gives school report cards an F and is calling for a rethink of how we assess children

Rebecca Carmody reports on the opportunity provided by the pandemic to reimagine reporting.

Move to Online Learning: 12 Key Ideas

Dave Cormier unpacks his experiences over time associated with supporting online learning and provides a summary of 12 ideas learnt.

Technology

‘Expert Twitter’ Only Goes So Far. Bring Back Blogs

Cal Newport questions the limit of tweets and threads to communicate complex and changing content. He instead calls for a return to blogs to support these conversations.

Under Cover of Mass Death, Andrew Cuomo Calls in the Billionaires to Build a High-Tech Dystopia

Naomi Klein critiques Andrew Cuomo’s invitation for a ‘screen new deal’ to rescue New York from the current ordeal.

How Facebook Could Use Giphy to Collect Your Data

Owen Williams discusses Facebook’s latest acquisition, Giphy and explains how this is yet another data point for the company to mine. A useful reminder about the fun tools we use every day.

Why Remote Work Is So Hard—and How It Can Be Fixed

Cal Newport looks at the history of remote working and unpacks some of the challenges with the move to remote working conditions.

Rabbit Hole

Kevin Roose dives down the rabbit hole in an investigation into the impact of social media and online life on today’s society.

General

The Risks – Know Them – Avoid Them

Erin Bromage provides some perspective on why some places are riskier than others and how to avoid them.

The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations

Kim Stanley Robinson discusses the waddy in which the current crisis has rapidly rewritten our imagination about what is possible.

The Importance of Trust

Paul Browning and Margaret Barr talk about the place of trust within an organisation.

Flattening the Truth on Coronavirus

The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months

Rutger Bregman recounts the story of a group of Tongan boys who were stranded on a desert island in the 1960’s and how they learnt to survive.

Read Write Respond #053

So that was May for me, how about you? I hope you are safe.

Cover Image via Andrew Becraft