- A week of planning endings and new beginnings.
- Since the pandemic began I’ve been working with the team on the Get help with technology service at Department for Education. It’s been a privilege to work on a service that has enabled over a million young people continue learn at home while schools have been fully or partially closed. It has also been a real rollercoaster and my first time adapting my skills to a civil service context, in a crisis. The service is now looking to the future and it feels like a good moment to step away, so I’ll be finishing working on it at the end of March and continuing with some of the other smaller engagements I’ve been keeping up around the edges. But I’m feeling proud of the incredible team I’ve been part of on this, and of the mission patches we created and shared as part of it.
- Working on another virtual choir project for the Barberfellas at the moment. I hope it’s the last one of these that we do. In the meantime I’ll just enjoy hearing my friends in my ears and pretend we’re in the same room.
- Plans are forming for the big choir to maybe start rehearsing again face to face in May after what will be fourteen months of Sunday zoom rehearsals.
- Applying for some courses to do in April / May. I hope they will run, and maybe even in person.
- BFI Flare is in session. The British Council’s Five Films for Freedom were all great in various ways, watched with mates over jitsi which is definitely the best watch party tool I’ve used this past year.
- Also watched a couple of full features too which both had quite a lot of depth despite simple premises: Sweetheart and Cowboys. Loads more to come this week.
- Matt Webb shared this neat experiment around social attention which reminded me of a lot of early learning design x social software thinking we experimented with FutureLearn back in 2013/14. Wish we’d built it.
- Bought some lettuce and leek seeds to plant in the pots on the roof (and then probs fail to grow correctly).
- Inching back towards some sort of new normal, maybe?