Heart Soul Machine

All in the Verbs

2026-04-10T16:00:00Z

At work, I've started to be involved in developing a process for program design. I am particularly interested in thinking through the tools, techniques, and approaches that make for genuinely good learning experience design. A central piece of that work are the learning outcomes: what students are doing across the program and within each individual course. This is a real opportunity to expand constructive alignment beyond a box-ticking exercise and to use it more as a strategic approach to clearly thread multiple components of the broader student experience through an entire program, scaffolded across courses.

When I started this, I didn't want to just continue with the formulaic approach to program learning outcomes. A critical part of that approach are the verbs, and as I mentioned in my last post, the current approach to learning outcomes and verb selection are structured around Bloom's cognitive dimension alone. The reality is that other dimensions exist — they just haven't been developed with the same rigour or consistency. In that last post, I started sketching those other dimensions out further. Building on existing work, but bringing a more structured and nuanced approach – making sure there are equivalent levels across each dimension, and starting to think through what is distinctive about each level and each domain.

When it comes to actually writing outcomes, though, it always comes back to the verbs. So one of the things I've been most keen to develop is a comprehensive verb list that works across all three domains — cognitive, affective, and operative — at each of the six levels.

Doing this work has been genuinely interesting. I already had a collection of verb lists I'd used as tools in previous projects, so part of the task was to consolidate them, but I also looked more broadly at what others have done, and tried to synthesise it into a coherent suite of verbs that sits consistently across the levels.

One of the more interesting realisations along the way was that some verbs are genuinely shared across dimensions. Take identify — cognitively, you might identify a pattern; affectively, you might identify the emotions present in a situation; operatively, you might identify what movements are being made in a physical space. The verb holds across all three. But at the same time, some verbs clearly belong more naturally within a specific dimension. And there's a sequencing dimension too: a verb that's standard practice within one domain at an early level might become a shared, cross-domain expectation at a higher level.

What I'm really trying to achieve is a more three-dimensional version of Bloom's. Learning has height, breadth, and width – but the affective and operative components have often been lost. These are often dismissed as "soft skills" or treated as trade-specific concerns, but they matter deeply in higher education. Higher education that includes vocational training and degrees in which cognitive, affective, and operative development are genuinely intertwined. Think about social work or nursing: those programs aren't just about building knowledge. The affective dimension, how you engage with patients and clients, and the operative dimension, how you hold yourself, how you carry out specific procedures, are core to what it means to be competent in those fields. We need to be capturing that, but also extending our thinking beyond cognitive and what students know, to what they can do and who they can be.

So, here's the verb list. I'm still working through how best to share these kinds of resources, but for now this feels like the right move — put it out there and see what people do with it. If you already have a verb list you work from, there might be things here worth adopting. Keen to hear your feedback.

	Shared Applies across all domains	Cognitive Thinking · Knowing · Reasoning	Affective Feeling · Valuing · Relating	Operative Doing · Making · Performing
Awareness The learner notices, attends and begins to name – inwardly, emotionally and sensorially.	identify, label, listen, locate, name, notice, observe, recognise, recall, recite, record, reproduce, retrieve, select, visualise	Remembering choose, copy, define, describe, duplicate, enumerate, list, match, memorise, quote, state, tabulate, tell	Receiving attend, acknowledge, aware, concern, experience, follow, open, receive, respect, tolerate, welcome, withhold	Perceiving align, detect, focus, hear, orient, perceive, position, sense, track, tune
Concepts The learner begins to make meaning – interpreting information, reacting to experience, and readying for action.	associate, clarify, classify, describe, discuss, explain, group, illustrate, indicate, interpret, match, outline, paraphrase, reconstruct, relate, report, represent, research, restate, roleplay, show, summarise	Understanding cite, convert, estimate, extend, generalise, infer, judge, order, reason, rephrase, rewrite, trace, transform	Responding ask, attribute, comply, engage, express, explore, hear, participate, practice, question, react, reply, respond, share, wonder	Preparing approximate, attempt, calibrate, check, copy, distinguish, exhibit, follow, handle, hold, imitate, mimic, prepare, replicate, try
Patterns The learner puts knowledge and skill to work – applying procedures, committing to values, and reproducing actions with growing confidence.	act, administer, annotate, apply, build, carry, chart, collect, complete, construct, demonstrate, discern, document, employ, execute, experiment, interview, introduce, map, manipulate, operate, organise, paint, plan, practise, produce, quantify, sketch, teach, translate, troubleshoot, use, utilise	Applying adapt, articulate, calculate, determine, establish, exemplify, predict, prepare, schedule, solve, transfer, write	Valuing accept, adopt, appreciate, commit, connect, defend, dramatise, empathise, invest, justify, prioritise, seek, simulate, value	Imitating adjust, assemble, differentiate, form, make, measure, monitor, perform, practice, refine, rehearse, repeat, replicate, sequence, simulate, time
Practices The learner examines structure and relationships – breaking things apart, ordering values, and developing consistent practice	analyse, categorise, connect, contrast, cooperate, correlate, corroborate, debrief, deduce, diagram, differentiate, discriminate, dissect, distinguish, divide, devise, engineer, examine, focus, implement, infer, inspect, investigate, manage, order, perform, prioritise, propose, question, reason, reflect, separate, storyboard, survey, test	Analysing appraise, break down, compute, conceptualise, deconstruct, debate, deliberate, estimate, inquire, simplify, subdivide	Organising address, advise, arrange, balance, broker, challenge, conduct, contribute, elicit, encourage, facilitate, initiate, integrate, mediate, navigate, negotiate, read, reconcile, resolve, weigh	Practising adapt, adopt, address, attribute, combine, coordinate, customise, develop, exemplify, incorporate, modify, sustain, systematise
Principles The learner applies criteria and judgment — assessing quality, living consistently by values, and executing with fluent mastery	appraise, argue, assess, compare, conclude, consult, contextualise, convince, critique, decide, decode, deconstruct, defend, derive, determine, dispute, estimate, evaluate, extrapolate, forecast, guide, interrogate, judge, justify, measure, persuade, predict, prescribe, present, qualify, recommend, refine, resolve, review, support, verify, weigh	Evaluating authenticate, consider, criticise, cross-examine, disprove, grade, hypothesise, influence, perceive, prove, rank, rate, reframe, score, substantiate, validate	Characterising advocate, behave, campaign, embody, exemplify, exhibit, foster, model, modify, promote, resist, uphold, urge	Performing coach, conduct, direct, express, extend, fashion, improvise, integrate, master, mentor, oversee, supervise
Expression The learner generates something new – original thought, authentic voice, and novel technique – that reaches outward into the world	abstract, adapt, arrange, author, challenge, collaborate, combine, commentate, compose, create, design, develop, diagnose, elaborate, facilitate, formulate, generate, imagine, innovate, integrate, invent, improve, instruct, intervene, make, model, modify, negotiate, optimise, originate, prepare, provoke, rationalise, revise, simulate, solve, strategise, structure, theorise, validate	Creating anticipate, assemble, compile, conceive, distil, express, posit, postulate, rearrange, reorganise, report, speculate, substitute	Advocating advance, arbitrate, champion, cultivate, effect, enable, engender, further, govern, influence, inspire, lead, motivate, pioneer, press, regulate, shape, steer, steward, transform	Originating choreograph, contribute, curate, fabricate, lead, manufacture, pilot, pioneer, redefine, synthesise, teach, train

To the Dark Side

2026-04-10T10:00:00Z

If you've got dark-mode enabled on your system or browser ,you might be seeing the website differently than normal. I've been mucking around as a way of learning some of the newer CSS and what's possible these days. One of the things I've been keen on is moving to a more "vanilla" approach to my websites – less reliance on frameworks, addons and plugins. So I've been trying to suss out what you can do these days with just plain old vanilla CSS.

As a designer, one of the things that I've relied heavily on in the past has been SASSto handle the grunt work of creating colour systems - all of the darker and lighter tones for each of the available colours in your palette. That can be done now using the native colour-mixing that's available in CSS. To complement that, I've been looking into making more "colourful" yet accessible use of colour across my sites. I love colour - huge, big, blocky chunks of it - and often the more eye-wateringly lush and juicy the better. I started this by updating the colours I used on the Learning Types site. One of the tricky things in a colour system is tachievingconsistency across the range. If you use yellow , the palette quickly becomesmuddied into poo-brown. In steps the OKLCH for creating my colour system.

There are a great number of colour systems – ways of codifying the hues, tones, lightness and darkness of the colours we see. Many on the web are used to the hex-codes like #ff0e69 and #ffae2c you see around the place. You might be familiar with RGBA where you can assign values to the red, green, blue and alpha (transparency) channels. Theres HSL, which does appear on this very website - which is your Hue, Saturation and Lightness. OKLCH is one of those - you define the values for the Lightness, Chroma and Hue. This is all nicely explained on OKLCH in CSS: why we moved from RGB and HSL:

oklch() is a new way to define CSS colors. In oklch(L C H) or oklch(L C H / a), each item corresponds as follows:

L is perceived lightness (0-1). “Perceived” means that it has consistent lightness for our eyes, unlike L in hsl().

C is chroma, from gray to the most saturated color.

H is the hue angle (0-360).

a is opacity (0-1 or 0-100%).

The big thing for me was this idea of "perceived" - especially because I'd been using darken() and lighten in Sass and while they might be mathematically correct, there was alway a lot of tonal differences across the colour palette. OKLCH improves that quite a bit, and while I still might tinker, it's reduced the massive variations I am used to.

So I wanted an excuse to explore OKLCH, but also some of the new variables and functions possible in CSS. Down the rabbit hole I went, but what I wanted to share was where I ended up. I've now built a colour system I am happy with – I haven't applied it to anything yet, but I've started incorporating it here. What I did was break down my OKLCH into its constituent parts.

For example I've tweaked the colour palette here to use a tint of my Soulyellow:

--hue-base: 73;
--chroma-base: 0.005;

These are now CSS variables that I can use. So I plug them into a repeatable palette:

--color-base-50: oklch(0.985 var(--chroma-base) var(--hue-base));
--color-base-100: oklch(0.960 var(--chroma-base) var(--hue-base));
--color-base-200: oklch(0.920 calc(var(--chroma-base) * 1.2) var(--hue-base));
--color-base-300: oklch(0.840 calc(var(--chroma-base) * 1.5) var(--hue-base));
--color-base-400: oklch(0.720 calc(var(--chroma-base) * 1.8) var(--hue-base));
--color-base-500: oklch(0.580 calc(var(--chroma-base) * 2.0) var(--hue-base));
--color-base-600: oklch(0.450 calc(var(--chroma-base) * 1.8) var(--hue-base));
--color-base-700: oklch(0.340 calc(var(--chroma-base) * 1.5) var(--hue-base));
--color-base-800: oklch(0.230 calc(var(--chroma-base) * 1.2) var(--hue-base));
--color-base-900: oklch(0.150 var(--chroma-base) var(--hue-base));
--color-base-950: oklch(0.095 var(--chroma-base) var(--hue-base));

And now I have a full palette for those colours. I'm using the calc function to change the hue and chroma across the range to provide a better spread and consistency alongside the other colours in the palette.

I mean – look at those beauties!! Look at the consistency across each level!

The other nifty CSS feature I've started adding to the site is a light-darkfunction. So instead of color^[1] having a single assigned value, you can have one colour for light mode and one for dark.

So the background of this page element is written

background-color: light-dark(var(--color-base-200), var(--color-base-950));

Now for the site, I am still using the 11ty Rocks Sass + LightningCSS which I found out does some nifty backwards compatible tweakery, so your source code might not show that – but that's what I write. And it just works!

So I spent last night and this morning tweaking things across the site to make dark mode work. There are a few bits I need to work on (and if you see them let me know!) but I'm well underway on making the site more Dark Friendly.

I am sticking to the American spelling as it's part of the mental model I've had to build to work on the web all these years and finding errors in my code because I've tried to spell colour correctly. ↩︎

March 2026

2026-04-08T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

March in Adelaide is what the locals call Mad March — all the festivals descend at once. Fringe, the more highbrow arts festivals, WOMAD – all of it and at the same time. It's also the city at its most livable – days still warm, nights just tipping into cooler territory — perfect for sitting out under the stars with a glass of wine and enjoying the gardens.

We took full advantage, catching a bunch of comedians and soaking up the Fringe. Still haven't made it to Cabaret — honestly, it's not something I grew up with in Wagga Wagga, so I've never quite known what to make of it. Maybe that's next year's experiment.

The bigger win this month has been the bike. Riding has started to feel like sustainable exercise — physically and mentally. The commute to work is somewhere between 17 and 19km, depending on the route, and the e-bike levels things out enough that I'm not arriving at work completely cooked. The ride home is the real event – a long stretch of flats followed by a serious hill climb at the end. I've been exploring every path and trail app I can find, trying to map out better options on and off the hill, but I keep ending up on glorified goat tracks that require reflexes and agility well beyond what a 45-year-old has any right to expect of himself. I'm slowly eliminating the dead ends and coming back around to the conclusion that the original way is probably the right way — even if it's brutally steep.

It does feel like there's a real opportunity – the roads are single-lane and already clogged with cars so riding on them isn't an option — but there are fire trails and reserves that could form a proper route if maintained and potentially paved. I think it's genuinely excluding people who would otherwise commute by bike, and it feels like something worth petitioning the council about.

On the health front (and this feels significant), my blood work has finally come back normal. First time in a long time. Not amazing, just normal. Right in the bell curve. Which, given the road it's taken to get here – changing habits, the medication helping, Frankie demanding his walks regardless of how I feel about it – actually feels like a real achievement. The dog has been an unexpectedly brilliant forcing function. There's a living creature who depends on you moving, and he will absolutely let you know about it. That kind of accountability builds routine in a way that nothing else has managed to for me.

I think what I'm realising is that I've spent a long time trying to impose routine on work and letting home be free-flowing. But my work is complex and chaotic — especially in the middle of a merger — and it's never going to be otherwise. Home is where the routine actually lives – I'm in more control. That shift in thinking feels useful.

The state of the world remains openly hostile to too many people – the cost of living, petrol prices, all of it feels slightly unhinged. I'm aware I'm in a relatively fortunate position: e-bike, train line, barely touching the car. But despite the external chaos, I feel good. Not just fine – no, actually – I'm good. That's worth noting.

Events

We saw a few shows at the Fringe - Mel Buttle, Tom Ballard, Zoë Coombs Marr, & Alexei Toliopoulos. A couple of rides - one through Belair National Park another through the Craigburn Farm trails. Clare and I had a perfect afternoon at Lino Ramble – a beautiful spot in McLaren Vale for a wine tasting. Our friend Gin turned 50 too, so a nice night in the park to celebrate her birthday.

Photos

Watched

I enjoyed the simpler tale in a A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Got around to watching One Battle After Another – which I enjoyed. Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere was an interesting journey into a pretty toxic space. We started our Family Movie series - my pick was Hot Fuzz and Mrs K went for The Prestige - waiting to see what Ms A chooses!

Listened

Ransom Man on BBC Intrigue - about the data breach at a Finnish psychotherapy service Vastaamo.

Beyond the Cognitive: Rethinking Bloom’s Taxonomy

2026-03-20T00:00:00Z

I've been spending this week exploring program design at universities and what current practices look like, and importantly, what people are thinking about at this point in time. One key thing is around the assurance of learning and in the age of AI it's definitely run up the ranks of priorities for universities. But I've just been reading broadly and actually surfing the web – clicking on links and mentions, working my way through references and going down rabbit holes along the way.

Much of this thinking was prompted by reading about Australia’s emerging National Skills Taxonomy, which points to something important: the need for a common language to connect vocational education and training, higher education, industry, learners and workers. ^[1] Moving the conversation of learning beyond content delivery and toward genuinely transferable skills is critical and has been part of my recent work on course and program outcomes. The shift in framing — from content to skills — led me back to a familiar starting point: Bloom’s Taxonomy.

The Bloom’s We Know

Most educators know the Bloom’s triangle. It gives us a hierarchy of cognitive functions, from basic recall to synthesis and creation. The revised version, updated by Anderson and Krathwohl, usefully reframes each level as a verb, which is why it's been adopted so broadly as we shifted the language of education to an outcomes-focused one.

I was really only familiar with this view of Bloom's, and it wasn't until I was well and truly down a rabbit hole - bouncing from Frontier Modalities of Learning for Top Performance to Reverse Bloom Learning Framework - that I learnt that Bloom always intended the cognitive domain to be accompanied by two companion frameworks: one for the Affective domain (emotions, attitudes, dispositions) and one for the Psychomotor domain (physical and spatial skill). These were developed later –Krathwohl for the Affective, Simpson for the Psychomotor – but they’ve never really entered mainstream educational practice the way the cognitive taxonomy has. They also lacked some of the clarity that helped with the adoption of Bloom's. But it's telling that the systemic approach to conceptualising learning, particularly in Higher Education, is only the cognitive domain.

An influential concept for me is from a talk that Bret Victor gave, The Humane Representation of Thought , in which he discusses the different models developed to articulate understanding:

So while the cognitive realm has played a large part in my work, it's not without recognising many of the missing aspects. I've tried to incorporate a fuller picture into my work, but not having a simple tool like Bloom's has made it challenging.

What We’ve Been Missing

Higher education has sought to address the gap through initiatives such as “graduate qualities” — broad statements about communication, collaboration, and ethical practice that sit alongside disciplinary knowledge. But these often remain aspirational rather than embedded. We acknowledge the affective and physical dimensions of learning, then design courses that don’t meaningfully develop them. Constructive alignment practices have tended to focus only on the alignment of outcomes across a course and a program of study, and because much of their development centres on the cognitive domain, we're missing vast swathes of context about the broader learning experience. The industry conversations about soft skills point to the same gap. Collaboration, empathy, ethical judgment, and hands-on capability aren’t cognitive skills, and if taxonomies don’t account for them, our program design won’t either.

A Proposed Revision

Part of my preferred learning process is being productive, making and creating something, which in turn stimulates the rest of my cognitive domain. So I started working on a revision that brings all three domains into alignment: similar language, equal levels, parallel structure, and all expressed as verb forms that ask, “What can the learner do?”

One immediate problem with the existing frameworks is inconsistency: Bloom’s cognitive domain has six levels, Krathwohl’s affective has five, and Simpson’s psychomotor has seven. That asymmetry makes it hard to use them together.

I’m also proposing to rename “Psychomotor” to “Operative” — a term that better captures the domain’s focus on physical and spatial understanding and sits more comfortably alongside the adjectives Cognitive and Affective as a trio.

To help balance the domains, ensure consistency across the levels, and support this as a framework, I've added descriptions to align them across the three domains. These help us use the framework to develop outcomes, guiding how to think across the domains and apply experience from using the cognitive domain into the two new ones.

Blooms in Three Domains

	Cognitive	Affective	Operative
Awareness	Remembering Recalling facts, terms or concepts from memory.	Receiving Being able to notice and attend to a stimulus, experience or feeling.	Perceiving Using the senses to notice cues that guide physical action.
Concepts	Understanding Making meaning from information by interpreting, classifying or explaining it.	Responding Actively reacting to a stimulus, not just noticing it; the learner can participate rather than just observe.	Preparing Readying the body and mind for a physical task, noting posture, movement, and spatial awareness.
Patterns	Applying Using knowledge in a new or practical situation. The learner can transfer what they know into action.	Valuing Attaching worth or importance to something. The learner begins to show commitment rather than just compliance.	Imitating Copying a demonstrated action where performance is approximate and deliberate rather than fluent.
Practices	Analysing Breaking information into parts to understand structure, relationships and what is or isn’t relevant.	Organising Making sense of competing feelings and experiences by building a personal framework. The learner begins to understand why some things matter more to them than others.	Practising Repeating an action until it becomes consistent and increasingly automatic. Effort shifts from thinking about the action to just doing it.
Principles	Evaluating Making judgements based on criteria and evidence. The learner can justify a position or critique a method.	Characterising Emotional dispositions and responses to circumstances become consistent and recognisable, helping to contextualise situations.	Performing Executing complex actions confidently, fluently and with adaptability to real conditions without needing to plan each step.
Expression	Creating Combining elements into a new, coherent whole, producing something original.	Advocating The learner feels strongly enough to share, model and promote their outlook to others.	Originating Creating new movement patterns or techniques to suit novel problems and environments.

Level Focus

I put this together to help define the specific focuses of the different levels.

	Cognitive	Affective	Operative
Awareness	Discrete pieces of information	Sensations & feelings	Sensory cues
Concepts	Categories and ideas	Emotions & attitudes	Body mechanics
Patterns	How things work and relate	Recurring emotional responses	Habitual movement and posture
Practices	Step-by-step methods for doing	Deliberate ways of reflecting and responding	Structured sequences and routines
Principles	Rules that govern understanding	Rules that govern ethical and emotional life	Rules that govern skilled performance
Expression	Thinking in an original and generative way	Engaging authentically from a place of personal meaning	Moving and creating with individual voice and mastery

Some notes

In working on this I came across a few challenges and issues:

One thing I’ve been careful about is keeping the Affective domain true to its emotional and experiential nature. It’s easy for descriptions of this domain to slide into the language of values and ethics which while related, may actually be Cognitive aspects creeping in. The domain begins with raw openness to experience and feeling, and it culminates not in having the right values, but in actively living and modelling them.
There is something about the hierarchical nature of the original Blooms taxonomy that has always troubled me, and which is nicely expressed in the Reverse Blooms paper. The triangle implied a linear approach - you worked up from the foundations and creative work was the pinnacle. Good and engaging learning experiences often aren't linear - they don't require a vast foundation of information to be remembered before moving on to something else, learning is iterative and develops over time through cycles and movement. Creating holes in knowledge helps engage learners to willingly participate in filling them in. That's a lot more fun than enforcing absorption of the canon before you can actually do something.
One final observation that has stayed with me: across all three domains, the lower levels tend to be internal and difficult to observe, while the upper levels become progressively more external and visible. Perceiving, receiving, remembering — these happen inside the learner. Originating, advocating, creating — these are things the world can see.

That inside-out progression feels like an important design principle. It suggests that our assessments, which tend to focus on observable outputs, may be systematically undervaluing the foundational work that makes those outputs possible.

Where to From Here

This is a work in progress — a first sketch rather than a finished framework. I haven’t developed verb banks or detailed rubrics for each level. But the core argument feels worth making: if we want education to develop whole people, our taxonomies need to account for the whole person.

Thoughts and feedback very welcome.

References

Anderson, L. W. & Krathwohl, D. R. (Eds.). 2001. A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives (abridged edition). New York, NY: Longman.
Bloom, B. S. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals, by a committee of college and university examiners. Handbook I: Cognitive Domain. New York, NY. Longmans Green.
Krathwohl. D. R., Bloom, B. S., and Masia, B. B. (1964). Taxonomy of educational objectives, Book II. Affective domain. New York, NY. David McKay Company
Harrow, A. (1972). A taxonomy of psychomotor domain: A guide for developing behavioral objectives. New York: David McKay.
Simpson, E. J. (1972). The classification of educational objectives in the psychomotor domain. Washington, DC: Gryphon House.

The use of language as a connector is a driver of my work around Learning Types. ↩︎

A little glitch

2026-03-13T00:00:00Z

I've been slowly working away at developing a portfolio, and I was starting to get a bit lost. I decided to seek out some examples and get a bit of inspiration. I happened to stumble on a couple of portfolios that had a bit of 'glitch-aesthetic'. As an ex-graphic designer who grew up in the era of grunge design, I love these little flashback reminders to another time, where design wasn't flat or fucking liquid-(gl)ass. This was a time when digital was mediated through the analogue - that 9 times out of 10, your problem was a dodgy connection or cable.

I wanted to do something quick and get a win on the board, so having played with Claude a little, I thought, let's see what it can do. I pointed it at a site whose effect I liked - michaelvillar.com - and one that should be easy to replicate. It had a logo as an SVG and so did I. So I pointed Claude at the site - and shared the javascript file I dug through the source to find - and asked it to replicate it for my site. I got a nice set of code, and after tweaking some CSS has it all working. I asked Claude to abstract the code so that I could apply it to other elements of the page - and it quickly created a reusable utility that can apply the glitch effect to any element. I've got it working on hoverand on a random time loop - but just on the HSM logo.

I am just beginning down the road on this project - but I am keen to pull in a few of these little visual elements and move beyond the flat and static in the final design. Will see where this all goes!

February 2026

2026-03-08T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

While January was a bit of a mulligan, February has been good. I've been able to get a couple of 'life improvements' actioned, which is nice. One of the big ones has been buying an eBike. It's something I've been mulling over for a while now - ever since we moved up into the Hills, I've not felt overly confident about getting on the bike, and I've missed it. After spending way too long researching, I bit the bullet and went in hard, getting a Specialized Tero X 6.0. For the commute to work, the safest and probably quickest way off the hill is through the Shepherds Hill Recreation Park and the fastest way home is up a ridiculously steep path with gradients of 10º, 20º, and 15º. I did the route down on my trusty hybrid, but the gravel paths and steep descent felt pretty dangerous. Going the full mountain bike has made a huge difference on the descent - having big chunky tyres on the gravel and a dropper post, so I can change my height, I feel like I'm "in" the bike when descending rather than on top of it. The commute isn't any slower than driving or the train when you add in door-to-door, and at certain points in the year, I bet it's faster. I'm slowly building up my confidence with getting back on the bike and feel good doing it.

I've also been social - getting out and seeing friends, doing things and spending some quality time with the family. That's done my mood a world of good and helped me feel more connected.

It might be the bike or being more social, but the result is that I feel ... good. I know the world is falling apart and we're in the middle of a polycrisis - but I feel fine. I'm moving, I'm making progress on a few projects, my world doesn't feel like it's completely falling apart.

Events

Dressed up for our friends' Musicals themed 50th party (went as a Mormon as it's literally the only musical I have seen). I went to see the band VOLA at the Lion Arts (absolutely fantastic), a mid-week comedy show and a standup show with the Missus. We had a couple of nice meals (Japanese and a great little Mexican) and a few drinks out – it's the perfect weather for it in Adelaide.

Photos

Watched

Predator: Badlands- watched this one with Ms A and really enjoyed it. It's a similar play within the genre and universe as Prey which I really liked as well.

Rugby is back on, so I'm caught up on the Six Nations and Super Rugby.

Listened

Enjoyed a couple of ABC crime podcasts:

Hometown Boys | Welcome to Balmoral - I found this report deeply engaging about the experience of a young girl who was raped by a couple of peers from the small town's football team. The series charts her experience bringing charges and the ostracisation of her family from the community, which placed more credence in 'the boys' story despite actual convictions in court.
Unravel - Huntsman - This series explores the crimes of Greg Lynn before he became famous for killing two pensioners in the Victorian high country. The story traces the relationship with his first wife, Lisa, and the history of domestic violence and acts that take on a new light given his later conviction for murder. (I can't find a link to the show - and it looks like it might have gone offline, as there has been a retrial of Lynn announced)

January 2026

2026-01-31T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

We saw in the New Year with friends, which was really nice. I picked up a cold on the way back from our Christmas with the in-laws and have been dealing with it throughout January. While the symptoms have certainly diminished, I still don't feel 100%, and certainly don't sound it. I'm still snotty and nasally, but feeling mostly fine.

I went straight back to work this year, experimenting with balancing leave while staying present, by taking Fridays and Mondays off, and making each weekend a long weekend. In hindsight, I wouldn't do it again. I only feel somewhat rested, and I never really got the chance to fully engage in the deeper planning I would normally do for the year ahead . I've come to rely on January to shape the direction for the year ahead. Going into 2026 I don't have that usual feeling of confidence.

It's probably also a symptom of the work environment. While we are now officially merged, very little is clear about what the future will look like. I had to onboard a new team without any real knowledge or direction of what we are doing in the short or long term. It's been odd and unsettled.

That said I threw myself into getting some old projects moving again. One of those was building an archive of the OUA project work I led with my team prior to the merger. There is now a bit of ticking clock around those courses, which won't run the same or look the same in the future, as it will all be rebranded. We started the work last year but got snowed under. So I picked up developing up an 11ty site, adding in PagesCMS, and building a site archiver. The plan here was to get screenshots of all of the pages in the course rather than taking copies of the entire course. I spent quite a bit of time in Claude working through the screenshot app. I tried last year to do it with ChatGPT, but it failed miserably. I knew about Puppeteer and so wanted to script clicking through a course and taking screenshots of the content area.

Claude was actually a joy to work with - it was iterative, and was very much like my own programming experience - building an MVP and then adding features as we went. Knowing what I wanted and having enough programming experience to ask for it helped speed up the process. One of the key aspects was getting content to load before the screenshot was taken. Canvas is an absolute beast with JavaScript, so "normal" times just don't work, and its built-in techniques require scrolling into frame to trigger loading. With a bit of tweeking I got there so it became pretty much a set and forget process. The work now is to write about each course and choose the media to archive. I also want to pull together some of the supporting elements we also created during the project. If you click on the link - you'll see it's a work in progress, but I am hoping this will be an important portfolio piece my team can use into the future.

I also took some time this month to do some digital hygiene stuff. I have an old MacMini that has been a faithful server, but I've noticed that in the last year its performance has degraded substantially, and I can't really trust its role as a central hub. I want to move to a better setup and have been exploring various NAS and DAS setups, but given some recent issues with the MacMini, I decided need to speed up the process and settled on getting a new Orico Mini Tower with two 4Tb drives setup as a Raid 1 mirror (mirrored drives in case one dies) just to consolidate all the files before disaster strikes. That in itself was a big task, but pretty seemless. I now have a backup of our media library, RAW photos, music, ebooks and audiobooks. There's still a bunch of stuff I want to sort out, but having files backed up is a nice feeling.

One of the biggest helps with this was getting a fibre connection to our home. This has been something I have wanted since the NBN was first announced in 2007. That said - it's been more than 15 years of waiting since it was taken off the table due to a "genius" decision by the Abbott and Turnbull to 'demolish' the NBN and deliver a 3rd rate solution. Thanks to a consistent 1Gb connection I was able to consolidate files from various cloud services and backups. Downloading a 28 gig library of photos just wasn't a problem and made my life infinitely easier!

Apart from all that – the other key thing for January has been the heat! It's been crazy hot – with multiple days above 40 and it getting up to 50 in the state. We've survived thanks to the AC, but also it's put a big curve on wanting to go outside and do much.

Events

Half of my family seems to have birthdays in January - so there was a flood of well-wishes criss-crossing the country. Ms A and Mrs K celebrated their birthdays. We had a bunch of girls attempt an escape room before dinner out and a sleepover. Mrs K's birthday coincided with Labyrinth's 40th Anniversary release, which we saw at the old Capri theatre in Adelaide. It's an independent, not-for-profit cinema that houses an impressive Wurlitzer organ, which was in fine form and played before the movie started. We also headed out to Hoosegow for celebratory dinner, somewhere that had been on our list for years.

Photos

Watched

I really enjoyed the weirdness of Bugonia. I got into the chaos of Rogue Heroes - there are some really powerful episodes in the series so far. John Candy: I Like Me was just a sweet film and helped unpack an actor who was in a lot of childhood movies but didn't really make sense to me at the time. Also got through two seasons of Dark Winds which I really enjoy as a blended genre.

Listened

I have been on a The Rest Is History bender, consuming a vast chunk of the back catalogue. What am I getting out of it? A more fleshed-out timeline of history - but also a deeper recognition of the ebbs and flows of human history. I've really started to appreciate more about the idea of 'civilisation'

2025 - A Wrap

2026-01-03T00:00:00Z

Trying to sum up the year feels like a challenge. I'm currently nursing a cold, and I think that's a result of running on empty the last few weeks of the year. It's been a big, long slog.

The Highs

There were of course, some highlights:

13 Years – a massive milestone with Ms A. turning 13 back in January. Living with a teenager is something new, and points to success in her being able to survive and thrive in throughout her childhood, but it's also a turning point towards adulthood. It have me something to hold on to and helped put a lot of things into focus – that much of the strife and effort of the last few years has all been getting this human to this point. While I begrudge work, the reality is that it has enabled me to bring up a family in a pretty comfortable surroundings and without going without much. I also love the human we've helped create, seeing her personality start to blossom and coming out of her shell a bit more. We had a road trip together, and while there was quite a bit of headphones on and ignoring Dad time, there were some nice chats we had – and when visiting my cousin, she was the most outgoing I've ever seen her. It's been amazing to watch her grow up and mature.
Japan – I've missed travelling and this was such a great adventure for the family. Our route from Tokyo, Kyoto, Kanazawa and back through the mountains had just the right amount of everything. We crammed a lot into those days, walked a lot and got to see and experience so much.
Growth – The year wasn't one of change, it was one of consolidation and growth. Heathwise I made some gains on the important stuff - eating better and building in consistent movement into the day. Walking Frankie six mornings a week brings the worst out of me during winter (as we trudge through the dark), but it's also meant I've been the most consistent when it comes to exercise. I need to dial that up a bit to include more gym sessions, but I think I've proven I can stick to a routine.

On the professional front there were also a few key milestones:

Owen – The first graduate from the OUA program was a huge event for myself and the team. While we had wrapped up the course development last year, we actually got to see the fruit of our labour when Owen came to Adelaide to graduate. He bought his wife and kids, and his parents came along, and we managed to bring him into the studio to pepper him with questions. For me, this was such a big vote of confidence: getting someone through to the end of their degree, and hearing good things about the courses we worked on. It was such a great reflection on the whole team and everyone who was part of the program.

https://youtu.be/Ky1E0DzbxsU
Ascilite Paper – In a similar note, getting the team to co-author a paper on our work during the OUA project, get it peer-reviewed and published marked another milestone. We focused on distilling what we had done as a team and how we had worked, and as such, we now have a reference point and can share our work more broadly. Coming together to get the words on the page, and again to present at the conference, was pretty challenging – but I was also proud of what we had done and the effort the team had made.
Conferences – I managed to attend quite a few conferences this year (CanvasCon, Reclaim Open, ICDE, OERcamp, & Ascilite) and it was a nice reminder of the connections I have to professionals around the world, to know there is a community out there that I am part of. It was so nice to meet new people and connect face-to-face with those I'd only ever known virtually. It made me miss some of the people around the world – and how I have to get way better at keeping in touch!
Professional Practice – While it's certainly felt like my career has been on hold, and starved of opportunity over the last couple of years, that extra time has meant that I've felt much more comfortable in what I have achieved since coming to Adelaide. While my team has been dissolved as part of the merger, their sadness made me feel I had done something right. I had created and developed a culture and practices that my team can take with them. They can even reference themselves about how we worked and what we proved does work. I did apply for a more senior job right at the end of the year, and while I was not even successful at getting an interview, the process of writing up the application forced me to reflect on what I have done as a professional. And you know what – there's a lot of good stuff there. A lot of it has to do with setting up how people work – giving them the tools to work and creating the right ways of working and processes. What I feel I've been able to do over the last few years has been establish some critical professional practices around course development and learning design. They might not have percolated out beyond my team... but I have them under my belt and can point to a number of successes.

The End at the Beginning

The year ended with many endings. The team, unit, division and university I've spent six and a half years at is all gone. Wrapping it all up, there were a few tugs on the heartstrings. No one died, but things definitely came to an end. The people you depended on and got through things with together – many of those relationships will change in the new year. I've got a whole new team of nine, that I am not particularly familiar with, let alone have any experience working together.

I'm also not 100% sure what work we'll actually be doing. Have spent the better part of 18 months in the absolute churn of course development – I have zero desire to go back into that – not unless there are significant changes. Now that the merger is complete - the excuse for not changing things have run out. We are new functional unit within the new university and as such should be completely in charge of our ways of working. I am hoping we can restore the power balance back in-house, rather than outsourced to a function of Deloitte.

I am going into new year hopeful of a new beginning.

Numeric Milestones

One of the resonating things for the year was we touched on a bunch of milestones. My daughter turned 13, I turned 45 alongside my wife and we celebrated 25 years together. It made the year feel important – a distinct and clear point in time and in lifes little journey. It also brought things into a more stark contrast – we a 5 years away from some more significant milestones and there's a lot I want to do between now and then. So while this post and the year have been focused on what has passed, I am very aware of what's to come!

Media

This was the year I finished the Discworld series. I can't actually remember when I started – but the words of Terry Pratchett have been pretty consistently been the ones I fall asleep to for almost a decade. I haven't been able to give up on the routine, and so have gone back to some of my least remembered/enjoyed novels. I have to say the last few books and the arc of Tiffany Aching tied together nicely with Ms A growing up.

Podcast-wise – at some point I stumbled into the Rest is History and have been binging on the entire back catalogue. I've really enjoyed each episode of If Books Could Kill and it's saved me from reading a lot of frustrating non-fiction. Embedded: Alternate Realities was one of the best listens to really understand the reality-distortion-field in full effect, and how impacts those around them. Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet and Expanse: Nowhere Man.

TV-wise my picks of the year were Reservation Dogs, Andor, Say Nothing, Slow Horses, The Agency: Central Intelligence, Murderbot and Down Cemetery Road. All had great performance, scripts, story and cinematography.

Movies were consumed, but I don't know if there were any that were true standouts. I did like Sinners and Bugonia just because they were quite different.

Also saw my first musical (and probably last) – The Book of Mormon in Sydney.

2025 December

2026-01-02T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

OK – let's round out the year. December started with a bang – the annual Ascilite conference. This year, I encouraged the learning design contingent of my team to write and submit a paper for the conference as part of their professional development. We had completed a pretty significant project before all the merger malarkey – but hadn't actually written up anything. I did submit something previously, but it was hastily written (one day while on holiday in Fiji) and didn't pass muster with Reviewer Two. So the paper we worked on was important – to try and capture what we learnt from the process – in particular, what we could carry on into the future.

I've written one other group paper – and these are challenging beasts. We did do it, though, got some positive feedback from the reviewers, tweaked and submitted. We then had actually to present it. We had a 20-minute slot, and rather than just regurgitating the paper, we pushed ourselves to pull out what we wanted people to take away. And once we presented (in the last slot on day 1), it was a massive relief and also a massive accomplishment. I've loved my team, in all its interactions over the last six and a half years in Adelaide, and this was the real beginning of the end. December marked the end of the University of Adelaide, but also of this team and our legacy and achievements as a group.

There was a lot of future focus at work – on what we, as a new unit, might be – but also a distinct lack of detail to navigate. I didn't know who my new team would be, nor did I know where the team I had would end up. We had a good couple of weeks before we found out, and in the new year, I'll be walking in to manage a completely different team. I haven't worked with anyone on the new team, I honestly don't know most of them – and so we start from scratch in the new year. I'm both daunted and looking forward to something new.

That feeling of endings and beginnings was my December. Old things and new things coming together. Good things and bad things, good news and bad news. It all happened within the ebb and flow of each day. I carried in my lack of sleep and overall tiredness from November into this month and so for the last few days have been experiencing the cold my body needed to have – the final thing to force a few days of rest and recovery.

On the family front, it has been a ride. There were a few dramas on the in-laws' side, which were a challenge to deal with 1300kms away, and I was expecting that they may bleed into Christmas events, but that didn't happen; it required a lot of eggshell walking and negotiating. My brother and I and our little families caught up and went down to our childhood home on the 25th anniversary of our dad's passing. It was nice to hang out somewhere so familiar, yet so utterly different, and take some time to just remember.

I got some good and some bad health news, but overall I'm positive about things. I've made some positive changes and I am seeing the results from that. If I build on that I'm confident that more good will come.

Events

The actual conference and social components of Ascilite were really nice. I got to catch up with some old friends and colleagues and made some really good connections. I got prompted to do my PhD... which I'm giving some serious consideration to.

But probably the more consequential was the end of the Orcas – my team. The make-up has changed over time, but I think what has been consistent is our ability to achieve and get things done. I don't take credit for the work – but I do think I've proven (at least to myself, and hopefully a few others who will now get to experience working with my people) that I've been able to establish a good team culture, one that actually encourages others to succeed and to collaborate. There's always a lot of talk about this and endless LinkedIn philosophising... but not very many examples of it happening. My team has put the runs on the board over the last few years, consistently delivering top-notch work. It's not always happened seamlessly or without issue – but it has always happened. I made up some "merch" to remember the team – some temporary tattoos and sticker packs with the little orca insignia. It was awesome to post the team's brag list for 2025, because even this year we've done a lot as a team, despite not really working together as we have before. Getting to nominate my team for awards, and them working towards accreditation and recognition, has filled me with pride. I definitely had a few #ProudDad moments throughout the year.

Photos

## Watched

Recorded watching Nobody 2 (fine), Superman (liked), Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (fine), and Down Cemetery Road (recommend).

Listened

I think the December episodes of Lamestream media's podcast are fantastic. I've been listening since the start, and I think the last set of episodes really were great listening, offering an absolute ton of insight and unpacking of media issues in Australia.

2025 November

2026-01-01T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

The first couple of weeks of November we were in a post-Japan haze. I love how travel seeps into your pores and you experience it beyond the time itself. The vibe after Japan was a feeling of grief and longing. I really loved being in nature and the hustle of the city, the food and the freedom of being away from work.

That said, I didn't spend that much time pining, as I was off to New Zealand fairly quickly for the ICDE World conference. I'd been to Wellington before, back in 2012 for an Ascilite Conference, and had only ever seen the city itself - and that's about it for the whole of the North Island. This time I had a bit more time to explore the city itself, but I also hired a car and set out to explore some of the countryside as well. I drove out to Cape Palliser, climbed up to the lighthouse, explored a couple of the villages, found Rivendell, and most enjoyably – Brewtown. I really loved the city too – it has this kind of grungy side that lets the independent shops, bars and breweries to exist and thrive. The conference was great too, where I made new contacts, met some IRL and reconnected with some old colleagues and friends.

I came back tired! The conference was full on, a lot was going on at work with the merger and in the Common Core course. Add to that the stream of end-of-year and end-of-university events that populated the calendar and a weekend spent writing up a job application, and I ended the month feeling like I'd lost a lot of sleep and needed to catch up.

Events

The big events for me were the string of presentations and conferences that occurred in relatively quick succession. It kicked off with This One Goes to 11(ty) as part of the Reclaim Open event. I did that early in the morning from home in Adelaide, worked, flew to New Zealand and backed up being on the Plenary Panel the next morning (lacking a few hours of sleep!). I didn't end up presenting at ICDE, but attended the pre-conference workshop day and most of the sessions, which meant some very long days. Luckily, when we finished up, I could head to Garage Project, which had kicked off Pickle Week and had a couple of glorious pints of pickle beer on the balcony with Ann-Marie. Also had a lovely dinner with Jocosta and friends.

I also presented live at the OER Camp event, which was really nice and an interesting event, while also prepping slides and a group presentation of our Ascilite paper for the following week.

Family-wise, it was pretty relaxed – very home-centric – and Frankie turned 4.

Photos

Some great snaps from New Zealand are included this month:

October 2025

2025-12-05T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

I am running behind on my monthly post, having just got September out the door a week into November. That said, October was special - our first family overseas trip! That statement needs a few qualifiers as it wasn’t technically the first or even the second (there’s a trip to Vanuatu and Fiji), but in terms of going somewhere to be tourists and explore something new and not spend most of our time in a single place - this was it! I’m going to write up our Japan trip separately, so I’ll try to just capture the vibe in this post.

The first week of the month was quite a lot of preparation and organisation. Heading off for two weeks and leaving a nervous and high-demand fur-baby meant organising someone to stay in the house. Luckily, a friend could come and stay for the two weeks, so the next step was unpacking the quirks of the house and turning all of the tacit knowledge about how we live into clear instructions. There were a lot of nerves before we left, trying to remember if we remembered everything - but once we were away, it was amazing!

I love travelling.

This was the first family trip where the aim was to explore a new place, and we took to it with gusto. Everything was new and needed to be sampled. We ate and drank new things, often picking things at random rather than researching each decision. We spent a week in the cities before hiring a car to get off the tourist track a little. I loved the Japanese rail system, but I also love to drive, so this was a good compromise and enabled a few accidental encounters and visits to ‘real’ Japanese places where tourists don’t go. We walked a lot and did really well as a family – I don't think we had any meltdowns or fights the whole time.

Coming home was hard. I spent the first week missing travelling and trying to re-acclimatise to work. One thing that became clear, though, was how much ‘noise’ there is in this job at the moment. So little of what’s happening is of consequence and just takes up space and time - at least the trip away made this abundantly clear. This has meant my stress levels have dropped as I've stopped investing so much into the workplace. Rather than worrying about all of the things, I’m just staying within my zone of control. I still need to take action regarding my career, but that involves shifting the focus to myself and not the job.

One thing I came to realise while on holiday was the place my job has within the context of life. It probably doesn’t “spark joy”, but it has enabled our family to grow and grow up without having to want for much. It’s made transitioning to a new place not only possible, but pleasant. Travelling with my teenager let me see the proof that we have done well as parents. While work has felt like it’s taken over my life a few times, the reality these have only ever been distractions from the bigger whole. It’s felt good coming to that perspective, and maybe complements us as a good family unit that is happy because we get along and actually enjoy each other's company.

Events

Travelling to Japan! I did get to hang out with my best mate before we left and briefly after we got back home, which was a bonus.

Photos

There's a whole album of photos from Japan...

And this perfect shot taken back in Adelaide.

Watched

I watched a few things on the plane rides... but only a couple were noteworthy.

Mountainhead - part critique of Silicon Valley mindset, but I also felt the way the plot went, it was an endorsement of it as well. Sits in that genre of shit people doing shit things, and perhaps the lack of resolution is the point.
I really like Michael Fassbender and watched his Steve Jobs on the flight over and The Agency: Central Intelligence on the flight home.
Enjoyed Mickey 17 as an interesting take on work and life.

Reclaim Open - This One Goes to 11(ty)

2025-11-06T00:00:00Z

Feel free to read the post below - which was my rough script for the presentation. If you'd prefer to watch... there's a recording up on YouTube!

It's a real honour to be able to speak here today. I am a little daunted by my spot in the program, and my presentation will certainly have a different focus, but I think it will share some common themes.

What I wanted to share today were some thoughts on the technology that's available to empower us to reclaim open — to knock down the walls that are trying to enclose us and make space for ourselves, our passions and what we care about.

To do that, I decided to share two of my passions - making websites and heavy metal.

Today's presentation will focus on a specific technology, 11ty, and we'll examine it through the lens of the greatest living rock band... Spinal Tap.

I apologise that the presentation is going to extensively reference the movie and the music throughout... but it should make enough sense for everyone to follow! But as a bit of homework if you haven't seen it before or watched it long ago – go and watch the movie.

The Back Catalogue

OK — so let's kick off by jumping back in time and looking at how we went about making websites in the past.

Back in the Web v1 world, you had to code your own HTML. This was and is pretty challenging for anyone and it had the drawback of having your content being embedded within the structure of your site.

A HTML page looked like this and consisted of tags for various page elements and formatting, with your content text interspersed throughout. Your navigation was smooshed into the code, and it was all handmade and bespoke; there wasn't a lot of automation.

What it had going for it was that it was fast and it was simple. And this was necessary because this was pre-broadband, and servers were more like hard drives connected to the internet, allowing you to browse through the folders they contained.

Web v2 then came along and abstracted the content into a database, and your website structure and navigation into templates. This meant you could update the structure and look of your site relatively quickly and without affecting your content, and vice versa. You could update the content without potentially breaking the rest of your site, or forgetting to update something on a page.

This evolution required two critical things: a server and a database. The server was necessary to take content out of the database and push it into the template, and it would do this every time a user requested a page. These two elements also require constant monitoring, upkeep, updates and maintenance to function properly. While they created efficiencies, they also introduced two things that could fail, fall over or be attacked and hacked.

So then we came to Web v3... well not really - that was some crypto fever dream... but in this same time frame stepped up the development of what is known as a static site generator.

A static site generator is the best of web 1 and 2 – a tool that allows you to separate content from template files, and that outputs plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files that can be served directly without a database or server-side processing. Your content exists as files, rather than a database, and writing in a format like Markdown means that you can write more naturally and not have to think about tags and code. To create your site, you run a command to build the site (locally or on a server), and the generator builds your sites, puts your content into the templates, updates the navigation and creates a folder for you to host wherever you want - on Reclaim, Github Pages, Netlify or any number of other web services.

11ty is an example of this new generation of Static Site Generators.

Death of the Drummers

One of the features of Spinal Taps career was that they had a series of unfortunate deaths occur to their drummer. And for anyone who's been making websites for a while will relate to the fact that websites can "die" for a variety of reasons.

"Spontaneous combustion on stage"

Web 1 HTML sites worked, but maintaining that code and content was a nightmare. As humans, we don't naturally write in HTML, and the effect of not closing a tag, or creating a new page and forgetting to update the navigation across Every. Single. Page. In your site — could easily set your site and your will to live on fire.

"He choked on someone else's vomit"

Web 2's reliance on a database and a server required vigilance. These extra elements meant that we are often reliant on the work of others. Adding in themes and plugins to your WordPress site, for example, also creates vulnerabilities - a plugin stops being maintained, and now your site won't load. Your switch themes and now your navigation is gone. Web 2 created a whole series of dependencies that you and your site become reliant on working, and if something breaks, it can be incredibly hard

"He died in a bizarre gardening accident"

Now it's important to note that the web is a finicky and problematic medium at the best of times. Major technologies come and go, major services go down. Switching to a Static Site won't solve these things, but it will give you a more robust and controllable site to work with, plus ultimate portability. With a folder full of files rather than a database, you still have access to your precious content, and you can move it somewhere else, creating and recreating things anew.

Hello Cleveland!

Now, when it comes to Static Site Generators, there are a variety of options out there. Just like Spinal Tap on their way to the stage, it can be easy to get lost on your way to the stage.

They tend to be based on of different programming languages, purposes or intentions. I'm not going to get into the weeds with what each does, but rather I want to outline why I think 11ty takes the right approach.

Unopinionated

First of all - it's unopinionated. That means that you can set up your site the way you want to. You can choose from a range of languages to use, you can choose how you want to set up your folders, you can set up your templates how you like.

Most SSGs aren't like this - they are built to work in specific ways, usually the way that their creators like to work. If you mess around with their structure, the whole thing breaks - and can leave you trapped inside a pod onstage.

Amplify your skills

11ty empowers you to build on skills you already have. If you're not that familiar with HTML and CSS – use a starterpack. If you're familiar with a CSS framework like Tailwind, cool, you can use that too. It's even possible to setup 11ty with a CMS so you don't have to look or type any code whatsoever.

Additionally, 11ty supports a wide range of plugins and customisations that can be integrated into your site. If you have specific needs but not the skills to do it yourself, it's possible to make what you want because 11ty is so customisable.

Tiny Bread

What is the most powerful part of 11ty is your ability to tailor it to your needs. It's easy to over-engineer a simple blog that gets updated once a week. Simple blogs that don't need enterprise complexity. For example, most Content Management Systems will come with a full Javascript library your user have to download that may not get used.

11ty only comes with what you add - if you don't add Javascript - there isn't any. This makes it possible to make your site the perfect size for the job - scale things up or down as needed. That also means that load times are faster, the site runs quicker and your audience gets what it wants faster – The Full Sandwich.

A Collection of Guitars

Nigel has huge collection of guitars - from those with sustain that allows you to grab a snack, to those that cannot be played, or even looked at. You can also use 11ty to create any kind of website, from a simple one-pager through to a fully fledged blog.

You can make them for different purposes.

A Recipe Book

This Recipe Book site is something I created to gather and share recipes I’ve found and tweaked, and it came about because the app I was using was dead, and I wanted to be able to easily share recipes. Each recipe is just a Markdown file and an associated image. The markdown file is just plain text, so it’s readable and editable in a variety of applications, and I can take that folder with me anywhere. But 11ty transforms them into a site. The home page has filters so you can quickly find a recipe, and I’ve also added search so I can type in an ingredient and find the related recipes quickly. And because I can control how things are displayed, I can set up the view so that you can see the ingredients AND directions on one page!

A Resume

This simple one pager sits on my timklapdor.com domain as a 24/7 accessible profile. Rather than trust LinkedIn, I wanted to have control over my profile and what is or is not there in the public. Again, most of the content is just a series of Markdown and simple data files that come together in a simple design.

A Blog

I have been keen to wrestle back control over my blog and so a summer project was to rebuild my personal blog in eleventy.

Personal Projects

In my role as a Manager of Educational Design at the University of Adelaide, one of the key areas I’ve been working on is the concept of Learning Types and Patterns, and embedding them into course development practices. This kind of work is something I wanted to share more broadly and so I built this site. In 11ty each pattern is a markdown file, and the site pulls them all together.

This is the second version of the site, and I reworked it because the new <popover> tag made it possible for this to be a one page little app, with filtering, each pattern opening up in its own little box, and I added a light and dark mode via the css

The Kitchen Sink

One of the beauties of 11ty is you can combine content and data from around the web. I love the work of individuals like Robb Knight who has used 11ty to gobble up everything he does online. Robb is using his site to ingest data from around the web and has got his site publishing to Mastodon and an RSS feed. This is certainly a more advanced use case, but it shows the ultimate utility of 11ty.

Takeaways

It’s such a fine line between stupid, and uh...clever

So much of the web tends to get over-engineer when a 'simple' site is all that's required. 11ty provides a middle ground for a lot of what we do within the open web. Rather than needing to jump into Wordpress everytime, 11ty provides a not only a fast way to get started, but make the Clever choice and create exactly what you need.

Stonehenge

We tend to think of the web as monoliths that will stand the test of time. The reality is that most of what we build is under threat of being crushed by a dwarf. A WordPress site probably won't last more than a year or two without an update before it's completely broken or hacked, and so many sites seem incapable of standing the test of time. And while 11ty changes and evolves and may one day disappear,, the site you created, those static HTML – they just keep on working.

Keeping your content in markdown files also means that your project can be reused, repurposed and reinvented. Not only is your project portable, but the effort you've put in and the labour involved.

Community-supported

Behind 11ty is a broad community of developers that openly contributes to the development of 11ty, but also to empower users around the world. I would say I am "self-taught" when it comes to 11ty, but that is an illusion. I was taught by 11ty's open community – people sharing resources, experiences, how-tos, tips and tricks.

In a world where we want to reclaim open, this ethos community is exactly what is needed. A welcoming and diverse community willing to share and contribute to each other's success.

Be Lukewarm Water

Derek Smalls: We’re very lucky in the band in that we have two visionaries, David and Nigel, they’re like poets, like Shelley and Byron. They’re two distinct types of visionaries; it’s like fire and ice, basically. I feel my role in the band is to be somewhere in the middle of that, kind of like lukewarm water.

Those static HTML pages aren't the flashiest or bleeding edge technology – but they work. They're fast, secure, easy to maintain and cheap to run. In a world that loves to think in extremes, sometimes somewhere in the lukewarm middle is the right place to be.

How to get started with 11ty

To finish up I thought I'd share some starting points on where and how to get started with 11ty.

11ty Videos

11ty isn't a fancy app, its a few commands in the terminal - which can seem a bit intimidating – but the reality is that you can learn the basics in a couple of minutes. Added to that - you're opening up the terminal and typing into the command line - which is as cool

11ty Starter Projects

A range of starter projects are available on the official 11ty website, these can be a great way to get started - especially if you don't want to start from scratch.

11ty Rocks

One of the most influential on my uptake and setup of 11ty sites has been 11ty Rocks by Stephanie Eckles. Stephanie has some great tutorials, tips and starter packs to get you setup and underway.

11ty Bundle

Collecting posts and resources about 11ty from right across the community is 11ty Bundle - go here to find the latest posts and tips from across the community.

And if you've got any questions - feel free to drop into my dms!

September 2025

2025-11-05T00:00:00Z

Catching up on the blog after a bit of time off and time away (which I’ll share in the upcoming October update, which will certainly come out before the end of November!).

The Vibe

I'm no longer doing the pre-dawn dog walks. In the morning, the sun's up, it's light and generally been pretty pleasant. Still quite wet and alternating between blasts of winter and the occasional beautiful spring day. September Iis a complete scattergun approach to weather patterns,which probably mirrors the mood quite a bit in terms of emotions and well-being just in general.

As always, the turmoil of the merger continues unabated. The work though seems to have fallen into a bit of a pattern – but it’s not something I enjoy. I'm not what you would call a ‘maintainer’; my preference is to work as more of a Pioneer, exploring new spaces and defining the patterns others might follow. So I’ve adopted more of a coping strategy, switching off a bit more about that part of the work and focusing on some of the more engaging bits which has been around the new university's Common Core.

I've been working on the Entrepreneurship and Design Thinking course, Igniting Change: Ideas to Action, and it's been a breath of fresh air in terms of something challenging and engaging from an intellectual perspective. Part of that has been the realisation that one of my strong points is working through the details to operationalise what, in essence are just good ideas, but also ideas that are new and don't exist as things that we can copy, (which appeals to my pioneering spirit!).

It’s probably useful to unpack the Common Core courses a bit. They are a range of six courses that students are required to complete as part of the degree studies at the new Adelaide University. Students need to complete one of these six courses each year of their study, which has been built into all the new programs and curriculum. They are aimed at being cross-disciplinary, skills development, experiential, and (hopefully) transformative learning experiences. Which is awesome to aspire to - but it's challenging to put into practice!

Part of the innovation in the courses is that their design is almost contradictory to how universities generally operate. For example, these courses are non-graded, meaning you either pass or fail. This might indicate to students that these courses have a lower value, but how else do you enable students to have a transformative learning experience and take risks?

The assessment process that's been decided upon is that we would have two formative assessment tasks for students, followed by a single summative task, which takes the form of a portfolio. Wanting to increase the risk appetite for students and having a single summative task that accounts for 100% of the course is somewhat contradictory. It's the single point where we can actually see that the students have met the learning outcomes. A single point of assessment also means a single point of failure in my books. So that’s where I’ve spent quite a bit of time working on this month - dwelling on the question of how to make this work. This is the stuff that I can actually engage in – problem-solving and being creative. I think I've come up with an approach that seems logical and achievable within the constraints of the learning management system and the tools we have available. I need to write more about this because I think it's actually really important, and it would be a valuable addition to my portfolio, as there's a lot of detail and nuance surrounding this topic. I'm not even sure if it will work 100%, but part of this risk appetite that the university has is that they seem like they're willing to take risks on these courses. So it's not just on students' heads, it's on ours as well.

All of this has compelled me to truly reflect on how work makes me feel. Being engaged in two quite different types of work – mundane, repeatable, templated work vs more engaging, challenging, and creative tasks – has really pushed me to think about work beyond skillsets and competencies, but about feelings and what makes me happy.

I've also started to get a bit more organised, because when I recognise that being organised makes me feel better and more relaxed. This is opposed to when I feel reactive - not necessarily a lack of control, but the sense of input into what I am letting into my life. I've certainly tried (and failed) to do this on a few occasions - and while I haven't maintained it during each attempt, I was far more productive, I felt better, and I was a lot clearer about what was going on. The problem is that once I had that clarity, I just continued forward without looping back around on why everything was clearer, and maintaining that organised process.

So a big chunk of September has been about thinking through what it is that I need to be and do and want in life. It's been interesting because a couple of years ago, while I was completing the focus course, I got a better sense of the bigger picture of where I wanted to be and where I was going. The problem came in the actual implementation of those big-picture ideas. I came across two people in my Mastodon feed who were spruiking the benefits of OmniFocus and a more whole-of-life view of organising things, rather than just random, disconnected to-do lists. I read up and watched a few videos about this approach and it felt right and made a lot of sense, helping to explain some of my previous failures. So I've started the journey of setting these things up and starting to put things together in that space. I don't think I've got a system per se, but I feel like things have started to progress fairly positively in that space. I've got a lot of stuff out of my head, and to be honest feel like I've created more space in there as I'm not needing to keep a million different things at front of mind. We'll see how that pans out!

And I think that's probably where I'm at the end of September – starting to make some more conscious decisions about life in order to put myself back in control of things and not purely be reactive to the world around me and the situations I find myself in. I want things to change – particularly at work. I need my career to actually be something that gives me joy. I'm not feeling my talents are being utilised – I think more strategically and operationally, but I'm not in that space right now. Since the merger really kicked in, I've had zero ability to be that person, and I'm not sure the opportunity to do so exists in the upcoming restructure. I'm not sure if there are future roles or future projects to align myself to... but rather than just let it devolve and for myself to burn out in this space, I need to be a bit more proactive and take the bull by the horns and be the change that I want to see.

Events

Had a great dinner out at the local Argentinian restaurant - very meat heavy :-) - but was nice grown up night out with friends Dave and Jane.

The in-laws came for a visit and to watch Ms A's first performance with her local acting troupe. It was a fun nights performance (I can appreciate this a bit more than the "theatre" group performances).

Photos

Very light on in the photo department for the month ... only two made it into the favourites!

Watched

Really enjoyed the first season of Peacemaker and Alien: Earth. Completely missed the boat on The Outlaws and have enjoyed bingeing episodes when some I needed something a bit lighter and fun. Finally got around to watching Kingdom of Heaven as a few people mentioned it online... it was fine but I don't think I missed anything. Stuck through Black Rabbit for Jude Law, but I am not a fan of this farce-based "what 's-the-worst-thing-this-character-could-do" genre of, well, anything. Had potential, but missed the mark.

Listened

These episodes on 'The Rest Is History' were really enlightening in terms of explaining the almost hidden agenda at play in geopolitics - oil.

This podcast episode shared by Doug Belshaw on Anxiety was really interesting, explaining it as normal cognitive behaviour

Limits

2025-09-10T00:00:00Z

In drafting my August 2025 post, I had been mulling over another point, but that post had become quite lengthy. It could be due to quietly turning 45 and starting to feel my age, but I have begun to become much more attuned to limits.

Growing up and throughout my teens and 20s, limits tended to focus on the physical, on how far you could push your body. What I'm starting to feel in my 40s is the psychological side of that equation. It's not that psychological limits didn't exist until now – it's just I was not attuned to it. As I did in my teens and 20s, I've pushed the limits and definitely crashed and burned a few times because I didn't comprehend these limits and what they were. There were definitely periods of burnout and heavy periods of trauma in my life that I didn't ever deal with. I wasn't particularly aware of what trauma was and how it comes to bear on the way that you do things.

One of the aspects of the past month has been an inability to concentrate on productive work – essentially sitting down to write, but also just to be creative and sit with thoughts. My mind is constantly wandering. A lot of this has to do with the issues at work, but also with issues at home – finances and the feeling of having too little time to address all the things. I've found it really hard to filter out the constant noise and distractions of wanting to feel plugged in and aware of what's going on. Even the idea of 'productive work' has evolved for me to just the ability to be distraction-free and having the discipline to stay focused on a single task.

Part of it might be to do with my phone and having that as a crutch to lean on. Another part that I've really started to think about is being an introvert and needing to have quiet time for myself to recharge. Yes, I can do the social things but I also have to recognise that it drains rather than feeds me. I think it was friends Mark and Kahiwa who introduced me to the spoon theory – this acknowledgement that we have limits, and there are only so many spoons per day, and once you're out, you're out. Applying this to decision making or socialising and acknowledging that we only have so much to give on a certain day – that regardless of our ambitions, we have limitations. There's only so much each of us has to give. What might be unique is in what our limits are, not that we don't have them at all.

Right now, I feel like I don't have a lot left in the bank. My supply of spoons across a variety of areas is in short supply. This is when opting for defaults and the path of least resistance (which inevitably has bad consequences) becomes the easiest thing to do. It's what leads to getting takeaway on the way home rather than cooking. Of staying on the couch and not getting out for exercise. Of doom scrolling for hours rather than engaging with your list of amazing cinematic experiences you have access to. In an increasingly electrified world, this may make more sense. EVs, phones and batteries all need to charge and come with different capacities and chemistry – so it should make more sense. What I think has changed for me is realising that the battery metaphor is not purely a physical one, but it's a mental one too.

During my August introspection, I realised that I only have so many conversations in me per week. With most of those conversations happening at work, home has become the place I return to empty, needing time to recharge. Therefore, a lot of home time is not spent talking with my family or friends, as I don't have the spoons for that. I might be physically with them in the same house, but a lot of the time, I'm not necessarily present. As a family, we share similar psychological profiles – so with the three of us, the toll of work and school as the places where the vast majority of conversations happen, it means that there's very little that happens at home. At the moment, this is just something that I am now aware of – it's not wrong or bad, but it has an effect.

With this information, it's made me consider the need to rejig my work schedule to make time for days without conversation. This isn't a negative against the people I work with, but from a mental health perspective, the ability to tune things out, to focus, to be distraction-free is challenged when the day is full of conversations. This conversation-heavy work pattern also affects home life because, as an introvert, it takes time to process them, it takes time to engage, and it takes effort to go through that process.

I'm also not having a lot of "meetings", I've managed to eliminate a lot of those but I am left with a considerable amount of conversations, whether they're face-to-face or on video, they require me to be present. Most of what I need and want to talk about is not suited to chats, emails or other technology-mediated things. It is about being present with people. And there's an internal acknowledgement that this is an effort.

I really liked this Sherry Turkle article because it really spelled out that there is friction of face-to-face and friction of engaging with another human being. A lot of digital technology has made attempts to remove that friction, but the only real consequence of those attempts is the unlimited amount of hurt that people can inflict on one another (e.g. everything about Twitter, Meta, and 4chan for the last decade). In this world, there's no accountability, and there's no friction to calling people names, or saying really derogatory things, or doxing, or cruelty, or bullying. Online, people say things they would never say face-to-face because of the friction created by interacting with another human being. That friction is in the face, gestures and intonation that's all there in the 'meat space' that online cannot and doesn't want to replicate - operating in a world where the other person can and probably would react to the things that you say requires a very different set of rules.

I know that the connection you make through conversation is an empowering part of life. There is a need to try to read signals, to have empathy for the other person – and that's work! That's effort, that's labour and it takes care to do those things – yet that is what's productive. Building relationships and rapport is productive. Yet so much of the 'productive work' that we are asked to do is really just the bullshit job stuff – filling in forms, having an output, making numbers go up, showing you're busy. Yet the hard work, the hard labour, the productive work is all the scene setting, the engagement, the questioning, the to and fro that happens from dialogue, conversation, through exchanging ideas. We so often just miss that or pay no attention to it. Or, as Sherry points out, it gets engineered away because it's not seen as useful, valid, or part of the process. It's engineered out of things.

It's been good to be insular over the past month as I've needed time to evaluate and make sense of what's going on. I've needed to work out my limits, but also why it sometimes feels so hard to get through the day. Knowing you're limits isn't about stopping the dreams, but being real about what's possible. Appreciating the effort that goes into things. Acknowledging the labour, the work. And I need to see that in myself.

August 2025

2025-09-07T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

August seems to be my month of introspection. We're coming to the end of winter, but it definitely has not disappeared yet - although maybe I need to move on from my Western conception of the seasons to the local indigenous one.

This August has been wet and occasionally wild so there hasn't been a desire to get out and see or do things. Its a time of hibernation and being insular, as being inside is often the best thing to do. Being warm and dry has its appeal. And with that there's a lot more time spent inside my own head rather than being out in the world. From that perspective, it's been a busy time.

We've gone through the change plan for the new university, and while I still have a job, not a lot of the feedback that my colleagues and I provided was put into the new organisational structure. There's a lot that has been put off to a future date - ensuing that there will be further changes - creating a climate of discomfort and disruption, that is expected to just become the normal state. I've talked the idea of temporary permanence before where that what is supposed to be a temporary extends into the foreseeable future becoming the permanent space that we operate in.

The job is as secure as it can possibly be and while there's a lot more to come in of the next six months, I’m in a holding position role while we go through this merger. At at some point we have to return back to normal operations and new projects to work on as I'm not particularly happy doing the work that I'm assigned as it doesn’t play to my skillsets. There’s no sense of creativity or to use my ability to solve problems. It's not playing to my ability to work in complex spaces. A lot of that has to just do with the working environment that’s completely hierarchical and a top-down approach to change. There is of course the illusion of consultation throughout the process Despite the years of experience me and my colleagues can bring to the process, we've never been engaged or asked to bring that to the fore. We've tried to, knocked on the door, submitted and requested things, but nothing's changed - which is the main frustration of the job.

I went to CanvasCon this month which was your typical vendor conference. Which is hosted here in Adelaide. The final speaker was a kindergarten teacher who's become famous on TikTok and Instagram, Mr. Luke. He bought a specific energy to his talk which was light hearted but asked something a little deeper around the idea of joy in our work join. It reminded me very much of the Mari Kondo approach of asking “Does this spark joy?” in order to clear out your home. When I asked that about my job - when was the last time that I felt joy? - it feels like it was quite some time ago.

The reality is that it's often only in retrospect that the joy appears. More often than not, the artefact or the place inherits a sense of joy rather than process embodying it. The joy of the birth of a child is certainly not in the process, but in the materialisation of life. When I think about joy at work, it stems from working in spaces of conflict which don’t bring joy in and of themselves. Joy comes from the end result where resolution makes the hard work pay off, where the conflict resolves in a better situation than when you started. So it's interesting to try and think about how you might cultivate a sense of joy at work. Joy isn’t immediate, but the result of effort. Maybe joy is something to strive for, but perhaps it’s something we discover. Maybe happiness is something we can achieve at work instead?

I started to contrast that with the zeitgeist of the ‘Influencer’ and the growth of Instagram and TikTok lifestyle inspiration. This is what we tend to think ‘joy’ looks like, but it's all fake and performative.

I’ve also returned to the idea that was popular pre-pandemic of bullshit jobs as a way to rationalise what’s happening with AI and the hype around it. I’ve started to see this relationship between bullshit jobs and AI, and how these two things marry together perfectly. If we're honest about the capabilities of AI, then the jobs that will disappear will tend to be bullshit jobs. Let's think about the industrialised nature of media and public relations. We've reached a point where every business does a press release, and the press release goes straight into media circulation because none of these things are jobs that care is attached to. These are money-making exercises, these are business functions. They don't contribute positively to culture or participate in society - they are there to extract a set value. Bullshit AI performing bullshit jobs.

And then I relate this to my own career and ask – what is the value that I bring? Can I marry that with that idea of joy? And this is where I've wallowed through most of August. In this space of self-doubt, self-pity, of not feeling connected, not feeling engaged with what's going on, and in many aspects feeling like I'm going backwards.

In a conversation with my wife, we discussed how the cost-of-living crisis has eaten up all of our disposable income. We're in a significantly different financial position than we were just a year ago, when we were able to save and put money away quite generously. That said, our saving wasn't invested, we spent it on trips to see family, outings and socialising – and that's all had come to a stop. We've had to rein in significantly on what's possible. So all of a sudden, the hard work that you put into your job doesn't seem to be paying off. I'm not feeling better off or like I'm moving forward. At best, it's stationary, but it definitely feels more like we're going backwards.

So that's the vibe of August. It's wet, it's cold, it's depressing and I've been depressed.

At the same time, this is also the time of the year when the wattle starts to bloom. These golden flowers herald spring. It's coming. It's coming! The buds are starting to appear. There are blossoms on the row of trees leading down our driveway. We're still in for cold days ahead, and a few warm ones, as we move into this part of the year where the garden becomes overgrown in weeds. There's not much you can do about it. That's the natural state.

Events

I attended CanvasCon and also got most of the new team together for a lunch - always such a good time breaking bread with people. Had a friend come and visit from Victoria

Photos

Watched

A complete mishmash of viewing through the month. For example, a weekend with Werner Herzog's Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, followed by Adam Curtis' Shifty to KPop Demon Hunters. We had a family trip to the cinema to see the 41st anniversary screening of This Is Spinal Tap

Listened

I thoroughly recommend a couple of recent podcast seasons: [Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet](This Is Spinal Tap) and Expanse: Nowhere Man.

Read

I passed a bit of a milestone in August, finishing the final Discworld Novel. It was with a bit of grief getting to the end of the series – it's something I can recommend everyone should read, given Pratchett's genre-hopping style there is truly something for everyone.

July 2025

2025-08-02T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

In fact it’s the wettest July in 27 years, so more than the whole time we’ve lived here. The weather has probably reflected my mood if I’m honest, but there has been a few events that were highlights.

It probably comes with the seasons, but I am feeling a real lack of momentum in life. I feel a bit stuck, part of that is the ongoing merger - and not really having any sense of control when it comes to my job, and maybe my career too. The other part is the lack of resources to do much to change those circumstances. As so many people around the world are experiencing, the cost of living has essentially eaten away at the comfortable buffer we had with our incomes. We have enough to cover expenses, but at the end of the fortnight, there's nothing to spare. Unlike others, we haven't had to go without, but with all that's going on in work and life, it means there’s an increasing gap between what we want to do (or be able to do) and what we can afford to do. I remember this as a kid growing up, so it's not new – but I had become accustomed to a 'good' income and being able to care less about money. Now that care is very apparent.

And it's this vibe I've been sitting in for the past couple of months. Not trapped but hemmed in. Those earning less than I would be feeling this far more, I, and I acknowledge that, and having grown up in that environment, I know how that feels. This is the trap of money, something that the rich never seem to understand - that the ability to change is not hampered by desire, but the available resources. This is why the approach of “education” to solve social issues is always doomed to fail, as the problem isn’t the willingness or knowledge of change, but the material means available to enact it.

I need to go away and think about this more, work out what the change is that I need and start working on some more concrete and achievable plans to get some momentum to swing my way.

Events

I had a great night out drinking dark beers with my friend and colleague Andrew Beatton. We kicked off the night at SludgeFest, a celebration of one of the strongest (and tastiest) beers out there. Pick of the tasting we had was the 2025 Imperial Mocha Stout that weighed in at 12%! We then headed over to the main event, the Festival of Darkness. This was a 'tasting event' where about a dozen breweries provided tastings of primarily their dark beers, but a bit of everything was available. Stand out for me was the amazingly named Noodledoof and their Iced Coffee Stout.

We then had my niece visit during the school holidays, which was really nice. The girls got along well, but they are so different, which made it interesting to be around them. The weather wasn't on our side, but we did go out and about. We finally saw Morialta Falls with some water flowing and three koalas, as well as some of the city's sites. Mum came for a visit, so we had a nice time eating and drinking before my birthday. And then I turned 45! The years are flying by a bit too fast for my liking.

We completed the ThincSeed pre-accelerator program, applied for the accelerator but didn't make it. It's not all doom and gloom — but it does mean we need to replan our process for our somewhat secret venture.

The final 'event' I wanted to mention was collaboratively authoring an Ascilite paper. This was challenging but deeply rewarding and really helped me gain a deeper understanding of the work that I've done and contributed to with my team. Fingers are crossed that it gets accepted, but regardless, I am super proud of the work and the paper.

Photos

A few photos from the month.

Watched

I was (un)lucky enough to be sick during the month so absolutely hammered my outstanding watch list - alongside a countless number of rugby matches.

Top of my list would be Reservation Dogs which I finished up. Seriously one of the most quirky, fun and touching things I've watched in a long time.

I also loved watching Adam Curtis again in his series Shifty. I really want to chat about the series with someone, but I enjoy Curtis' unique style and storytelling.

Sinners was also a standout - everything in and about the film is just well done - beautifully shot, great cast, great soundtrack, engaging story... what is not to like.

I also got through a few documentaries - Mistaken for Strangers, Lessons of Darkness, Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, My Best Fiend & God Forbid and a few movies too - 28 Weeks Later, On Her Majestys Secret Service, September 5 and Gladiator II. All were fine - and yes a bit of a Werner Hertzog binge - but nothing outstanding.

The Mirror and What's Not There

2025-07-27T00:00:00Z

It started for me with this video of Philomena Cunk and Brian Cox:

Now regardless of Paul’s understanding of quantum theory, this clip planted the idea of mirrors in my head. Sure, they may not run on quantum power but there is something to them that unlocks what seems like hidden world.

D'arcy’s post on the value of Rubber Ducking and thinking out loud outlines something similar to the power of the mirror. By looking and perhaps more importantly, talking and thinking in a reflecting way, we develop ourselves and our understating of things. That looking and seeing our own reflection helps to inform ourselves and develop our knowledge and experience.

Finally there was this great post outlining the Gestaltian Mistake. Evan walks through Gestalt theory, essentially

"there are consistent ways the human mind will group information and recognize patterns... even if there isn't actually a pattern there."

Humanity has this way of seeing the world through patterns, and we will see them even if they aren't there. That part is just wild when you think about it – yet revelatory when we look at the world around us. That what we see in a mirror is just a pattern that "looks like" reality - but it isn't. The mirror image is different and distinct from reality - we just perceive it as the same as it is the pattern that we apply.

This idea of seeing things that aren't there in the context of the "AI" flood seems to relevant. It's perceived as intelligent because we see recognise a pattern and then apply it. This mirroring (the output of text) coupled with our Gestaltian ways of seeing (the ability to output relatable text as a sign of intelligence), creates a reality that isn't there. On the individual level it warps reality – they see the pattern and it becomes Jesus on toast. This is their "truth", and you cannot change it.

I'm not sure what this ultimately means. I think the idea of reflection and reflective practice is important, but I also wonder if we naturally see patterns in everything, even when they don't exist, do we set ourselves up for failure? Are we able to recognise what's really there when it's reflected back at us?

June 2025

2025-07-13T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

It’s been a pretty wild month, particularly on the weather front. There’s been a toxic algal bloom off the coast, some wild storms that wreaked havoc on the beaches and jetty’s along the coast and the gloomy darkness that signifies winter in the southern hemisphere.

Emotionally it’s been a bit the same. There was the high of going to Sydney and seeing family, nephew and nieces and celebrating a milestone birthday. But one of the reasons why we were there was one of my nieces has a cancer diagnosis – treatable, which started on that weekend with glowing fluorescent orange tablets that look like those squishy earplugs but which we mere mortals are not allowed to touch. So sad, but full of hope. The restructure for the merger dropped. Positive - I still have a job. Negative - the actual structure seems unworkable and problematic. I have a palpable sense of not being in control of my future – and not the first time in my life. But also the pursuit of a new venture (or two) seems possible, doable and somewhat achievable which does gives me hope and something to aim for.

I had my first full road rage incident, which I can see now as just an outlet for all of this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Not overly happy with myself, but there was some righteous indignation being blocked by a truck on the way to the train station on a wet morning while the driver sat there on his phone refusing to move into an obvious space. Anywho - maybe not the most constructive use of energy, but there was something cathartic about yelling at someone to “get fucked” at 8am.

I spent a good chunk of the month working with my team pulling together a paper which has been great. It’s been a long time since I’ve had time to do this. There was the day I gave myself to write something up while in Fiji, but that didn’t get accepted (thanks Reviewer 2!). This time though it was more measured and paced. We utilised a retrospective as the catalyst for working out our lessons learnt from the process. I channeled that into a bit of a SWOT and TOWS analysis that really helped solidify our position. And then we set out writing. Authoring anything collaborative is far more labour consuming than anything solo. It challenging to mix in different perspectives, styles and voices. At the same time I love it when it comes together. Staring at the chaos beforehand though was challenging. I put it off a few times - and I now wonder if this is something that can be rushed. Things need to gestate and form, and that seems like something that is temporal, no amount of effort or focus seems to actually speed the process up.

Where we ended up in the paper was really good as well. We decided to write the paper as a case study, and to be honest that worked really well as the work itself never had a “theoretical construct” around it in the first place. And as a retrospective piece, it actually allowed us space to find a theoretical lens to see our work through. I’m not an academic and so this approach might be antithetical, but hey I am much more about making sense and reaching an understanding through process and action rather than research. In this respect I came across Dorst’s paper on Design Thinking. What I wanted to do was bring out the concept of design practice in learning design, rather than framing it through an educational lens, and Dorst’s ideas really resonated. The idea of shifting the work we do to be less about product and more towards value was helpful, but the idea of design work actually about reframing the problem space was perfect. The way they talk about getting situated and having a feel for the problem, rather than sticking with how it was currently framed opened up my eyes to something that I had practiced, but never vocalised or thought consciously about before. What emerged through developing the paper was a better understanding of process, and when we reframed the ‘problem’ of course development as a complex instead of complicated one – everything came together. I got to pull in a bunch of my knowledge, experience and perspectives into the paper and I’m so happy with where we landed. Hopefully the reviewers do too.

The other big time sync was participating in 5 weeks of the ThincSeed Pre Accelerator program. A group of us have been trying to commercialise some software we developed at the university for some time. We’ve hit most of the roadblocks now, but I think we might have navigated a way through that. Nothing is official, nothing is actually setup yet, what’s there now is a way forward. I spent the first few months developing a business plan and financial model for the business. This program was about what you need to do in order to get investment ready, and helped to really clarify what our next steps need to be. This is going to be a longitudinal project - unless some billionaire wants to give me money no strings - but it will be worth it just for the sense of independence it offers.

Events

We took a trip to Sydney for the weekend and had some quality time with my in-laws. We got to hang out with the kids, all now in high school which is such a different dynamic than when they were all so small. Also had some quality time with my brother in-law who took me on a beer crawl through Marrackville. There’s almost a dozen breweries in a very small space and we had a crack at about half of them before heading back on the plane to Adelaide.

I also consumed a lot of beer at the final Beer and BBQ Fest in Adelaide. My old boss and colleague Ali was flying in to attend and so we spent the afternoon catching up and drinking. There was a lot of great beer on offer - I am particularly partial to dark beer during winter and I found some great examples on offer.

One of my favourite things this month was sitting down for a recorded conversation with the indomitable Jim Groom^[1]. I did a bit of research and watched the other conversations Jim had in this "On Writing" series, and I felt a little out of place. I didn't necessarily feel like an impostor; I have written a lot over the years, but not in the same league as the other guests. I borrowed the analogy of the cook vs. chef – one can make a tasty meal, but the other applies a craft to food that isn't in a cook's repertoire. I'm a cook when it comes to writing – I can deliver words but I don't have a background in literature, I've never written a book and there isn't that desire in me either. What I found through the discussion was that writing was a way to reach out and connect with people, engage in conversations and share ideas, opinions and feelings. I recommend a dive into the whole series.

We had the Festival of Learning and Teaching where I was just a participant this year and gave me a chance to take it in. I enjoyed the chance to get out of the humdrum work and engage with some bigger ideas about learning and teaching and the impact of AI. It’s kicked off some thoughts - and hoping to write them up soon.

I also just wanted to mention that I also had a crack at Arcadia June, courtesy of the Hemispheric Views crew. This hand crafted podcast and their community have really embraced this iOS app that contains a heap of retro inspired games. Each June they ask members to all play and share high scores and compete. I kind of missed the whole arcade high score cultural phenomenon, so this was a chance to have a go. I didn’t submit any winning scores, but was happy to just hopefully get my name on the list. Can recommend the app as it’s a ton of fun and I’m still playing as we head into July.

Photos

Watched

Caught up on the latest seasons of Formula 1 Drive to Survive and The Last of Us. Smashed through MobLand which I enjoyed. Probably the best thing I’ve watched in a long time was Reservation Dogs. I smashed through all 3 seasons in a couple of weeks and loved it. Probably some of the best television I’ve seen in a long time.

Listened

The ABC series Dusted was a really great set of episode exploring mining in Australia. The spin on it was not that it’s focus was on Gold, Coal and Asbestos - three of the key defining mining enterprises in Australia - but that it was centred on the dust created by the act of mining and the diseases and impact they had on communities.

Loved this description of Jim from Tom Woodward’s post where you can get a sense of both the man and the myth! "He’s an independently wealthy Italian tech magnate and he can spend his time doing strange things from a castle in Trento where he lives surrounded by old VCR tapes and 1980s arcade consoles." ↩︎

The Economic Realities of Attention

2025-06-18T00:00:00Z

Present commercial “social media” platforms have increasingly gone past their ‘social’ origins. The ‘feed’ across these apps is no longer tied to the ‘social’ aspects, showing us posts and updates from our friends, family and those we chose to follow, it’s now all algorithmically selected by a black box whose criteria seems to be driven by content from accounts those you’ve chosen not to connect with. Regardless of the app, the feed is the same.

The algorithm was developed for attention, driven by metrics that are driven by ‘engagement’. These tend towards the extreme and base elements of human nature, evoking a reaction and capturing our attention. Not our affection but attention. Initially being provocative of both positive and negative emotions (hate and cat videos), it now sways completely to the negative because that evokes better metrics. Not a better experience, but better metrics.

By doing so, the platforms monetised and weaponised content. They hoarded all of their wealth and focused purely on the pursuit of profit at the expense and loss of all else. Morals, ethics, connection, friends, family, children, wellbeing, health – all of it tossed aside in the pursuit of money. Not value but wealth. The ‘social’ elements of the media were eroded and hollowed out until they existed only in the name and label given once upon a time. These are not platforms for connection, but for division. Not for cohesion, but exclusion. Not community or care, but fracture and destruction.

And I have to ask – is this worth paying attention to? Is the cost worth it?

Now let’s jump to today and the world of “AI”. Sure, it’s artificial, but it’s also as intelligent as a blow to the head with a hammer. It's another label that's absolutely meaningless, as it combines both fantasy and reality, possibility and faith, with an underwhelming reality that's entirely built on hype. We can certainly debate the nuances of a specific technology or implementation, but you cannot do that within the space that “AI” creates. You cannot talk about the truth of LLMs outside of the hype of AI. You cannot build castles from sand, nor can you conjure truth from lies.

As I look across the platforms today, what I see is a parade of AI-generated content posted by bots, commented on by other bots, in a feed of strangers, where every other post is an ad that’s curated by a black box fuelled by a hate metric.

What here is worth my attention?

What here is worth my time?

There is no social left in “social” media. There is no affection, no experience, no value, no connection, no cohesion, no community or care left in these platforms. Platforms run by business idiots who think that this is ok and that this (¯_(ツ)_/¯ ) is a viable business model. These are the same idiots whose only function is to make numbers go up.

But if we leave… if we take our attention and go. If we realise that what’s here is not worth anything to us anymore, we take that value with it. And we now know how much that value is worth, so we can take it and invest it elsewhere. In platforms that honour our attention rather than take it for granted. That provides real value to us. That create an experience worth investing in.

That’s the economics of attention we should be focused on.

May 2025

2025-06-01T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

After what seemed like a long summer or just an incredibly mild autumn, it now really feels like winter. For one, I'm now getting up in the dark to do the morning walk with Frankie, which has the upside of watching dawn break when there are no clouds. The other downside is the cold mornings: gloves and beanie weather. We had a wild storm come through the state in the last week, which passed us by completely. Given how many times we've lost power and had to clean up fallen trees and branches, I was shocked that neither occurred in our neighbourhood.

The best indicator of winter's approach was the English Ale event that Ms A and I attended (see photos). Based on the whiff of a 'traditional' harvest festival, it was a truly odd affair with Morris Dancers sharing the space with Viking warriors, elves, wizards and a whole slew of people dressed as animals - including a dolphin. Part cosplay, pagan and weird, it took place on a cold and wet Saturday afternoon. We gathered at Mylor and browsed the stall, drank good beer and waited for the burning of the wicker man as the day turned into night. It was great fun people-watching with Ms A and trying to make sense of what was happening around us. We didn't dress up - but are planning on making a return next year in some kind of garb.

We finally booked tickets for a trip to Japan later in the year as something to stay motivated for, especially as we head deeper into the colder (and hopefully) wetter months of the year.

The other major event of the last week was that the university's merger structure was dropped. They have been openly spouting the "no forced redundancies" line for months, and that part is true. The double-speak of that is that there will probably be redundancies, but that will be in two years, and there's no word on what will happen to the hundreds of staff on contracts. So yes, I still have a job.

For the moment, what has been supplied is the "Change Plan" – and we now have 15 days to review it and provide feedback. It currently looks like that while I keep my job, I lose the bulk of my team who get dispersed, so I'll get a bunch of new people to manage. Having created and rebuilt the team a few times already, my initial feelings were a mix of loss and frustration. I'm not sure if I have the energy to invest the time and effort required to create a strong team again, and I don't think whoever made this decision actually appreciates the effort required to do so, especially if the most likely scenario is that it won't be permanent. It also puts me in a place where I'm doubting what I am here for.

I came to Adelaide with a few things I wanted to achieve: build a team, develop courses without the inertia of an existing institutional tradition, and do things my way. Which I've now done and have the evidence of with our first graduating student as proof. It was so nice to see and meet Owen, Graduate Number One from our online program - and it makes all the effort feel worthwhile, knowing the very human impact your work can have.

While I keep my job, the change plan also states that I (and several others) are excluded from applying for positions above our current level. So, there is no opportunity for promotion or career advancement – which is a significant letdown. There has been so little recognition from my leaders about my work – the output and the outcomes – it's not necessarily surprising. My job has remained stagnant and without opportunities for advancement or progression, and the career path I thought I was creating has evaporated. I am considering what I want my job to be because what's currently on the table is not it. I have no desire to continue creating courses until the heat death of the universe. I need a new challenge, which I had hoped the change plan would offer, but to be honest, its strength and weakness is in how conservative it all is. There's no real change to be worried about, but there's no change there to inspire, either.

While I walked on the beach today, I contemplated, "What do you want to do?". Not what do I want to be – but what do I want to do? We get so framed by our jobs, and I was trying to think about what I would want to say to the question of what do you do? What's the thing that makes me want to get up and go to work? And when I think about it – I want to Discover. I feel at my best when I am working on something new, something that hasn't been done before, where what is needed is emergent, where there is no path to follow, and it's up to me to find a way. I don't have that now... and part of that is because, at least in my mind, it's done. I've worked it out. I worked out how you create online courses, how you build a high-performing team, how you oversee a project from start to finish, how you map out resource requirements, and how to timetable course delivery through to signing off the last course. The institution has that if they choose to listen or see it. My team has it – they have the lived experience to take it all and do it themselves, to take the lessons learnt and improve on it. So for me, the future job needs to be that - discovery. I need a new challenge.

Events

We had the inlaws in town for Mother's Day and had a great meal together at Herringbone. Ms A and I went to our first English Ale (see photos). Was such a fun time and we're keen to go back. Not much else, but have enjoyed quite a few walks at the beach with Frankie. One great thing about Adelaide is how much beach space we have, and that most of it is dog friendly, especially in the cooler months where it's off the leash all day.

Photos

Watched

I loved Andor and watched both seasons of it to eek out the most I could. I then went back to Rogue One A Star Wars Story for another watch. Enjoyed The Luckiest Man in America too.

Read

I have been using Readwise as my all in one saver of things and annotation tool, which syncs up with my Obsidian notes. This is probably the first month of it all working nicely, and I also now have a "What I Read" (or more accurately, Annotated) list in my weekly notes template.

So some great articles:

Experience Doesn't Stack: The Myth of Collective Knowledge by Joan Westenberg

One expert with twenty years doesn’t just know more facts. They see differently. They carry mental models that weren’t taught but discovered. They’ve built intuition from friction. They’ve made the same mistakes enough times to recognize them three steps before they appear. They don’t look at problems as they are but as what they become.

The Who Cares Era by Dan Sinker

In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care.
In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.

I Got Mine

2025-06-01T00:00:00Z

As the Australian Election Day approached in 2025, you could see a troubling cultural shift: the rise of the "I got mine" ideology, where individualism has overtaken community values and empathy. This mindset, accelerated by COVID-19 isolation, has eroded social norms, fractured our collective identity, and threatens the ideals of a democratic society – presenting us with a critical choice between continuing down this path of atomised self-interest or rebuilding our sense of shared purpose and responsibility.

We survived the 2025 Elections here in Australia and decided to vote in our incumbent Labor government for another term. What surprised everyone was the massive swing towards the government, turning around a trend that only a couple of months ago had them in a losing position. This bodes well for what I wanted to write about in this post.

The election made the rise of the "I got mine" ideology in Australia clear throughout its course. This phenomenon extends beyond our borders and is visible in countries like the US, and I see it as a direct consequence of the post-COVID-19 world, stemming from the physical isolation we all experienced during the pandemic.

During lockdowns, we retreated into our smallest social units — literally whoever we were living with at that time. Families, reconfigured households, or sometimes in complete isolation. This prolonged separation rewired our social behaviours in profound ways. One manifestation is the culture wars, where opinions and feelings compete with facts, both of which are now treated as carrying equal weight.

The more damaging outcome has been an eruption of selfishness. We've lost our sense of community and group identity. It seems only minority groups – like LGBTQI+ communities and people of colour – have managed to maintain any real semblance of collective culture and community throughout this period. ^[1]

Even communities built on deep, extended family relationships have been transformed by their inability to gather and connect during COVID. The result is a hardened individualism that trumps collective well-being.

This "I Got Mine" attitude now defines our cultural norms. Basic concepts of community, politeness, and social etiquette have essentially vanished. Behaviours that would have been unacceptable five years ago are now commonplace and unchallenged.

I've generally avoided confronting this shift, letting things slide to maintain some semblance of civility. However, what was once coded or subtle wrongdoing has become overt – akin to an open sewer running through our society. As long as the filth isn't directly in your home, there's a tacit acceptance that it's fine to flow freely through our public spaces.

The alternative is to build proper infrastructure – both literal and metaphorical. We need to acknowledge that conflict and disagreement will occur, but we can channel them constructively through social norms, etiquette, and mutual respect. These aren't superficial niceties but essential tools that allow us to coexist without constant confrontation with society's worst elements.

Reflecting on what constitutes civilisation, I realised that society began to flourish when we secured our basic needs sustainably. When we weren't constantly struggling for survival, we developed language, art, and communal structures. Civilisation scaled up as we found ways to support larger groups in meeting their collective needs.

But we're now regressing from that civilisational model. The fundamental concept of being "civilised" – living respectfully together and engaging in good-faith dialogue – has deteriorated. Conversations have become combative rather than collaborative. We engage in dualities of monologue rather than dialogue. The primacy of "my lived experience" now trumps facts, collective understanding, and even specialised expertise.

This "I Got Mine" ideology fundamentally undermines democracy and society because it rejects the notion that we're part of something larger than ourselves. It atomises everything into isolated individual perspectives, promoting the dangerous illusion that our beliefs and actions have no consequences for others.

Consider our response to climate change: we purchase petrol-guzzling vehicles while claiming to care about environmental preservation. We want pristine nature for our recreation but refuse to make personal sacrifices to preserve it. This hypocrisy epitomises the "I got mine" mentality.

This mindset has thoroughly infiltrated our politics, which should fundamentally be about collective action and shared values. Instead, political discourse now revolves almost exclusively around individual benefits – tax cuts and personal advantage rather than collective welfare and social safety nets.

We see almost no meaningful discussion about building future infrastructure or addressing systemic challenges, such as climate change and Indigenous health outcomes. The proper role of government should be creating systems and structures for tomorrow's society, but we can't even begin those conversations because our atomised worldview prevents thinking collectively. Our political discourse actively avoids these essential topics.

Here's my proposition: we can create something better even if it doesn't currently exist. Politics today lacks imagination – people assume there's a fixed game with established rules that can't be changed.

While figures like Trump demonstrate how to disrupt existing systems, we need disruption that unifies rather than divides. Politics should function as a contest of ideas, visions, and futures focused on systemic change rather than individual benefit. We need to shift from measuring success through individualised polling to evaluating collective progress and shared outcomes. The reality of democracy is that it is a popularity contest! The ideas with the most appeal win.

We've lost our sense of "we", what we should collectively prioritise, and how we should approach challenges together. My vision for future politics is to elevate discourse to the societal level, with each level of government addressing appropriate scopes of community needs. Federal politics should focus on national issues and broad collective action, rather than micromanaging individual concerns that are better suited to local governance.

I've long been disillusioned with politics, but I'm beginning to recognise that I dislike what it has become, not what it could be. In saying that, I may need to engage more deeply – not just to better understand the system but to actively work toward transforming it into something that serves our collective future.

There is a link, of course, to the exclusionary measures imposed on generations of minorities and the decay we see around us today. The terrible desire to "other" has grown to become so toxic that the other is everyone but ourselves! ↩︎

Why I Write

2025-05-19T00:00:00Z

Inspired by Lee Skallerup Bessette, this post explores why I write.

Early on, I wrote a piece I don’t think in words, which helped me express something about how my mind works. Writing is about finding the words; it’s an act of translation from something ephemeral and felt into something communicable and concrete. I can never transmit my mind or let anyone peek inside, but writing allows for some kind of proxy. It’s a translation from one “language” into another, more real and shared.

In terms of how my mind works, it's… spacial. It has depth and distance, volume and mass. Ideas often occupy space, allowing me to “see” them as galaxies and nebulas. When I get a new idea, it feels more like two stars colliding and forming something new. There is a flash, there’s an epiphany and a bolt from the sky.

Thinking feels good.

Writing is more challenging. It’s more like refining ore - it’s dirty and difficult trying to extract what’s of value from the stone that encases it. While thinking feels like I’m dealing with light, writing is like dirt. It’s damp, solid and heavy. It’s not clay or bricks; it lacks adhesive characteristics to be structural. You can shape it, but it’s weak and falls apart. You have to go slow, work with the flow and subsidence until it holds. It's about working in layers instead of shaping it directly.

Writing feels like work, but it’s good work. It’s good labour and toil; I feel better for it, and spending the time crafting what I feel are often unshapely mounds rather than sculpted forms. I feel connected to the soil and something bigger than me. I can see my little mounds, dreaming that they’ll be hills, but knowing that they are more likely to erode into nothing, perhaps discovered sometime in the future by archeologists whose only reading of what’s left is to ask - “Why?”.

Why I write is to seek a balance of sorts. Left only to think I drift off into space, lost and untethered to what’s around me. Writing gives me weight; it's my gravity. It helps keep me grounded and connected. If I cannot translate my thoughts into words, then what is the point? The words have helped me craft a space of my own. A little depression in the shape of myself. Writing has helped me stay grounded and connect with others. I’m truly in awe of the ability of words to create, sustain and grow friendships, especially across borders and time. Words connect ideas and bridge spaces in this world and connects my mind to something bigger than myself.

April 2025

2025-05-04T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

The start of a new quarter, so I did do a bit of a review on my OKRs, something new for me in 2025. I was a bit inspired by Ben and finally having developed some goals last year I figured let's add another layer of structure to this. My feedback to myself is that I have too many things happening, and have simply planned too much. Rule of One came into my feed when I was going through this process, and it feels pretty on par with where I am at, but I am struggling to really focus on the "One Thing". There is simply so much going on and I've been caught up in it all.

I had a good 10 day break due with Easter and ANZAC day falling in the same week making it simple to take a couple of days off to get a decent break. There were a couple of days at home, mostly in somewhat of a recovery mode, and then Ms A and I hit the road for an epic Easter Road Trip.

This time away was really about people and connections. We spent time with family just hanging out – in a lot of ways, just imprinting on each other and building that initial connection. Two of my cousins had babies we'd not seen, so we got to hang out with the fresh batch of family, which felt great.

Being away from work and worries was also just a plain relief. As the month went on, I felt less and less engaged with the work, and were it not for the people around me, it would be maddening. This post, Experience Doesn't Stack, from Joan Westenburg, hit the nail on the head for what April felt like. Trying to provide input into projects based on 5 years of experience living and breathing the thing, only to be told that I was wrong and hadn't really considered things, felt pretty bad. The break gave me some time to process this and come to the other side, where there is no point in investing effort into anything other than the task at hand. There is a lot of mismanagement due to no responsibility or accountability being in place, and a lack of leadership, or the ability or opportunity to lead, is telling in the kinds of decision-making going on. I don't want to be caught up in all of that anymore, so won't be sticking my head up into that space any more.

This month I got the finishing touches done to our business plan, worked on a name and some branding ideas – which I don't hate, which at this point in time is enough! I'm working on a couple of projects in an attempt to archive the work of my team and myself, something that can survive long-term. I'm building that in 11ty and trying out a few things in terms of add in some CMS capabilities via Tina.

I'll share all of that work in the future.

Events

The road trip was the big event for the month. It was pretty low key, but it was good to spend time with my daughter like that.

Photos

Favourite moments from the month.

Watched

I went back and rewatched Andor S01 in preparation for S02 – it really is the best Star Wars thing to have come out that stands on it's own. I've been getting through Bosch: Legacy, which I enjoy. As a family we watched The Bourne Identity which was a blast from the past. The Super Rugby season is in full swing so that's a lot of my watching time - I will watch every game of the weeked (some just the highlights) - but I love the game. This season has been great – not the same divide between Aussie and Kiwi teams as previously.

Listened

A LOT of podcasts!

The Good Whale
Things Fell Apart
Split Screen - Thrill Seekers
Weird Little Guys

A Value Proposition & Outcomes Focus

2025-04-29T00:00:00Z

Well, the countdown is on for our proposed restructure. They've put out the call for the senior director-level roles, and while it would be nice to think I could do them, I know that in the world of hierarchy that is the modern university – there's not much hope I'd be successful.

What comes from the reorganisation, I can only guess, but I am trying to see things positively and that this might be an opportunity for me to make a move (hopefully in an upwards direction).

So in that vein I've been trying to work on "selling" myself a little more, and in essence, trying to capture what I have done and am capable of doing. Having spent 5 years (6 in August!) in this organisation there are a lot of runs on the board – but if I'm honest not a lot of recognition. I joined the University of Adelaide the week the first online course was due to be finalised and go out - so I jumped straight into a quality assurance role... and very quickly had to define what "quality" meant. Since then, I've signed off on every online course the university has in its fully online degree programs - spanning five postgraduate qualifications and two undergrads. There's also the six MOOC bridging program which was done during COVID lockdown. In all around 100 courses. I've built an amazing team and culture around me and strove to embed truly collaborative process and move beyond the tired templates and transactions that plagues the typical course development approach.

So there's achievements yes... but what is the value I bring? I made things, and I made things happen. Most of my actual work is intangible – working on people's problems, communicating, listening and making plans. I was lucky to come across this toot from Paul Hibbitts^[1], and his framing really helped me focus in on a few things.

Articulating your value proposition
Of course, I was aware of the concept of a value proposition, but I never really considered one for myself. Maybe it's part of the system – the organisation only sees your value as a line item in a spreadsheet – but I hadn't thought much about the actual value I create. What is it that I do that is valuable? Not having a lot of positive feedback over the last few years has been challenging for me. The lack of recognition despite the results of my, and my teams efforts, stems from a change in leadership - those that are around simply inherited a project running well and have no understanding of the effort that went into making it that way.
Focussing on outcomes, not outputs
This was something new for me. For most of my career, I've been focussed on the output – an artefact that at least represents the effort that went in. But outcomes... that was new. It moves a bit into the intangible space, but at the same time, that's what my work has become – being in a more senior role has been less about contributing directly and more about leading and navigating a way through the process.

Crafting a first version

I really struggled to do this by myself. I sat and stared blankly at the screen, looked up formulas and examples and out of a bit of frustration I opened up an AI tool. The generative tools provide some hints but no real direction, they also claimed to not be able to write about me. Perplexity AI on the other hand had no problem, despite my clear Terms of Service, and was happy to spit back some suggestions - referencing my old and new blog, LinkedIn and a few of the websites I've crafted. I didn't hate it – I wasn't a huge fan of the 3rd person and some of the terminology. So I dug in a little, made some amendments.

A Value Proposition

I deliver transformative change to educational practice by seamlessly bridging innovation, pedagogy, and technology to create exceptional learning experiences. As Manager of Educational Design at the University of Adelaide, I led the establishment of the university's online programs. I oversaw the development of all online courses and developed a comprehensive Learning Design System and Quality Assurance Framework that has streamlined development processes while enhancing course quality across multiple disciplines.

Through my leadership, I embedded collaborative learning design practice, enabling the university to move beyond templated development towards adaptable, learner-centred solutions that increase student engagement and success. I consistently lead complex educational projects from inception to successful completion, meticulously planning resource requirements and delivering results on time and within budget. I employ design thinking methodologies to drive sustainable innovation and professionalisation of learning design at scale – empowering learning designers and educators with creative approaches that improve student outcomes while maintaining institutional consistency and efficiency.

I'm not sure if it's quite "there" just yet, and I'm happy to receive feedback, but it is a start.

Outcomes of my work

This was another space where Perplexity did a good job of pulling together a draft. As outcomes, these hold up pretty well and align strongly with some of the feedback I've got recently from team members, past and present.

The outcomes of my work are seen in the professionalisation, scalability, and agility of learning design practices, the empowerment of educators, the enhancement of student experiences, and the fostering of a collaborative, innovative culture within educational institutions.

Professionalisation and Scaling of Learning Design: My initiatives have helped move learning design from artisanal, one-off projects to a scalable, professional practice. This shift enables the university to deliver high-quality, consistent learning experiences at scale while allowing for adaptation, customisation and innovation.

Enhanced Collaboration and Multidisciplinary Integration: My approach unites pedagogy, student experience, and development processes, fostering stronger collaboration between educators, designers, media, and technologists. This multidisciplinary integration leads to more holistic and effective practices and courses.

Empowerment of Educators and Subject Experts: The systems and patterns I have developed provide scaffolding and support for course authors, allowing them to focus on their expertise without being burdened by foundational design and structure. This empowerment results in more authentic and engaging learning experiences.

Improved Student Experience and Engagement: By focusing on the design of the entire learning experience rather than just content delivery, my work ensures that students benefit from thoughtfully sequenced, visually mapped, and contextually relevant learning journeys and constructively aligned courses.

Agility and Continuous Improvement: Leading the implementation of agile methodologies and a design system has enabled significant changes to course development that can now focus on rapid iteration, responsiveness to feedback, and continuous improvement. This outcome ensures that learning design remains adaptive and forward-looking and applies to both processes and learning experiences.

Culture of Innovation: My leadership and emphasis on integrating technology with educational practice have cultivated a culture of innovation within the institution. This culture supports ongoing experimentation, adoption of new pedagogical approaches and development of new technologies and practices.

This little activity has felt worthwhile, just changing perspectives and seeing what it is I bring to the table, especially for recruitment and future roles. I probably need to back to my resume and the other accoutrement required for a few rounds of Expressions of Interest and job applications and align them to these bigger picture concepts.

Also a nice write up that fleshes this out a bit more ↩︎

Easter Road Trip

2025-04-28T00:00:00Z

I just got back from a short vacation with my daughter. We've had a few road trips over the years and they always feel like a really strong bonding time. We listen to podcasts in the car, eat random food, we stop and see the roadside attractions and take in the sites along the way.

With Easter and Anzac Day falling within the same week - it was an easy 10 days off taking off the middle days in the school holiday week. So we set off on Sunday, driving to see my mum, aunt, uncle, cousin from the UK and her brand new baby. There was lots of cuddles and nursing, as well as a chance to catchup on what's been happening in each others worlds.

We then headed down to Melbourne for a few days. There wasn't a lot of planning done about what we would do in Melbourne. Teenagers are tough in trying to coax out some level of interest, and the reality is we have a lot of the same "stuff" in Adelaide. So, we tried a few things that were a little harder to find. That included some American BBQ, a unique Asian dessert, and croissants from a bakery you queue up for. We then explored the streets, riverside and state library. We took in the free exhibition at ACMI too.

The next day, we travelled out to see another cousin of mine and another baby. Ms 13 was in fine form - I don't think I've ever heard her talk as much with adults before - she really came out of her shell and lit up as she took her turn speaking. We then headed to a local pub to see an old friend of mine, met his girlfriend, drank a few beers, ate and competed in the pub trivia - achieving an unexpected 4th.

The next day, we hit the road again, heading towards the Great Ocean Road. It's a remarkable drive through the coast and countryside, hugging the cliffs and beaches and occasionally climbing up into the hills and forests. The weather was fantastic, with some cloud cover, but warm and mostly sunny. We hit the 12 Apostles in the afternoon right when the light was perfect, peaking through the clouds and casting warm afternoon sun on the cliffs. The day ended with a tasty (lip-tinglingly spiced) pizza and with supplies for the next leg secured.

The final leg was back into South Australia, stopping at Mount Gambier to visit the sinkhole and blue lake before heading to the caves at Naracoorte. We then cut across to Kingston and checked in on the Big Lobster before driving home along the Coorong.

The trip was fun and somewhat chaotic. I love spending time with my daughter, and I got to recreate a photo from about 10 years ago - there wasn't anywhere to try and get her on my shoulders, and she was adamant she wasn't getting up there (and I'm not sure how well I could have carried her!). We got to share stories and talk through the things we listened to, whether about the welfare of Killer Whales or the different aspects of the culture wars. I love this not-so-little-anymore human.

Leading through Change

2025-04-03T00:00:00Z

My workplace is set to undergo a mammoth change over the coming months as two universities (UoA and UniSA) become one. This is not my first rodeo when it comes to large-scale change at a university, and I've been thinking about the role of leadership in change management. This is mainly because Change Management has become a formalised process with texts instructing you how to behave and what to do and creating a formulaic way in which Change happens. From my experience, this formula creates more problems than it solves, and it isn't necessarily the right approach. Leaders can (and should!) step in and intervene, not to undermine the process but to enable it to happen, knowing that change is not a simple process. So here's my anti-Change Management approach to leading through change.

Change should be a shared experience.

One of the defining features of formal Change Management processes is their attempt to create "others". This is often along hierarchical lines, management vs workers, but it's also common to create divisions along faction and team lines. Allegiances become weaponised, and any sense of togetherness quickly evaporates.

To counter what is almost an inevitability in any change, leaders have to be part of it. This isn't something happening to specific people, but it's a shared experience. This requires leaders to feel a sense of belonging, that they have to be part of the experience and that means listening, engaging and empathising, but also in acknowledging that this is a problem shared. We have to build trust in each other, or at least define where we need a sense of trust. Leaders should have a sense of solidarity in the process. There should be a clear understanding of what "We" means.

Clearly define what the change is.

More often than not, a formal Change Management process doesn't ever describe what the change actually is. Change Management is more so focussed on the process that it tends to push aside what is actually changing. For example - structural change does not mean jobs or the underlying work is changing, it might just be reporting lines or where people sit. Leaders have to spend time defining the change, because knowing what isn't changing is as helpful to know as what is.

Explore what's possible.

Formal Change Management assumes that by following a defined process ,you'll end up where you want to be. That's a really simplistic way to think about change, but it does allow you to write a book and get paid to deploy the same tactics at every workplace. But let's face it, most team and organisational environments are not simple. Just the fact that they have people involved means they are inherently complex. A better way for Leaders to work is to involve their team in thinking through the challenges. For example, reporting lines are going to be changing - so how could teams and people move more effectively? Getting people involved in the process, gives them an opportunity to tell you what they need in order for change to occur. Don’t just look for “pain points”, look for opportunities. Work on possible scenarios and show people how this could work. Explore what the change can do and think through what you could do rather than just what you have to do.

Address all concerns.

This one is pretty simple. As a Leader you have to listen. If change is going to effect people, then they need to be heard. Even if it is just allowing staff to express their feelings, people deserve the courtesy to be listened to. Not listening and talking through concerns immediately casts you as uncaring and unwilling to share the experience (see above). This doesn't have to be a passive part of the process. You can create a system to work through. For example, using the knowns/unknown framework, just being able to communicate what is known now, what will be addressed later and what you don't know and will need to be escalated for an answer is a good start. Coming into this process proactively with answers points to you being part of the team, and willing to engage with them and what their needs are.

Establish measures.

It's important for change not to be for its own sake, and so Leaders have to define what Successful Change looks like. When it comes to change - survival is not the same as success. Leaders need to be able to make that distinction, and they need to develop clear metrics for a successful change. This provides a goal, something to aim for, something to track progress. Change is a process that happens over time - so you need to provide measurements to demonstrate how far you've come, and where you've been. Wandering directionless in the desert is different to walking a path. Knowing you're 2kms from the finish makes a hell of a difference than not knowing that you are 10kms away.

Any more suggestions? Feel free to post them via the comments below.

High Agency

2025-04-02T00:00:00Z

Somewhat buried in this problematic article, High Agency — In 30 Minutes by George Mack, is a solid idea here around Agency. I'm not a huge fan of the writing style and the armchair psychology used throughout. Some of the explanations, analogies and metaphors leave a lot to be desired - but at the heart of it is something useful.

Mack outlines that there is a Spectrum of Agency, high to low, that tends to inform and elicit certain behaviours and traits. Mack defines these as skills (which I'm not sure they are) and has an odd list of "typical" traits of High Agency people - so I am having to put aside a great deal of this article.

At the heart of it, he describes High Agency as a combination of three distinct things

Clear thinking
Bias to action
Disagreeability

He also suggests that High agency is like a tricycle in that if you remove one of the wheels, it stops working. I tend to agree with the following in terms of how these display a sense of high agency:

If they can't think clearly, they will charge ahead with the first bad plan that pops into their head

If they lack a bias for action, they'll never move their ideas from theory into the real world.

If they aren't disagreeable, they'll quit and conform when someone in authority tells them "No".

The next part about High Agency software and Wilbur Wright is a bit of a bunk for me. So I'll skip to the Low Agency traps - which are essentially the opposite behaviours of High Agency:

Muddy Thinking
Bias to inaction
Agreeability

These traits of Low and High Agency resonate because they're manifest in the work I'm involved in at the moment. A big chunk of the merger involves trying to work with colleagues who come from a different culture and ways of working, and I would say that Agency is a key aspect of the underlying differences between our teams.

I have spent years cultivating a high agency environment within my team, and I have also had that as a key part of my role within the organisation, but at the moment that's not how we're operating. There is an ongoing lack of clarity around our work and no desire to seek clarity. There is little to no action possible because it's all tied to low agentic decision-making processes (everything is decided by a committee that doesn't include our voice or even acknowledge it). Finally, there is no appetite for conflict. We cannot push back on decisions or even raise valid concerns. Any disagreement or dissent is just waved away in favour of agreeability with whatever the status quo so we don't rock the boat.

The takeaway from this article is around the spectrum. It helped me see my current work environment with more clarity, but it has me thinking about agency.

Is it a skill? Is it behaviour? Is it culture? What creates and disables agentic behaviours?

March 2025

2025-04-01T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

The vibe for March was hot and dry. We've been inundated with a burst of hot weather late into the summer this year and a severe lack of rain. The Hills have run dry - anyone on tank water is now out of it, and the garden is looking parched and burnt. I am not a gardener of any sort, so I haven't really tried to do anything with the garden during this period - it's a bit of survival of the fittest. But for that reason, I think I'll have a bit of cleaning up I do once the weather cools down.

I think the heat had a bit to do with my lack of buying into the "Mad March" feeling this year. Sure, all the standard events were on, but it wasn't overly motivated to get out there. Part of that was the "Cost of Living Crisis" now starting to bite. We've had our mortgage at a fixed rate for a few years, and that time is up at the end of the month. We've been trying to budget for that new reality, which has much less discretionary money to spend. It's not as much fun, but it's better for us in the longer term. Every purchase requires a second thought, which has left me with a deep appreciation of how much we already have and how susceptible we are to marketing and hype.

With a bit more time at home I've been trying to get myself more organised. Part of that has been doing a pretty radical cleanup in Obsidian, my second brain. I've let myself be pretty experimental with how I use the tool, having a place to write everything was really the key for me. But it's gotten very unruly in terms of where things live and how it's organised. I've done a bit more work on the Johnny Decimal course – sorting out some other areas of life, and while I haven't got to a point where it's all sorted and working I can see progress. I'm hoping that this work can then drive some other effort this year – basically getting the world around me into a more organised state.

That drive for organisation is probably a result of the ongoing chaos at work. I'm still filling the role of Curriculum and Educational Developer - a pretend-and-only-on-paper role within the curriculum development process for the new university. We're now about 35 weeks into that process, and not once have we actually provided any meaningful feedback into the process. Now things aren't going as well as planned. So, at the moment, I'm having a very solid "See! I told you so!" moment – while also stuck in a system where I cannot change or influence what is happening. That's despite the fact that there is apparently a "continuous improvement" process, which doesn't seem to be very continuous or capable of improving much.

On the bright side, I got brought on to a couple of other projects, which have been more engaging and played to my strengths. One has been outlining the curriculum for a course on entrepreneurship and design thinking, which will form part of six courses that will be part of the Common Core of the new university curriculum. These will be a suite of, for want of a better term, 'Mandatory Electives' - three courses every student must complete at the new university. This stage was working with a large stakeholder group to define what the course should be – aims, goals and course learning outcomes. I enjoyed the deep engagement with a topic I'm really interested in and the collaboration required to get a consensus within the group.

That work has led into now planning out the resourcing and development process for creating these courses. This is something I've come to reflect on as a strength of mine. I've been able to apply my past experiences and the successes I've had in doing this. That success part is something I don't feel I've got a lot of credit or kudos for within the organisation... but every project I've led we've delivered and almost uniformly within the timeframe and budget I developed. I was hoping to do this months ago with the curriculum development but got completely sidelined in that process by. This time though I'm at least at the table. There is a lot to navigate to get anything I have proposed up and running – and then there's the actually doing – but I am hopeful that I can move into this project into the near future.

I've also been working on the initial discussions for the Online unit and what that might look and operate like. It's been another great group to work with, and I heard the stories, experiences, and lessons learned from all sides of both universities. I loved the honesty and the safe space that was created so that we could share not only what worked but what failed and sucked about the process. I did pitch the idea of treating online as a Campus – ensuring you have the right infrastructure, spaces for students, services, and access – and the idea of maintenance and cleaning services as well. There is such a hidden burden when it comes to technology around maintenance, particularly at an institutional level where every system seems to be treated as a one-off purchase, and that's it – "What do you mean there's upkeep?". The reaction from the group and the thinking this enabled was really gratifying.

One final thing I want to add – I wrote a business plan. Not a pretend Business Canvas – I mean a fully fledged 27-page business plan. There's an associated spreadsheet and everything! One of the things I've been working on throughout Q1 2025 is getting this thing together in order to progress developing up a piece of software we created while working at UoA. We tried to develop it internally, but the merger canned that process – so now we're looking at taking what we have and developing as an external business. The commercialisation part of the university is still interested in our product, but in order to progress, we had to have a viable business plan to present to them. It was no mean feat pulling this thing together – but it's done now – just requiring a few added details from the team. We need to work on a name, we have a Project X name for the time being - but I am keen to share more about what we are planning and to work out loud through this process.

Events

To kick off March, I went along to one of the Writers Week sessions hosting a conversation with Kara Swisher, who was on tour promoting her latest book. I've been a long-time listener to the Pivot Podcast and enjoyed the dialogue and conversation between Galloway and Swisher. I get the critique of them as individuals, but in terms of voices outside my bubble, I can handle them and do find some occasional nuggets of wisdom. During the talk Swisher made an off-hand remark about Silicon Valley being a
Mirrortocracy rather than a Meritocracy which did stick with me. Their aim is not to elevate the best, but simply perpetuates the system that brought them to power.

On the following weekend it was off to WOMAD festival for our now traditional Dad and Daughter day. There weren't any huge acts on the Sunday we went and it was warm, so it was kind of nice to just sit and chill and wander around the stages. We watched

Andrew Gurruwiwi Band - A Reggae/Aboriginal fusion band
Bala Desejo - exceptionally good-looking Brazilians doing latin fusion/style hopping
Etran de l'Aïr - Toureg rockers
John Grant - Piano man crooner with fantastic lyrics
Protoje & The Indiggnation - modern reggae - rock guitars
Sun Ra Arkestra - old school jazz vibes
O. – bass saxophone on midi control + drums two-piece
Talisk - Scottish folk/house
TEK TEK Ensemble - Aussie fusion
Yemi Alade - Nigeria's Beyonce
Nils Frahm - Electronic alchemist

Finishing up in the cool of the night chilling out to Nils Frahm was highlight of the event, but I loved seeing the variety of music on offer. I'm glad my daughter gets to experience more than the pop-menu of sterilised top 40 music.

Mrs K and I celebrated 25 years together on St Patrick's Day, so we had a lovely treat on the weekend and headed to the McLaren Vale to the Salopian Inn for an amazing long lunch. I'm still trying to get my head around 25 years, but it's been a fantastic journey together through life so far. It is crazy thinking about our time together and I am getting a flashback sequence similar to the Up! movie (obviously without the dying bit, but am resonating with a grumpier old man being developed!).

Next weekend was pretty chilled and relaxing. For the first time in a long while I actually sat down and read a book - it had paper and everything. A friend lent me their copy of Systems Thinking For Social Change; while I'm very aware of systems thinking, I've never really gone in-depth with it. It was a nice change just to sit and read, something I've been meaning to spend more time doing. The next day Mother-In-Law came to town and we had a great family. dinner down at Henley Beach and were rewarded with a great sunset.

I took a look and had a quick test of an eBike as an alternative for the daily commute and to get a bit more activity baked into daily life that doesn't require the car. We are blessed with trails all around us which I've only explored some of. The quickest way from our place to the city is on the trails through the conservation park, so I tested that out on my hybrid bike, but the seating position and lack of dual suspension made the downhill ride feel a bit precarious. So I've been looking at what they're calling an eBike SUV (namely the Specialized Turbo Tero X and Focus Thron² EQP) as they have mountain bike DNA but some of the luxuries of a commuter (built-in lights, mudguards and pannier rack). I tried out the Specialized and it was impressive just on the flat in terms of feel and comfort. Will have to see what I can find price wise, and also end of trip facilities at the University in order to fit into my daily routine.

Followed this up with a nice family weekend. Spent some time with Ms 13 in the city and went and saw the Viking hoard exhibition on in town. Wrapped up March with an outstanding Chinese feast at

Photos

Watched

Super Rugby Pacific is getting a good run at the moment and we're part way through both Severence and White Lotus. Managed to finish these though:

Reacher Season 3 - I do enjoy the series and the mix of physical violence and whodunnit.
Aguirre, the Wrath of God - Thought I should watch some more of Hertzog's films. This was such an odd movie and exemplifies the real change over time of what acting looks like.

Reading

This month I blogged a lot less, but read a lot more. Here's some recommendations:

The State of the Culture, 2024 actually inspired a blog post Being Broken. I really loved this bringing together of the physical, psychological and technological aspects of life to describe a state that really resonates with me.
Do One Thing - while we're not in an authoritarian state just yet (elections happening in May here in Australia), this simple cause to action was just a nice reminder that we have agency - even if it's to just do one thing.
AI The New Aesthetics of Fascism - lots of very quotable sections within this, with this being great summary of the article's gist – "It's embarrassing, destructive, and looks like shit: AI-generated art is the perfect aesthetic form for the far right."
Subsidiarity - was really nice to read a post from David (who also has an amazing memory and reminded me of Bunya nuts!). This is a great piece that introduced me to subsidiarity, but also to why it's improbable to be something that would happen within Higher Education.
The idea of Learning Maps is interesting - but the article is too theorhetical and lacks any real examples of the process or output. Could be useful to consider when it comes to Learning Design.

Listened

Wrapped up a couple of really good podcasts:

Embedded: Alternate Realities Reporter Zach Mack thinks his dad has gone all in on conspiracy theories, while his father thinks that Zach is the one being brainwashed. This is a really insightful and often painful look at what happens when family members start to live in an alternative reality.
Lucky Boy - Finished off this series about the sexual abuse of a boy by a female teacher. It was interesting to hear the double standard applied to these kinds of actions, but the similarities that sexual abuse has regardless of who it's done by and to.

Being Broken

2025-03-09T00:00:00Z

I read a couple of posts this week that really got into my head. The first was The State of the Culture, 2024. It's a bit of a ride through ideas about Art and Entertainment and the trend for growing entertainment to eat art. It then zooms out and all of a sudden, Distraction is there to eat Entertainment. As a society, we're no longer seeking to be entertained; we're here to be distracted.

The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity.

It's TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, X, Bluesky - and Mastodon and the fediverse too. They're all built not on engagement, connection, conversation or discussion but on distraction via little hits of dopamine.

And what follows behind Distraction?

I was a little stunned when I saw this because it seemed so obvious. It also hit me as I'd been here before. As a smoker, I'd got to the same point - where you do things for Fun, Habit, Distraction and then you're staring at Addiction. It sneaks up over time until you hit that realisation that you are just ... addicted. The only reason you do this thing is because of the addiction, not because it was dangerous or fun, or because it felt good in the morning with a coffee, or because it helped distract you from stress and step outside – now you're just addicted. You do it to feed the addiction, the what seems inescapable draw to just do it.

Until you reach a point where you just can't do it anymore. Until you stop. I got to that point because what smoking was at one point had been greatly diminished. It wasn't like it was, it was shallow and mechanical. And Gioia shows that too... where the dopamine culture has got us, with a massively diminished life experiences across the board.

What I found with smoking was that there was no pleasure anymore. There was no buzz, and so the next part resonated:

The more addicts rely on these stimuli, the less pleasure they receive. At a certain point, this cycle creates anhedonia—the complete absence of enjoyment in an experience supposedly pursued for pleasure.

This is where I feel I am right now. I wrote before of feeling stuck, but maybe that was just a symptom of the addiction, that what used to be good and fun and engaging more deeply just isn't anymore. That social media has become so hollowed out that it's now devoid of pleasure. It's not there now, and maybe it never really was. Or it was, but the whole point wasn't to engage you with art or even entertainment but to distract and addict you.

The article ends with a reference to Dr. Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation, and her suggestion of detoxing. And this is where I feel that pang of recognition. That idea of really truly disengaging makes me deeply uncomfortable. Like when I knew I was truly addicted to the cigarettes because I couldn't stop. Well, not that I couldn't, but that I needed to. There was a point after I acknowledged the addiction that I knew I had to quit. And I'm realising that's where I am with all of this other "stuff".

But this "stuff" is ... well ... everything!

How the fuck did we break everything?

Well, I think it was Covid.

I've felt the aftereffects of COVID-19 on my own life. Moving 1000+ kilometers away from your family and everyone you know right before being sealed off by a global pandemic leaves a few scars. Given its size and scale, it seems logical that everyone else also experienced some of the same effects to some degree.

This paywalled piece from David Wallace-Wells How Covid Remade America talks about the long-term effects Covid had on a nation and how they are playing out now in the US. While Trump 2.0 is one thing, the fact of the matter is that when the lockdowns came, technology was there. At first, it was to express ourselves. Then, to entertain us. Then, to distract us. And then Covid went away, but the habit didn't. It stayed, and the more we sort pleasure from it, the less we got.

Yes, things aren't what they used to be, but maybe part of that is that we are not who we used to be. We're addicts now. Willing to walk past the acts of bastardry we saw as long as it didn't affect us to the point where we were able to do the worst possible things to each other just so we can get another hit. Craving that stimulus, wherever it might come from. Willing to lower our standards and take whatever we can get because we need it now. Feeding the strategy of flooding the zone and responding to everything going on around us because... we're absolutely fucking addicted.

That's how it all broke. That's why we live here now, in all this hate and fear. We're no longer connected to reality, just to the screens, dopamine, habits, and scrolling.

Where we stop, that's when we can start again. By disconnecting from the habit and giving up on our addictions. You can feel that collectively now, a realisation of what we've left behind and turned our backs on. We need to return to place and people, to actual conversations, to talking with each other, and to sharing places.

Where I stop, that's when I can start again.

February 2025

2025-03-03T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

February was the official return to the grind. School was back into swing and work kicked back in as if nothing had changed. The weather was hot this year. We had a few scorchers, with a high of 43º on one day, and still no rain. Our garden looks far from healthy, but at the same time we're not active in it. I've used my last couple of Rostered Days Off ^[1] to start working on a new venture. At the moment we are definitely in side hustle territory, but I have now done a massive chunk of proper business plan and quite a bit of financial details to make it feel more real than before. I'm keen to share more about it in the near future.

At work, I'm still working on pumping out curriculum for the new University. My role is to work with academics as a bit of critical friend to aid them in developing a constructively aligned course, but more than anything, to move the curriculum from tacit that exists within the heads of a few individuals, and make it explicit and shared as part of the new university. Others probably don't see it like that, but it helps me sleep at night and not feel like I have become the Master of Forms.

In addition to that work I've been helping develop one of the six foundational common core courses for the new Adelaide University. These courses form a set of mandatory electives in the new programs, with students needing to complete one of the six courses in each year of their study (3 of the 6). I'm working on one in the domain of entrepreneurship and design thinking, while there are others in Artificial Intelligence, Indigenous Knowledges, Data Science, Ethics and Cultural Competencies. This has been quite a fun project to work on. Essentially, they are going to be massive courses (potentially 2000 enrolled) and are being sold as transformative learning opportunities. Developing an open curriculum for these courses where any student from any program at any year level can participate is a brand new challenge, and designing a conventional curriculum is challenging – and that's what I love. The Challenge! I really wish more of my work was like this.

I also started to working on the new Adelaide University Online section. It seems a bit late, but we are going back to first principles – literally developing the principles for what this whole area should and could look like now and into the future. It's been great to unpack the past and look forward to ways that we can do this into the future.

Events

It was definitely a stay-at-home kind of month, with just a few outings. We are trialling out a new family in preparation of a significant change to our home loan payments. We were smart enough to lock in out interest rate when we got the loan, but there is a time limit on that rate and it's about to hit. So it's time to put some constraints on our spending and keep better track of what we spend it on. A lot of it has been tightening up on outgoings and cancelling subscriptions, but the reality it inflation is just smashing us and everyone with just the standard food/shelter deal.

We did venture out of a colleagues birthday, had friends around for dinner^[2], had an overnight test drive with a Cupra Born^[3], went to an Asian Food Market in the city and got out on the bike. Still feeling I need to kickstart some change, but also trying to be more content with just being where we are and taking some time out to rest and relax.

Photos

Best snaps of the month

Watched

We had a family movie night and watched Twisters which functions perfectly as a stupid family movie. I enjoyed Mr. & Mrs. Smith TV series, which mixed enough intrigue into the action and relatively minor character development. There were some nice gags along the way and interesting easter eggs in the story. Rewatched The A-Team with Ms. 13, and am glad we found something we both enjoyed. Super Rugby has started again for the year, so that's been great to watch. I also finished Paradise, another post-apocalyptic bunker TV show. Not sure why that would be in the Zeitgeist at all but follows Silo and Fallout. This one is set in a billionaire's Bunker that’s been “designed” to create paradise on earth - by replicating suburbia, driving cars and an odd nostalgia for the 90s.

Read

I loved this post from Kin Lane about their dog and how they became such a part of their life's journey. Last year, I had to return from our family holiday after the first night as Frankie had to go to the emergency vet, and how that pang of responsibility hits deep and hard.

What Felt Impossible Became Possible - A bit of a story about George Dale, who campaigned in the 1920s against the Ku Klux Klan. This is a bit of a call to arms against Fascism and a reminder — Fascism always fails.

Listened

I started listening to The Rest is Classified after several recommendations on Mastodon and enjoying the stories so far. I also went back and listened to Bag Man from Rachel Maddow about Spiro Agnew, who I only knew as a headless body in Futurama. Another great historical series, and again, it confirms that it's all just history repeating!

If you have the opportunity, have a look at doing a 9-day fortnight! In an age of stolen wages and overworking, this has been my salvation. ↩︎
this Mexican Shredded Beef was really good, and I enjoyed this Quick Pickled Cabbage and so did 3 other adults and 3 teenagers! ↩︎
I really enjoyed the car and the drive, weighing up the family practicalities of it against it's marked down price ↩︎

AI Idealism

2025-02-18T00:00:00Z

I’m really curious about framing the critique of technology through the Idealist vs Materialist lens, as per Jathan Sadowski. So after listening to another raft of news about AI valuations, I was trying to think about the Idealism of AI – and I’m wondering if they forgot to do the homework.

The early Internet formed around the idea of being the frontier - this new digital world, a chance to reimagine and reinvent everything. Social Media had the idea of connectedness – of sharing, inclusion and global togetherness. While neither lived up to these ideals, there was at least something to graft the hype onto.

With AI, what is the Ideal? I can’t spot it.

Every proposed ideal future feels like a dystopia. Then there are the apocalyptic overtones and alternatives that AI prophets dole out in equal measure. The result is a complete lack of Idealism to drive the hype machine or connect with people’s consciousness (or sub or un consciousness).

There is nothing in the AI futures that inspires, except for the fantasy of some congress of human and machine^[1]. Behind every proposed rosy future has an equivalent Black Mirror where it all goes horribly wrong.

What you hear from AI prophets is an ideal world free from labour and effort, where AI and robots are capable of doing everything. Where all endeavour has become so commoditised, we need to rethink society. It’s also a world where human effort is worthless, and we are unmoored from our place in society and the world. It is a neocolonial state where we the people, become enslaved by the robot masters, that elite sphere of men that control the machines from their underground bunkers. And that’s the ideal?!?

The big sell is that you have no place in the world anymore, that anything that provides you with the slightest piece of worth or value is worthless and easily replaced by the ever-creeping colonial power. You write to make meaning? AI can do that. You draw and create images? AI can do that. It's that world, or the apocalypse. One where the world is destroyed by some paper clip replicating AI, or one that takes control of nuclear missiles and destroys us all because someone misprogrammed the concept of peace and balance in the algorithm.

The ideal of AI is not the one of the early Internet out on the frontier, where you can explore some great expanse. No AI has explored for you and deemed you unworthy. AI does not connect you with world, it provides summaries of it so you don't have to engage and stay isolated and unquestioning. The AI ideal is not one where the person or their experience is valued – it's one where you have no value.

Then there’s the Materialist critique - what can the AI do? Well, so far, it can do parlour tricks. It’s a modern day Mechanical Turk^[2] where, in very specific circumstances, it can generate text (that's closely based on the training data that it ingested) and provide passable responses to a flawed evaluation system. What it’s able to do is trick us into believing that there is an inherent “ability”, as opposed to a statistically "more probable guess". They have fooled us into believing that intelligence is the ability to respond to a prompt correctly^[3] is somehow an equivalent to intelligent behaviour. The only materialist perspective that AI is successful is its ability to delude and fool people into assuming this is anything more than fancy If-This-Then-That programming. That the “chat” window is anything more than fancier command line prompt. That somehow this “industry” is worth hundreds of billions of dollars of investment and expenditure, while the planet fucking burns. That’s the material success of AI – is to somehow want us to accept and invest(!) in this new colonial project where the most likely outcome is financial ruin and environmental collapse.

Epilogue

Look, I get this interest in AI. There are some cool things it enables people to do. Personally, I don’t engage in the kinds of tasks that it’s good at or where outsourcing this kind of labour benefits me. I’ve used AI, and on a few occasions, I’ve benefited from the textual analysis that LLMs are very proficient at doing. Is it Intelligent? No, it’s an app, like the dozen or so I interact with daily, except I have no daily requirement to use it. I don’t find the generative functions helpful or useful - but that’s because I use words to communicate thoughts, and choosing them is part of the cognitive process of thought - not an abstraction away from the thought itself.

I've found the language tools that LLMs provide useful, helping to translate and transpose language. I've seen some fantastic experiments using AI to write code, which is great because, among other things, we lack the language skills to effectively use these big 'ol digital machines and make them do what we want. But none of this is intelligence—it's programming. It's prompt engineering, which is what most of modern computing is anyway.

What exactly do you see when you run it past the idealist and materialist lens? I see ... just another app. I think this is what AI looks like when the sheen rubs off. It's just another technology that could be helpful, if we just used it in how it for what it was developed for and what it can functionally can do. Let's not oversell it.

Which is quite literally the fantasy of having sex with robots so that the transaction can be free of guilt, emotion and commitment ↩︎
No, not the colonialist and non-ironic low paid labour hire service where you pay third world workers a barely subsistence wage to be the “smarts” behind every application and service that has "Smart" baked in. I mean the o.g. man-pretending-to-be-a-robot trick. ↩︎
And the more defined the prompt the “better” it’s able to respond, I mean come on! It's on easy mode and your activating cheat codes at this point. An intelligence would be able, and does, more with less! ↩︎

Catching Up with Critique

2025-02-11T00:00:00Z

We seem to be returning to a cycle of excellent critique about the current wave of tech. As always, Paris Marx is knocking it out of the park with the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast - and I’ve really enjoyed the new weekly chat with Brian Merchant over on System Crash. This week was sans-Paris, but had Cory Doctrow on as a guest host for the week. This was such a good conversation about the week that was and I do really appreciate Cory’s perspective on things.

I've also started to listen to This Machine Kills with Jathan Sadowski and Edward Ongweso Jr.. I came across Jathan's work recently on the Tech Won't Save Us episode and Ed's appearances on Better Offline's coverage of CES. I love their dialogic style, which again isn't necessarily conversational, but more rap battle or consecutive monologues where they riff off each other and spin their own story. If you're up for something with a bit more passion and swearing, Ed Zitron has found his voice in his Better Offline podcast and newsletter Where's Your Ed At.

I also found that Helen Beetham has been recording a podcast, Imperfect Offerings and has two chats with indomitable Audrey Watters. I’ve missed Audrey’s critical voice on tech, but I've always understood her motivation and need to escape it and spend her energy elsewhere. I haven’t been able to get into her Second Breakfast and it's original focus on fitness and fit-tech (but loved hearing her experience of running and feeling good). There is a real return to form in these two episodes - and uneasy recognition of her tagline of the Casandra of Ed Tech (it was all true and more people should have listened!). The dialogue between Audrey and Helen is more in the style of intellectual dialogue, as opposed a straight-up conversation, but there is a warmth and respect between the two that's refreshing as it's not adversarial. There is more rigorous agreement, but they bring together two different perspectives and experiences together to explore with depth and care our current situation. There is The Audrey Watters episode which is then followed by the Second Breakfast x Imperfect Offering #2.

Keeping on the Audrey theme, I also watched her chat with Jim Groom on blogging and writing - and it was a fantastic way to start the week. Hearing her journey into writing, finding and reinventing yourself was really inspiring.

Focus vs Distraction

2025-02-03T00:00:00Z

In January 2024, I started working on the Focus Course. Part of that program involved developing your goals and ways of achieving them. The program gave me a good sense of where I wanted to go in the longer term, but I've struggled with how to actually do what I need to do. I still need to improve my focus.

While part of being focused is having goals to provide direction, focus requires you not to be distracted. Distraction is something that's weighing on me at the moment. Over the last two decades, I've witnessed the world that we live in become one giant distraction machine. Through the proliferation of social media into every daily moment and the atomisation of news, it's challenging to see and find what's important these days and what to focus on.

Filtering to stay focused or even turn off the firehose of distraction isn't as easy as it should be. Work, life, and family all synced with modern technology and life so they are intertwined and tangled in messy ways. Our reality is that life is just dealing with distractions at almost every level – family, house, car, pets, job, school, social commitments, and community. All of these things have a required level of attention which, as a whole, feel just like one distraction after another. With each distraction, it's so hard to see what to do next and this compounds with interest each day.

Over the last week, I've also noticed that distraction is an actual tactic and a strategy inflicted being used on us. Trump and Elon have just released an absolute barrage of shitfuckery (my new favourite term from The Juice Media). The fact Trump comes in with 200 executive orders on day one, each one worse and more heinous than the last, is tactical. Each of these orders impacts countless lives and the functions of families, peoples, and individuals who are being attacked in very direct ways - and there is no way to address every single one. And when we try and focus on one, we are distracted by the other 199 potential attrocities. And then along comes King Twit, who's out there parading Nazi salutes and sieg-heiling around publicly, which just adds to the distraction. And then when he denies it, we get distracted again, but you can see that it's all just a game.

I find all this just incredibly disappointing. This is where we live now.

This is the milieu. This is the environment we are in. This is the river that we're swimming in, full of sludge and shit. I think we just need to acknowledge that this isn't just a coincidence that we've ended up here. This is a specific strategy. This is the outcome of specific actions people have taken. There are people who think this stuff up and engage to make it happen. It is their job, their career, to put us in this place.

Seeing distraction as a tactic has made me more attentive. Now, as I look at what's happening, it feels like I'm living in an Adam Curtis documentary. I can imagine the 80s graphic overlays and stock footage almost as I walk through town and hear whatever next travesty is going on.

The aim is for us to be so caught up in our distractions that we feel paralyzed, unable to act, move, or unite. Finding focus requires us to reduce distractions and reduce the noise. To find quiet. To find some peace. To unplug.

January 2025

2025-02-02T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

I wrote about my January slump, but in general, I feel OK. I feel like I can see the big picture but am lacking focus and details. I attempted to do a bit of life planning while off during the first week – but to be honest I feel like I am spreading myself too thin. I want to go back and plot more things on a timeline of the year to try and have 'focus' seasons, and be a bit more realistic with my time and what I am capable of doing.

Events

The girls had their birthdays. Ms A is now thirteen, which means I have become the parent of a teenager. So far, it's been pretty positive; she's taking a lot more responsibility for herself, has put her hand up to do things around the house, and we had a proper, unprompted conversation about school after her first day at the new school. The new school is a big change for the year. She didn't have a great experience at the closest school to us - so the change is a chance at a new start and it seems to be positive so far. Mrs K took Ms A up to Sydney for her birthday to see her family up that way, and I got to hang with Frankie.

My mum visited for Ms A's birthday and the sleepover party - so we survived that and the next day, went for a morning swim and had a chance encounter with a dolphin who swam by almost within arm's distance! Ms A and I went go-carting which was good fun.

We went and checked out the Chihuly in the Botanic Garden exhibition which was cool - although the highlight for me was watching the little family of grebes that had made their home of a floating nest near one of the artworks. (Also - I love the animal identification system built into iOS that helped with finding out what kind of birds they are!)

We rounded out the last week of month with very hot and dry week. Monday there was a high fire danger day, and after picking the girls up from the airport, there were a lot of sirens and aircraft near us. The SA Alert app warned of a fire in Panorama and that we were to wait for advice. As a precaution, we packed up an emergency bag and waited to see what happened. Fortunately, the fire was under control within the hour.

We then had to deal with the opposite problem - a flood in the laundry! Fortunately, the plumber advised contacting SA Water as we have an easement on the property. they came out pretty quickly, checked the problem and cleared out the blockage (which was on out end but he helped out and worked on it for us).

As a side note - as an event I've also signed up for the #blogging4life happening that's going on.

Photos

Watched

Got through a few movies and some TV during January:

Movies:

Sugarcane - powerful and moving documentary about the aftermath of residential schools.
The Dry - pretty standard mystery, but kind of enjoyed Eric Bana being on screen again.
Birds of Prey - Margot Robbie's duality of Harlequin and Barbie is great. Watched with Ms A.
The Suicide Squad - I enjoyed how stupid and fun this movie is. I love the genre pisstake.

TV:

Say Nothing - great show about the Price sisters in Northern Ireland.
The Day of the Jackal - I really liked this

Listened

A couple of highlights from the month:

How to See Tech Like a Luddite episode of Tech Won't Save us with Jathan Sadowski was so enlightening that I even wrote a post about it, The Luddite & the Mechanic.
This extended run about this vital refugee corridor, The Darien Gap, was very new to me. The reporting is excellent and engaging, but the stories told are heartbreaking.

Read

I need to take a bit more effort to record my reading diet at the moment. Some standout pieces though:

Digital Fracking - Kin does a great job introducing fracking as a metaphor for what is happening across our digital platforms at the moment. I think there is real resonance between the two, especially the unintended and negative consequences - like [lighting your water on fire](https://youtu.be/4LBjSXWQRV8).
Once You're Laid Off, You'll Never Be the Same Again - some thoughts on work. The poignant bit here is the heading "You’re Just a Row in an Excel Table" - which is such an important reminder of how a version of you is seen at the organisational level. It might also be worth noting that you may not even get the dignity of a row and are more likely a division of a single cell. 😢

The Luddite & the Mechanic

2025-01-31T00:00:00Z

I was listening to the Tech Won't Save Us podcast episode with Jathan Sadowski discussing his new book, The Mechanic and the Luddite - A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism. In the podcast, Jathan introduces a few concepts that I found interesting and engaging, even if it was first thing in the morning when I listened.

The first one was around the Idealist versus Materialist forms of analysis and critique. The way it was explained in the podcast, and the way I interpreted it, was the idealistic analysis is like trying to fight fire with fire. In the sense that a lot happening in tech is driven by just hype and ideal future states. They are trying to sell the possible and idealistic because there isn't a material object or real thing to latch on to - just possibilities and potential. So an idealistic critique attacks those same possibilities, proposing alternative ideals and futures.

In contrast, a Materialistic analysis is thinking about how it works, why it works, and what is tangible – like where is the money coming from? Who do the people involved work for? What does the technology actually do (not what do you think it's going to do in the future)?

I hadn’t really thought about critique in this way and that different types of critique and analysis were possible. It prompted some thoughts on the kinds of analysis that I and others in edtech have done and why some critiques resonate with a large audience, and some fall flat. I’m also thinking at some of the more spiteful critiques and critics out there and what kinds of analysis they’re actually engaged in.

The central idea of Jathan's book is the Mechanic and the Luddite. I really liked their use of these perspectives in framing critiques and perspectives of technology.

The Mechanic's perspective is involved in the technical aspects of things. Thinking about and knowing how technology works underpins their approach. Here, the focus is on whether and how the technology works (or doesn't). The critique is more on the nuts and bolts, technical machinery, and approaches embedded in the technology.

Meanwhile, the Luddite's focus is on technology's social and community impacts, thinking about how it affects, changes and shapes society. The Luddite critique wasn't against technology per se but against its impact on people, their welfare and livelihoods and the downstream effects on their communities. Their concerns arose from losing good jobs, good work, and work-from-home privileges – which were hallmarks not just of today's struggles but at the time of the Industrial Revolution.

This is one of those books I'd like to read through and get into these ideas a bit more. Some books cover the essentials in the podcast, but this one seems to go deeper than the introduction to the ideas in the podcast. I hadn't encountered Jathan before, and I liked how he discussed the the idealistic and materialistic analysis side of things. I looked him up and found the This Machine Kills podcast which he does with Edward Ongweso Jr., who I also found great to listen to on the Better Offline podcast's coverage of CES.

One thing I came away with was the ability to contextualise critique with a bit more nuance. It's interesting to think about the work of critics I like, say, the work of Audrey Watters, who I've always loved but can be polarising (although I've never understood why).

Intellectual Outsourcing

2025-01-30T00:00:00Z

I've been trying to connect a few thoughts together to get to this point. I put together a note on what I feel about Outsourcing, which frames my thinking about it as a more general concept, and in doing so, I dug up an old post in which I discussed outsourcing and centralising as typical features organisations use to find "efficiency". In that same way, I've started to see AI implementation as a form and extension of outsourcing.

I feel it’s important to note that the current generation of AI tools available are not “intelligence” but language analysis tools. They are sophisticated and in many ways masquerade as lifelike^[1]. Still, they are not intelligent beyond language analysis. They are not fact machines. They don’t understand concepts or meaning beyond statistical analysis and probability. They are derivative machines, highly capable of simulating thought only because we’ve associated output and product with thinking.

Humans have developed language as a way to communicate thoughts. Language is a way we can share life's intangible aspects alongside various artistic endeavours - from painting to music to dance. The words aren’t the thinking or emotions themselves, they are descriptions of what we experience - attachments and appendages to our lived reality. They express meaning, but the meaning itself is something else, not the language or the words - the meaning is the experience.

As I listen to the latest murmurings about “AI’s” applications, I keep hearing exclamations that have confused the ability to produce language with the ability to think. They are not the same. An ability to recite numbers not correspond with an ability to complete mathematical tasks.

The media have unquestionably fed the hype that AI will be a replacements for people, jobs and entire industries. Yet when we look at what abilities AI currently has its scope and success only goes as far as to demonstrate their statistical ability to generate words correctly to a predefined set of parameters. Sure the accuracy of the words and language chosen is significantly better than previous iterations, but AI isn’t developing the prompt. It’s not creating the parameters or assessing the output or correcting its mistakes. It’s not thinking.

If a job fits those parameters (generate words correctly to a predefined set of parameters), then yes, AI will likely replace it. But if that is the job, the. It probably falls into what David Graeber calls Bullshit Jobs and may actually be of social benefit (or, better an understanding, these jobs are superfluous to society and a waste of resources). Beyond that though - what is it the AI will disrupt?

What I fear is the other “sell” – that these tools will allow us to outsource thinking^[2]. Just imagine a world where you don’t have to think! To some, that is the goal - to outsource thinking completely. The bluff, though, is that they can’t. They can generate words, but there’s a big conflation between that and crafting a story, developing a solution or exploring a dilemma.

In my job, we have been presented with an AI tool to “help” with constructive alignment in courses. The idea is that you feed it learning outcomes, and then it provides you with a grading rubric for the course. The actual results are less than perfect and are mostly unsuitable and unusable because they are filled with errors, misconceptions and conflations. By engaging with the tool, the thinking required to do constructive alignment has been outsourced. The output of a grading rubric is usually the result of thinking about aligning skills, knowledge and activities with evidence of learning, the process of analysis and reflection, consideration of the course as a whole and pulling together expert knowledge and teaching experience. When you hand the production of the artefact to the AI, you have circumvented the thought that goes into the artefact. The content that the AI spits out is thoughtless and usually thoughtless slop, as the prediction of language is not a substitute for the thinking required to properly do constructive alignment. What I’ve found to be helpful in this situation is to avoid the tool altogether and to guide the thinking of alignment through a stepped process. By doing this instead, we have words that are considered and meaningful rather than probable. The rubric is thoughtful, ensuring that it accurately reflects the intentions and expectations of the course.

As a bit of coincidence, Miguel Guhlin posted a link to an interesting study, AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking. It concludes,

"Our research demonstrates a significant negative correlation between the frequent use of AI tools and critical thinking abilities, mediated by the phenomenon of cognitive offloading. This suggests that while AI tools offer undeniable benefits in terms of efficiency and accessibility, they may inadvertently diminish users’ engagement in deep, reflective thinking processes."

My feelings align with this research, but I'd take it further. The only benefits of efficiency and accessibility are in text analysis and generation. If that is not the aim or purpose of the task, then there is no benefit, especially if it is an attempt to outsource or offload thinking.

Built as an interface that resembles a conversation that we interact with and it understands, but in reality, it is an obfuscated command line with a language tool doing what it was made to do - analyse language ↩︎
in a somewhat murky and distant future that could be tomorrow but probably not, because they certainly don't now ↩︎

Outsource & Centralise

2025-01-29T00:00:00Z

I wrote the bulk of this post almost a decade ago as the university I was working at was undergoing a formal review by a consulting firm to propose a restructure aimed at improving “efficiency”. Given that I am in that situation again (the university I am currently working at is merging with another university) and the same consulting firm is managing the process - I thought I’d publish an update. Firstly, to argue about their two pillars, which I predict will form part of their key recommendations for the organisational structure. The other is to make a point that we still don't understand or appreciate knowledge work as being

The playbook for most consulting firms is pretty limited, and most advice they essentially boils down to two things - outsource and centralise. Why? Because it's worked in the past. There are great exemplars of business transformation being achieved through these types of measures. I'm not going to debate that, but what I would suggest is that those examples only occurred when dealing with issues of labour - not knowledge. A business based on manual labour can reduce costs through outsourcing to a cheaper labour market, and centralisation can produce savings at scale. However, labour is a simplified concept that has little to do with many businesses today, especially in my case - a university.

Yes, we require "labour" to function, but that term doesn't reflect what most people within the organisation do. What they do is deal with is people and information. To do this requires understanding, and understanding requires the development of knowledge. So the work our people do looks less like traditional manual labour and more like knowledge work^[1].

With that distinction in mind, let’s look at the concepts of outsourcing and centralisation.

If we Outsourcing knowledge, we lose on many fronts. We lose access to the people who possess it, and we lose it as an organisational asset. We also add a cost to the business. To access outsourced knowledge, we now have to pay for it; the "vendor" of that knowledge knows that and will ensure we pay for it – forever. We also lose the ability for that knowledge to grow, adapt and change. This is a key difference between knowledge and labour - labour has a static value^[2], but knowledge can grow and decline. Knowledge can develop and change organically, but labour can't. So Outsourcing treats knowledge as static, robbing it of its very essence so that it can fit nicely on someone's spreadsheet.

Centralisation also suffers the same fate because it treats knowledge as a static value. The thinking that centralising knowledge into specific units fails to comprehend that knowledge is how we deal with complexity. To deal with complexity, we have to experience it, and through that experience, we learn. Learning is the basis of growing knowledge, not sticking it in a vacuum. Centralisation stifles knowledge creation as it starves it of the nutrients that diversity brings. The differences we encounter is key for learning because it is fundamentally about challenging, changing and reforming models and patterns of thinking. Centralisation, as Taleb might put it, ensures an organisation becomes fragile. It robs it of the ability to grow knowledge, which eventually makes the organisation dumber and less able to adapt to a changing environment.

So, despite what the spreadsheets might say, outsourcing and centralisation significantly harm the organisation as a whole. It adds a cost rather than removes one, ensuring the organisation is less agile and adaptable.

Peter Drucker originally coined the term "Knowledge Worker” way back in his 1959 book The Landmarks of Tomorrow ↩︎
Or at least a more predictable value based on wages and inflation ↩︎

The January Slump

2025-01-27T00:00:00Z

I find January such a rollercoaster month of emotions. The first week is usually spent with family and having a well-needed rest to get over the year that was. At the same time, there's the bulk of 365 days in front of you and a certain level of enthusiasm for making change, taking a fresh start, and getting things done. But once you head back to work and the routine kicks in, you realise, "Hey, this job takes up a lot of time and effort, and I don't feel there's much left over for everything I wanted to do". It starts to weigh you down, even though the sun is shining^[1] and the weather is probably too hot.

I find this time of year is a real motivation slump for me. I really like reading Doug Belshaw's ways of working and how, over the years, he has become more seasonally attuned. I've never thought about it or given it much time and scope, but it's crept into my mind over the last year. I can recognise this slump, the same as the one in winter when we don't have a break and go somewhere warm. It feels odd though, having this feeling in the middle of summer.

I remember Alain de Botton discussing the idea of having time in the calendar for festivals and events and rituals' role in grounding us. This was in relation to what we can learn and borrow from religion in a more secular society. Ritual is one thing that I've spent most of my life avoiding. The rituals of religion were probably the first to drop off, and once the forced timetable of school-based ritual was finished, so was I.

After that, I guess I've just been freestyling, not having any actual rituals, any real structure, just bobbing along, moving from thing to thing. But to be honest, I'm starting to crave structure a bit more, at least wanting to feel more connected to things and having those common rituals and events seem logical for that to occur.

I know a lot of people have work rituals, such as a regular conference that they go to every year. That's been hugely challenging in my role as a professional staff member of a university, as we're not given the same structural perks or opportunities. Funding isn't made available on a recurring basis; it's potluck depending on how the budget looks that year. We tend to have a pool of funds available to a group of staff, so it's unfair to expect that you get the same allocation every single year moving forward while others don't get an opportunity to do any development. At the moment, work is so ad-hoc and unpredictable it's impossible to build any structure or routine there.

So I'm starting to think that with this lack of motivation starting to kick in – I need to do something. I guess January is the only time of year I tend to come to a complete stop. It's perhaps starting the engine again that is the challenge. Stopping is important. It has meaning in itself. That ability to switch off, that ability to sit around and watch the cricket for a day, is really important, not just from the mental side of things but from the physical too. That's probably where I'm feeling it the most, not having that same motivation to head to the gym or head out for a hike – especially in the heat. This, in turn, impacts my mental health, and then the slump kicks in.

Trying to get out requires a kickstart to push past that initial resistance and inertia There's a clip that appears on Reddit fairly often about starting a tractor with a shotgun, and I'm wondering if that is what I need, some short, sharp explosion to get things up and running.

https://youtu.be/eBLlVUc0sEU?si=gsqz7rCCVEmAx3Kc&t=81

Happy to take suggestions.

At least here in Australia. ↩︎

Car Shopping in 2025

2025-01-19T00:00:00Z

We got our family car back in 2012 - the mighty Skoda Octavia RS TDI. Going for a performance diesel was one of the best decisions I have ever made. I got a car that was incredibly fun to drive, had plenty of power, was incredibly efficient for long-distance driving, and had a boot that could take everything thrown at it. I still love the car, but it shows it's 13 years on the planet now. Just before Christmas, we gave it a very thorough service and got new tyres, but it requires a bit more work - replacing some parts in the front end, fixing the AC and a new electrical fault where the power cycles in and out randomly (which I managed to "fix" by pulling out the fuse).

We ran well with just one car, but as the demands increased with a school-aged kid, we got a runabout, a well-priced deal on VW Golf Comfortline. It's super practical, relatively comfortable and does everything well. It also has some work that needs doing.

When both cars started to play up, I decided we needed to have a bit more of a realistic "end-of-life" scenario in place. The plan was to keep the Skoda, given its practicality as a family car and lack of appeal in the second-hand market. While it lacks the mod-cons of carplay and electric seats, it eats the kilometres and will do most of the 1000 kms back to Wagga on a single tank.

I've made it a habit to use our increased use of rental cars when travelling to take the opportunity to test drive other vehicles, especially EVs. So, over the last couple of years, I've driven the Polestar 2, Kia EV6, Tesla Model Y, BMW i4, the ICE BMW X3M, Audi Q2 and Cupra Alteca. I'll include some driving notes at the end of the post^[1].

I want an EV - they are simply nicer cars to drive. That said, the price of EVs has been much higher than their ICE rivals. Pricing has gotten sharper in the last year, so come 2025, an EV is on the cards. While I would love to spend the money on a Polestar 4 with all the extras or a Volvo XC40 (which we have test-driven), we don't have that kind of money. We did a test drive of the EX30 Volvo when it came out, and while I love the car and the interior, there is no way to get any one of us to sit comfortably in the back seat. It made me very sad.

With stiff competition from Chinese EVs coming into the market and another swathe this year, fingers crossed that all brands get pushed to compete more on price. There are a bunch of cars that are more our price range now which we haven't had a chance to see:

A Saturday Drive

On Saturday, the family went window shopping. The plan was to get a sense of the cars (looks, materials, feel and space), consider what mattered to each of us, and create some criteria for assessing them.

MG

We started with the MG, which I had high hopes for as I had seen many of them around. There's a lot around, as their pricing is pretty sharp. That said, the MG4 did not pass the family test. Backseat comfort is key in our family given the size of our offspring, and we rotate who gets back seat duties. While we didn't test drive it - the fit and finish felt off, and there were some weird ergonomics and placement within the cabin. Noticeable issues were getting comfortable in the driving position, and despite being shown the top-of-the-line model... it all looked cheap.

Leapmotors

Next we headed to Leapmotors, a bit of a wild card but on the way to the BYD shop. The new C1 is an SUV, somewhere in the mid-size, but it is pretty big on the outside. On the inside it's impressive. This was on another level in comparison to the MG. The fit and finish were way more impressive, comfortable and almost sumptuous in comparison. My daughter was in heaven – the back seat gets limousine-like levels of space and comfort. The sales guy seemed keen to get us into the car for a drive, so we went out. Driving it felt light and nimble, slightly unnerving because a car this size and weight shouldn't be. All the systems worked, and we warned about all the driving aids (that can be turned off, but maybe not as a default). The speed limit was helpful as the car accelerated gracefully and silently. Although the car's dynamics weren't up to test, it felt pretty capable in the city and during the brief highway stint we did. I doubt this will be a "fun" drive, but in terms of comfort, this was a standout. I was shocked at the end of it. I did not expect that much car and quality of finish for that price point.

Cupra

We then went for lunch and on to Cupra to inspect the Born. This is a car that's recently had a massive discount applied from around $65,000 driveaway (all fees and registration) down to $49,990 – which is how it made it on the list. This seems like a direct replacement for the Golf, it's a small hatchback, but I was surprised at the amount of space available inside. The seats are sporty, comfortable and supportive in the front and back. The new cars have an "interior" pack that removes the middle seat in the back to make it a 4 seater, which, to be honest, is honest. There is ample leg room, the kind I wish the EX30 had, and upfront, it was great too. This one is going in to be booked for a test drive as it wasn't available on the day.

BYD

The final stop of the day was BYD. These are the new go-to Chinese EVs, and I was surprised at the premium feel of the Dolphin and Seal inside. That said - these are the absolute opposite of the Tesla minimalist aesthetic. There are buttons everywhere and a giant rotateable screen. Fit and finish seemed good, but the cars seemed overwhelming on the inside. The sales guy informed us they had no demonstration cars - they've cleared their entire inventory. My pick of the two would probably be the Dolphin. Given its pricing, I had pretty low expectations, but it was pretty good overall in terms of space, features and comfort.

Thoughts

So, at the end of the day, I probably ended up in a very different place than going in. I had thought the MG4 would make a strong case for itself, but we all saw significant drawbacks. The Cupra Born made a massive case for itself given its proximity in price to the MG4 model we were looking at, and having the Cupra badge, I'd say that this could actually be a very fun car to drive. Initially, we were thinking about replacing the VW Golf, but the Leapmotors C1 shook that up. That's a lot of money for the car, and I can see it being a pretty sensible choice. But at the same time, given the money being spent, it might be worth thinking about going bigger and stretching the budget a bit further and replacing the Skoda. Without getting ridiculous, that could include:

Cupra Tavascan
Kia EV5
Smart #3
Ford Mach E

Another option is to look at the second-hand market, but it can be unpredictable, and it is not entirely clear how that relates to leasing options and taxes.

What did come out of the day was some good discussion about what we want out of the car and some criteria to mark them against:

Price - We need to work on our budget a bit more, but essentially a score on how close to our budget the price is.
Rear space: Can we fit in the back, literally? How does it feel in terms of height, width, and leg room?
Rear comfort - Is it comfortable for a long drive? Vents, chargers, cupholders - all necessary to make the trip comfortable. It is good to include seating position (how upright and supportive) as well as seat comfort.
Driver space - How is the space in the driver's seat? Is the seating position good? How is the visibility, reach and access to all the essential bits?
Driver comfort - The big one for me is the seating position and getting in and out. I love a bit of thigh support, so adjustments and memory features score highly.
Passenger space - Probably the same as the rear category but for the front passenger. It can be interesting to see how passengers are treated in some cars.
Passenger comfort - As above.
Range - How far can you go on a charge?
Recharge speed - How quickly can it charge at home and out?
Drive quality - How does it feel to drive? I'm looking for responsiveness of the throttle and brakes, the weight of the steering, the turning circle, and it's fun.
Ride quality - How does the ride feel driving on different surfaces, roads, and conditions? Does it feel like a moon buggy, or can you feel the bumps in your spine?
Build quality - Does everything fit together nicely? Do things look like they're flimsy and going to break? What materials are used, and might they be problematic?
X factor - Does the car do something the others don't? What makes it feel special?
Annoyances – I need to add this one after having struck off a few cars because of their new "nagging" features (dinging incessantly, taking control of things, not letting me take control). It might also be cosmetic and aesthetic.

I plan to weight each criteria and then score each viable option that passes the family test. So, there might be a few updates to come!

Test Drive Notes

With a couple of links to longer reviews I got around to writing.

Car	Notes
Polestar 2	Really great car and driving experience. I love the brand ethos, but its not that cheap, especially the way pricing is done with feature "packs". I didn't love the centre console, but if pricing was better I would easily look past that.
Kia EV6	It does a lot of stuff right, but I felt the interior felt cheap and weird material choices (velour style seats, nope). Also the driving aids drove me up the wall. Never has a machine pinged so incessantly by things I am more than aware of.
Tesla Model Y	I wanted to hate, but it's a great car. Rental was the base battery size, so that was the only issue. I can see why people like the car and the sold so many. But Elon.
BMW i4	Great driving experience, but the battery and efficiency is problematic given the price.
BMW X3M	Great driving experience, felt a lot smaller than the size of the car to drive. Is expensive and thirsty.
Cupra Alteca	Great car - probably the right size for our family trip. Handled 2 adults, an almost-teenager, dog and luggage on very long drives. The downsides were the thirsty petrol engine and the fact that the ride was too firm on bumpy NSW roads.

See table above ↩︎

Mastodon Comments

2025-01-12T00:00:00Z

Around this time last year, I started working on this blog. It was a project I really got my teeth into, and I had a few must-haves. The biggest was that I wanted it to be a static site - just files on a server - with no backend, database, admin, or maintenance required. I also wanted to have the whole thing run on files - markdown in particular - so whatever I wrote was easy to reuse and repurpose but stored and accessed without needing a website or technology to run.

I set up the site using Eleventy (11ty) to do all this. I’d been a Jekyll user before and had encountered a few limitations that 11ty didn’t have. Being built in JavaScript rather than Ruby meant there was a larger community of developers engaged and a lot more portability of code.

One of the missing features of a static site is the lack of Web 2.0 features that enable user-generated content, such as comments. So essentially, the site has been operating as an OG weblog - and I liked that. Just me and some words

Then along comes agent provocateur Jim Groom:

To be honest over the last year I have looked at a few options to add comments but I didn’t find many that didn’t leverage specific publishing systems (Netlify, GitHub) or weren’t a paid for service. Given this site currently costs me the fee for the domain and that’s it - paying for a service is not a cost I will bear. Also, IM not doing this site for clicks or user engagement, the only metric I’m worried about is my output and post count. and while the site currently sits on GitHub Pages given the current rate of enshitification I didn’t want to move away from having the freedom to FTP the site anywhere and point the domain at somewhere new.

So at Jim’s behest, and using it as motivation I resumed my search, but this time I went to the search bar with a specific question – can you use Mastodon for comments?

I started here because I could see that Mastodon and ActivityPub could be an awesome way of combining blogs and interactions into the future. And while my simple 11ty blog wasn’t going to be able to run as an ActivityPub server - it had a lot of what’s needed to connect into that eco system.

And what I found was, Yes! Yes you can use Mastodon for comments. A number of posts discussed how they’d gone about it, were sharing their code - so I thought how hard could it be?

Well surprisingly simple! In about an hour I’d managed to copy the code, integrate, test and style it - and as a version 1.0 I’m very happy.

How does it work?

On my end I copied the code that Casey wrote - his comments template (which includes the js file) and the associated css files for the comments and avatars.

From there I made a couple of tweaks to the variables used - and added those to my template metadata.

commentUsername = your Mastodon name (the first @)
commentHost = your Mastodon host (the second @)
commentId = the Mastodon post ID that refers to the blog post

I tweaked the setup for 11ty - so I've put the comments template as a Partial that I can include in my template and I have the template pull in the comments section only if there is an Mastodon post ID is linked. This was to give me an opt in to comments - some posts I might not want them at all.

I’ve already set up EchoFeed which automatically posts to Mastodon via the sites RSS. So once I've got that post - I can add the idea back into the post and republish. So rather than automatic there is a manual step - but it also gives me the power to opt in and out. Choices are a good thing.

If there is a comment ID attached to the post then the template will pick that up and add the comment template - which all works client side via the Mastodon API:

{%- if commentId | length -%}
  {% include "partials/comments.njk" %} 
{% endif %}

And from my end that's it. I found Fabrizio Musacchio's post which added some other features - an API token so you can get more than 60 replies etc. But I also noted that he's not using his own Mastodon comments on the site... not sure why. I'll keep looking at this and see if any other features might be useful to add and poke around old posts and see which ones to add comments to.

Learning Type Iconography

2025-01-07T00:00:00Z

I wanted to bring the Learning Types to life and give them a more visual identity that extended beyond the colour scheme I've adopted for their use. The process was challenging! I dived into the Noun Project for inspiration and to explore what was on offer. While there are a few icons that I liked, nothing actually fit the bill, and what was there was a mishmash of styles, but rather than move on, I thought to myself — "I can do this", even though I never had.

While I've worked in graphic design I hadn't ever needed to create an icon set. Singular icons and logos, but never a set. So this was new territory, and something creative to get my teeth into, which I really needed.

My journey started with sketching out ideas for each of the learning types: Assimilative, Investigative, Formative, Discursive, Productive, Evaluative, and Social. I wanted to create something visual that conveyed the concept and meaning I wanted people to connect with. To be honest, I don't know how well that comes across, but I'm very happy with the result, and for a personal project, that's what counts.

That said, I did want to record what I was going for with each icon, at least for posterity's sake.

I decided to use a line-based style and something that worked at a larger size, as these would never be used for navigation or a user interface. I liked the process of trying to keep things consistent and balanced while providing a quite different visual for each type of learning.

I’ve linked some themes and concepts to visual components used throughout the set of icons to give them some consistency and overlap through a shared visual language.

Circles – I’ve used circles to convey where knowledge lies. In some cases, they represent individuals; in others, they represent spaces.
Dots - These represent knowledge. In some cases, it is the knowledge that individuals already possess - and so is shaped by that; in other cases, it resides within the space.
Diagonals Represent the space for learning, often indicating where it occurs. I like the sense of movement and activity these provide, which helps capture the dynamic nature of learning.

The Icons

Assimilative

The aim was to capture the merging of new information with what already exists. The crossover point, the diagonal lines, was key to trying to capture the process of assimilation of new information with existing knowledge.

Investigative

Here, I wanted to capture the act of seeking and finding, so this icon was formed by trying to convey possibilities and pathways. While there is a defined path, there are also options to explore.

Formative

I wanted to capture the idea of taking oneself into a new space. Sure, there is a blank canvas there, but also a sense of wholeness moving into it. We take what we are and know into something new through the act of trying.

Discursive

The point here was about sharing perspectives. The circles here are the individual - opposites to each other but share the same conversation and discussion in the centre - the vertical lines.

Productive

This one is obvious, but making and growing something is how I envision this kind of learning. Growing from the seed of knowledge already developed, the learning comes from the branching and unfurling of new leaves.

Evaluative

This kind of learning is focused on feedback and reflection, so the imagery tries to do that by comparing two states. Rather than going for a tickbox, the idea here was to capture change - not correctness and to illustrate that through a reflection of the two states.

Social

In this icon, I wanted to visualise a shared learning space and that the knowledge exists within the space rather than the individual. Here, the crosses represent individuals with different orientations and perspectives, but they each contribute to the shared and accessible knowledge at the centre.

A Review of 2024

2025-01-07T00:00:00Z

In 2024, I did something different. After a lot of walking and pondering, I sat down and wrote out my values and goals. I hadn't done that before, so it was new and challenging. Honestly, I'd 'achieved' all the things I had set out to do in my youth (job, family, house, material things), and I was floundering.

After a lot of soul-searching and reworking, I came to the point where I could confidently state that my two values boiled down to Understanding and Independence. I also wrote up a mission statement to contextualise those values into a way of doing and being:

The world is complex, but I seek to understand it. That means moving, changing and being dynamic. Life is experiential. I want to see the world — walk it, taste it, see it. I will be accountable for my actions, seek to tread softly and make choices that are good. I want the world to learn, starting with myself, then my family and those I can touch. Through learning, I can create opportunities for understanding, compassion and friendship. I want to have independence and help others achieve it so that we can live openly and honestly, being true to ourselves.

It's almost a year from that work, which included a plan for the year and setting some goals, so I figure I better hold myself to some account. I worked on the premise of having six areas of life and setting a long-term vision for each, as well as a 5-year and 1-year goal to aim for. This worked great in giving me a direction for where life was heading, and I felt a lot more focused throughout the year - things were happening, and I was moving towards something significant for once.

But let's review the specifics:

1. Career

Start experimenting with my own business. See where I can create value and a reputation. Look at passive and active incomes.

I think in this I made some good ground here. I got myself a couple of websites up and running, including learning-types.com, patternlearning.co and overhauled learning-patterns.com. I even found time to be creative and create some alternative logos for the university. I presented them at several conferences and got some constructive and encouraging feedback. In terms of income - well from an active space there are workshops that I can run and I plan on getting a half-day, full-day and a design sprint model up and running in the new year. I got a good taste and I am keen to keep going.

2. Relationships

Connect with new people by exploring new social spaces and opportunities.

Probably not the biggest gain, but some progress. I carved out some time in the week to be more social and did a few events with different people throughout the year. It's challenging to make new friends in your 40s, but I think just operating in more social spaces is enough. I do hope in the new year that some more travel and getting outside of my comfort zone might help.

3. Physical Health

Loose weight, low carb eating, keep exercising and sweat

Eating habits have changed quite a bit this year so I'm happy with that. I am walking everyday with the dog but have sucked at getting the sweat count up. I had a massive lull during winter and I need to look at how to counter that — I think I was also sick for about a week and that really knocked the momentum I had. The weight is a bit of a yo-yo — it's gone down and up, mostly down for the moment (which is good) but I need to work at it more.

4. Inner-Personal

Build on my international network. Participate and reach out to people.

Not too bad. I caught up with Alan, Kate, Grant, Lindy, Julie and a few others during the year, and it was good for the soul. I need to make more of an effort - and go back to doing some Zoom sessions. I wonder about podcasting as a motivator to reach out and reconnect, and there is also a plan for an overseas trip in 2025, which will force me to contact people.

5. Finances

Start a new business bringing in new income.

I made $0 new dollars this year from anything I did. I never really got the momentum behind me to get the workshops out to the public and start looking for paid gigs. The job got in the way, not necessarily with extra hours but by dominating my headspace. I need to work on this some more and create more space for myself and my career goals.

6. Rest & Recreation

To let go of control. Create space and margin by not extending myself. To take time out for me.

Hmmmm. This is a tricky one as there are aspects and periods where this has been true, but I don't think I nailed this one. Control is certainly something I struggled with, and while I lived with its loss in many ways this year in my job, I don't think I went along with it willingly. In fact, up until the last week or so, I actively fought against it.

A retrospective

Some quick notes using our work retro format:

Keep

Walking the dog and doing big walks on the weekend.
Walking and talking out ideas has been great and made me more productive.
Weekly notes because daily is too much for me.
Planning and thinking of the future and being in a mindset to think about it is important.
Finding ways to be creative and making stuf, because I need an outlet I control.

Stop

Falling off the wagon with hard exercise, be consistent all the time.
Caring about the job and the organisation - it's not reciprocated in any way.
Wasting time on Reddit - has not been helpful.
Subscribing to stuff. Find stuff first and not scroll endlessly.
Double screening - the phone has to go away.

Start

Planning more rigorously. When I planned, I was better.
OKRs - Be more constructive and accountable to myself and my planning.
Watching movies more often and appreciate the escape.
Manage my time better - lets not waste it, and direct it towards where I need it.

Change

Have more than one exercise to do. When winter comes, have a fallback.
Find a group to join and find a non-digital creative outlet to expand my options and create opportunities.
Bring the family along – I can't do it alone.

AI says tomato but you mean potato

2025-01-05T00:00:00Z

The fact that AI has become an inescapable component of daily discourse, news, and debate has been wreaking havoc on my sanity over the last year.

What’s become apparent is that by adopting the term AI, Sam Altman and his contemporaries have intentionally muddied the waters when it comes to what’s imagined vs what’s happening.

I am a bit of a stickler for definitions, mostly because if you want to socialise ideas, discuss them, and collaborate on them, you need to be on the same page. You need to have a shared understanding of what you’re attempting to discuss so that you don’t talk past each other, conflate ideas, or have clear boundaries for discussion.

That’s certainly what’s needed regarding AI because, right now, every discussion, think piece, critique, report, and press release has an entirely different interpretation of what AI is and what it means.

AI is used as a container word - a useful tool in language that captures a broader concept - like traffic. What is traffic exactly? You know it as a concept, but you can’t discuss traffic in and of itself - you have to break it down into the many things it contains – from cars, pedestrians, people movement, flow, signage, signals and infrastructure.

The difference between traffic and AI is that traffic has known components. The things the word contains are properly defined and can be discussed. That’s not the case with AI. What’s inside the container is an absolute mess of concepts and ideas that lack shared understanding and definitions.

What do you mean when you say AI?

Are you referencing Large Language Models? The software? Applications, Intelligence as a process or philosophy? Reasoning? Labour? Algorithms? Copyright? Machine learning? Hardware? Probability? Mathematics? Chat interfaces? Image recognition? All or none of the above? Do the people involved in the reporting, decisions and discussions about AI have any knowledge as to what any of these components are or what they mean?

The term AI has been colonised as an integral part of the hype cycle required for VC firms to dupe people out of their money and transfer more wealth to the 1%. AI as a concept has been enshittified right out of the gates. If we want to have proper conversations about it, we need to break away from the container and start talking about what’s inside, including the nuances and differences between the tomatoes and the potatoes. Because swapping out the tomatoes for potatoes in a recipe, despite the fact they sound similar, will give you very different results!

2024 - A Wrap

2024-12-31T00:00:00Z

Let's start with some of the highlights:

Tasmania – In April we headed to the Apple Isle to see some friends who also moved from Wagga at about the same time we left. It was a lovely time hanging out with them - especially seeing our girls enter 'besties' mode. They've been friends since daycare, and it was so great to see how quickly and easily they slotted back. Tassie is such a gorgeous place. I'd forgotten how small it all is - only 570,000 people in the state!
Music—There was a bit of a resurgence in music over the year. It started with seeing Mr Bungle, a heat-stress-inducing WOMAD, a new guitar, TISM, and finishing with playing at DaveFest '24. I've been noodling away since we moved to Adelaide, and it was great to actually play with others. It is also the perfect motivation for next year and playing more.
Kitchen – It was a saga and an ordeal, but in the end, we have a kitchen where everything works, everything has its place, and it looks good!
Goals & Direction – I really did start the year off in a worse place than I had. I took all of January off to sort myself out and took the time and effort to work through the Focus Course which helped me find my way. Over the year, it's paid dividends in helping to orient me to what's going on, and I feel like I have more focus on where I need to be.

On the professional side of things:

Learning Types - I focussed some time and effort this year on building out the work around the learning types, which has been underway for a while. I set up the website, made icons, and then started to work on workshops and activities aimed at utilising them in different learning and teaching practices.
OE Global - It was a great conference full of international participants. I got to present my work on a Learning Design System and catchup with Alan and Grant - and enjoy some Queensland humidity.
Career not Job - One of the things that came out of the Focus Course was detangling my career from my job. They aren't the same thing and often don't align. The job is something you get paid for, but your career is something you pursue that gives you value. I assumed they were one and the same and linked them together, so when the job was going pear-shaped, so too was my career. In retrospect, I was putting too much into my job and not enough into my career. That was something good to come to terms with this year.

Growth and Change

In reflection, this was a year of personal growth and change. I finished last year on a downer, but this year, I've been on the up. I've made steady progress on embedding and changing practices around how I live and do things. There have been plenty of external changes and chaos, but I've felt more equipped to face them.

I felt good about exploring my creative side this year – designing, making, and playing. I know I need to balance working and consuming with creating and producing output. Getting that balance right is always tricky, particularly when things get tough, but I know working towards it is important for my mental and physical health.

Merger, Merger, Merger

This year, my work was almost exclusively focused on the merger (the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia are merging into Adelaide University). I've really tried to influence things positively but have struggled with the organisation's hierarchical nature and how it's been structured for this change. The lack of collaboration has been telling, and trying to move away from a deeply collaborative model of work to a ... whatever you want to call what is happening... has not gone well for me.

I could have had far more of a positive impact had I been able to influence decisions along the way. Instead, we are now stuck with a complete mess (one that I did predict and have been trying ever so hard not to say, "I told you so"). I've been neutered as a manager and am unable to really support my team through the process, although some how that's still an expectation despite not being able to adjust anything about how they work other than approving leave.

I am wondering if 2025 will be the year that a some industrial action takes place. There is a lot going on and a lot expected to happen in the coming year. If I'm honest, I'm kind of looking forward to the fireworks.

Wrapping Up

This year ended with the completion of a pretty big project. Over three years of work went into planning, establishing, designing, developing, and creating two fully online programs. I saw my team expand from two to six and faced the many, many challenges involved in creating courses on a strict timeline and short timeframe—not once or twice, but 38 times.

From my career perspective, pulling everything together has been rewarding. I've grown into managing and developing a team, making good products, and stepping away from the doing side of things to take on a management role.

From a job perspective, it's not gone the way I had hoped for most of the time. I've never had any recognition of the work that went into making this a success. I've not formed part of anyone's strategic planning, in most cases, completely ignored and overlooked. There's been no progression of the role nor support for growth - despite being here for 5 years.

This incompatibility between career and job has forced me to spend a lot of the year contemplating if the two match up in any way, shape or form. With the way things have gone with the merger, they have only diverged more and more. So at the end of the year - despite wrapping up the biggest and longest project that I have worked on (from start to the very fucking finish) - it's felt completely underwhelming.

My People

With all that said - I love who I work with.

I love my team (in all its various iterations).

I work with a bunch of talented and good people. I love that they challenge me. I love that they see the world differently. I love that they bring themselves to work. I love that they feel comfortable to be themselves. I love being in a room, shooting the shit, but also working through some horrendously complex situations together. There is a great sense of camaraderie, which probably comes from shared trauma, but it is good to go to work and connect with these people. I found my people.

In this video, I spoke a bit about the people aspect of my work. It was all off the top of my head in an interview style - but I think it got to the point really well.

Getting the right group of people together and creating an environment that fosters collaboration - that's when the magic happens.

https://youtu.be/lhXJx7BUwf0

December 2024

2024-12-31T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

It definitely felt like the end of the year, and I was pretty low on energy throughout December. There were many social events leading into Christmas, and I spent almost a week with my family over Christmas. At the end of it, I feel a bit peopled out!

Work got increasingly messy as roles, outputs, and responsibilities all came crashing into each other because no one (in charge) had the foresight to plan any of this. I ended up everywhere and nowhere and spent the vast majority of my time in meetings about work, rather than doing any of it.

Events

There were some great social events in the lead-up to Christmas, and I needed the distraction. There was a lot of drinking and merriment along the way.

A big one for me was my friend Dave's 50th birthday. Rather than a standard party, his family organised a gig to play his favourite songs. The band consisted of his kids, Ben and Nick, and “special guests.” DaveFest 2024 was a great night out, and as one of the invited special guests, I had to learn six songs to play—only two of which I was familiar with. It was great to get up and perform - something I have not done for sooooo long.

It was also the last month of having an old friend in town. It's been great having a close old friend in town and getting to hangout on a regular basis. I am going to miss shooting the shit and debrief about work and life - but glad it was a thing for a while. We headed out on a couple of drives during December - down the Fleurieu and over to Yorke Peninsula to see some of the sights.

Spent some nice time outdoors despite some of the hotter days. Got to see my first "shark spotting" with a plane overhead circling what must have been a large shark just off the beach I was walking on (not swimming).

Christmas was nice - loud and crazy with all of the nieces in fine form. We went back to Wagga - or, more correctly The Rock - where my sister now lives. We travelled via Mildura on both legs as we took Frankie with us and found a pet-friendly hotel on the way. I enjoyed stopping off in Gol Gol (the NSW side of the river) and being close to the water. I got the chance to catchup up with Ben and Rob from the good 'ol days.

Photos

Watched

I got through Black Doves and Dune Prophecy. I'm not sure I'd recommend them, but they were OK. I watched Birds of Prey with Ms. A, which was good fun.

Listened

Got my podcasts on while away and really enjoyed the Motor Doping saga of Ghost in the Machine and the social commentary of The English Disease. While at first, I thought football hooliganism would be interesting in itself, I loved where this series went - more into the class structures, social issues and misogyny that are deeply engrained in the violence and prevalence of the sub-culture.

2024 and what I'm using

2024-12-16T00:00:00Z

📨 Mail Client: ~~Mail.app~~ Canary (free) + Outlook (work)

I struggled to find a mail app I liked to use that does the simple things right. I don’t need 100 automations or AI summaries - I want a search that works and finds the email from 6 months ago. Canary does that really well. The interface is simple and easy to use, it has the right functions I want, and I’ve been able to get away with the free plan so far.

✅ To-Do: Obsidian & Things

I’ve spent this year trying to get my shit together and have honestly found most apps wanting. I’ve got a decent thing going in Obsidian, but I did a big GTD dump into Things during the year and I love how it’s all organised. That said, I spent soooo much time in Obsidian that having to go into a different app to manage that seems to get in the way. I’ve found a few plugins recently that might help, as I love the workflow I’ve got in Obsidian at the moment and just need a couple of simple functions for it to be my full-time organisational app.

📖 RSS: Readwise
📑 Read It Later: ~~Pocket~~, ~~Omnivore~~ Readwise

I’m going to lump these two together, and I decided to dump some $s down for Readwise. I’d started the year using Omnivore and enjoyed the annotation features and syncing - and then they shut it down. After a couple of tests, I figured Readwise did everything right - in particular, having an option to voice-generate the article for me.

📜 Word Processing: Obsidian ~~and Word~~

Obsidian has gobbled up word processing for me. I might do a copy and paste into Word at the end, but in terms of writing - Obsidian, hands down.

📊 Spreadsheets: ~~Google Sheets~~ Excel

I haven’t opened any Google tools for the past year. It’s odd, as Google Docs was a previous mainstay, but I guess when you don’t need to collaborate as much or your organisation has shifted to whatever Microsoft offers (Shitpoint?), you don’t need it.

🖥️ Presentations: ~~Powerpoint~~ iA Presenter

A big plus for me this year was going in on iA Presenter. This markdown presentation tool fits my way of working to a tee, allowing me to create, develop and write up my talks quickly and easily. I’ve usually had to swap out to PowerPoint for the delivery format (conferences now lock down the computers to use to avoid all the tech woes), but this, too is pretty simple.

🍴 Meal Planning: Reminders.app

Reminders for a couple of interesting updates this year, one was the ability to create Kanban boards. Creating a simple Backlog and days of the week was easy and a nice way to do this planning.

Hardware

No significant changes, but I have to give an Honorable Mention to my AirPods Pro 2s, which received quite the workout over the last year. See my Podcast Diet and add a healthy dose of audiobooks and plane travel. These bad boys have outperformed anything I’ve ever owned: sound quality and noise cancellation far beyond what you reasonably could expect from such a small package. I hope the next version adds some of the Smart Case features that the Jabra models have, allowing you to plug into a plane's entertainment system and stream the audio to your Pods. Also, I’ve never really got great feedback from the sound quality of calls from my end - I can hear them fine, but sometimes they can’t hear me particularly well would love some control over that.

A Year in Podcasts

2024-12-15T00:00:00Z

Off the back of a couple of good posts from others (Doug Belshaw, Bryan Alexander, Alan Levine & Laura Hilliger), I thought I'd do a bit of a wrap-up of the year in podcasts. My devouring of podcasts was pretty substantial this year. They've been a core part of my media diet for a few years, but this year especially as I've tried to be more active and do more chores around the house - podcasts have been a great companion along the way.

Let's start with the heavy hitters and the regulars from my subscribed list:

Darknet Diaries
I stumbled into this series right at the beginning of the year and consumed the entire catalogue over the first few months of the year. The series has given me a much deeper understanding of cyber security and threats through the stories told and a lot more affection for the work involved in not only breaking in, but keeping people out.
Behind the Bastards
Long time fan, and this year I caught up on the back catalogue and am now up to date. I'm a huge fan of Robert Evans and his style, and I appreciate the care he brings to the topics he tackles. This isn't a read of Wikipedia highlights; these are deep dives into the lives and deeds of some of history's biggest bastards! Recommend: The Kissenger episodes with the Dollop.
Pivot
I've been listening to Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway since the beginning and them as a duo works for me in a way that their solo podcasts don't. I like the vibe and personalities clashing a little. This year though it's got a bit harder to listen to as the bubble of wealth starts to show more and more and you can see a real disconnect between the hosts and the everyday lives of everyone else. I still find the discussion interesting and is the closest I will come to any real 'business' reporting.
The Dollop
Another backlog catchup is complete! I do love the Dollop and the simple premise of the podcast - one comedian reads the story, the other improvises off it. The stories are really good and interesting - although I cannot do any more baseball ones. Recommend: The Reagan episodes with Patton Oswald.
Better Offline
A new podcast with Ed Zitron, in which he goes hard at technology, Ed's critique of tech is pretty no-holds-barred, and I appreciate the honesty and passion. We need more people in this realm attacking the bullshit that represents tech reporting in the media.
Tech Won't Save Us
More critical tech, but Paris Marx leads the charge with a slew of invited guests sharing their expertise. Recommend: Big Tech Won’t Revitalize Indigenous Languages with Keoni Mahelona.
Hard Fork
This is a good example of the 'tech reporting in the media' mentioned above. Casey Newton and Kevin Roose represent the mainstream in this space, with most of the news fuelled by press releases and interviews with whoever needs to get in front of the microphone to schill. I respect them - but their over-positive role in the hype machine is a little concerning.
Search Engine
I've enjoyed P.J. Voight's solo project and the stories he tells. I like that the topic and format is pretty broad and unexpected (I really didn't think I needed to know about getting into an exclusive German dance club) and I've also enjoyed some of the deeper 'less fun' episodes.
If You're Listening
Matt Bevan's If You're Listening has changed over time and for much of this year has been a weekly new update that takes an in-depth look at a specific conflict or issue in the news. We also had a special America's Last Election series within the season. Recommend: I haven't watched the YouTube channel - but it is worth it for the punchy editing and visual layers it brings, like this footage from Iran.
Hemispheric Views
This is the only "guys having a chat" podcast in my feed. I really enjoy the dynamic of these guys and the community they've built around them. Recommend: The Battle of the Defaults and the App Defaults craze it created is a great place to start.

This year, there were also some fabulous series I found incredibly engaging:

The Outlaw Ocean
This podcast opened up an entire world to me - every episode opened my eyes to something new that did, was and is happening out in international waters. Recommend: All of it! All seven episodes.
If Books Could Kill
So technically, this is more episodic, but I found the whole series to be worth the investment in time. Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri have a great dynamic, and the process of deconstructing these 'airport best sellers' is fantastic as it plays down the hype and finds the nugget of truth (if there is one) - and I don't have to go and read these stupid books. Recommend: Given the hype around teens and social media -The Anxious Generation.
SNAFU
Two great series on some hidden stories that exist out there. ABLE ARCHER 83 – The NATO military exercise that almost started a real nuclear war and Medburg – The story of a daring heist that exposed a colossal FBI SNAFU.
Scene On Radio
Another long-running series. I only got through a couple of seasons this year as I find them challenging and deep. These are deep explorations of cultural phenomena, and they challenge beliefs and understanding. Recommend: This year, I tackled Men and Seeing White - I 100% recommend them both.
Long Shadow
This year, Long Shadow covered In Guns We Trust, which was a deep dive into guns and gun culture in America. I still don't entirely understand it, but this series really does try to explain it. As an outsider looking in on America, guns are something I cannot get my head around and this series probably does more to confirm my beliefs than challenge them.
Expanse
I've been reading the books the sci-fi Expanse series, but this is not that. This is just well crafted and made storytelling. Bringing tales from Australia to the forefront and telling them really well. Recommend: The From the Dead season is my favourite - had never heard the story before and it was gripping.
The Coming Storm
Coming into the 2024 US election, Gabriel Gatehouse dives into the Deep State conspiracyland and the absolute craziness that now inhabits the Whitehouse now that Trump is moving in. Be prepared America - it's going to be wild.
Ultra
These two seasons from Rachel Maddow are intense and scary. I had no idea how embedded fascism had become in post-WW2 America, but my god, it was scary, and it never went away. Really engaging storytelling and some truly amazing stories that need to be told.
Things Fell Apart
Season 2 of Jon Ronson's Things Fell Apart is another season of stories from the culture wars. Rather than retell or dive into the current maelstrom, Ronson goes back in time to try and find the original source - the pebble thrown into the pond and caused the ripples we experience today.
Fur and Loathing
I had no idea that one of the largest chemical weapon attacks in US was set off at a Furry convention, hospitalised 19 people and remains unsolved. This is an interesting dive into the world of furry sub-culture and what happened when it was attacked.

November 2024

2024-12-01T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

The job has been busy. I'm representing my colleagues on the new Reference Group for Curriculum Development, and I found out I was co-chairing it as well. In November, I worked across about ten courses, running workshops, developing slide decks, drafting some style recommendations, and building course sites. It was not what I imagined at the start of the year, that's for sure.

Other aspects of work have been a bit dramatic as the process we're working through is starting to unravel under its own weight. I pushed hard early on that the approach wasn't suited for what needed to be done, but higher-ups decided to go with hierarchy over experience, and we're now seeing it officially not working. For example, I, an experienced manager, people leader, and project lead, am now building courses because they won't employ casuals to do that work. And that's because no one set up any systems to capture any data about what work needed to be done, who was doing it, and how much there was. I am sure there is a German word for the situation where schadenfreude includes yourself.

On the other hand, the month ended with some really positive conversations on leadership and the need to change. I hope there is more of that, and that it happens quickly. The idea of doing this for another year is ... schadenfreude?

Clare and I both had some time away from Adelaide — she headed up to Sydney to hang out with her Dad and Sister, so Ms 12 and I had some fun hanging out together. We had our first "family planning" session to work together on what we want to be doing in 2025. The new year is looming, and we will have a teenager starting a new school, so it was good to chat about what that meant, but also what we had as shared goals as a family and how we could work towards them together.

It's November, and I am feeling those strong end-of-year vibes. Although I got close several times this year, I didn't burn myself out. Recognising that has been a win for the year. I am feeling more positive now than I did a year ago. I am hoping to go into 2025 with a plan for the year - rather than recovering for the one just past... so I need to make some time during December for that.

Events

I also got my turn to be away and headed up to Brisbane for the OEGlobal Conference. Old friend Alan Levine was part of the OE Global team putting on the show and I figured I would put in a proposal to share some key aspects of my work. I got to give that presentation, An Open Design System for Learning, on the Thursday and it was great to bring everything together for that session. I've got a lot of value in personally sharing my work, and so this year has seen me take some time out to do that.

The conference was good, but it was surprising that so many of the same issues were present despite the fact that the last time I worked on anything open was probably about seven years ago. The sessions were pretty Library-heavy, as opposed to learning and teaching, which I do understand as a lot of focus has shifted to Open Textbooks and now to Open Journals. I met some really interesting people working on exciting things, so it was a good learning experience.

Brisbane is normally hot and humid at this time of year and it did not disappoint. That said I did enjoy the weather - the lushness that it brings and the absolute joy of watching a thunderstorm (not so much when you're stuck in it!). I do love the skies in Brisbane - they have a drama all to themselves. I also explored a little more of the town this time - heading over to the Valley to hang out with Grant Potter and to Eat Street on the Friday night for some drinks and food. There is one thing that I adore about Queensland, and it is the nighttime culture. It's warm and beautiful and so liveable and pleasant. So it was great to eat, drink and chat those evenings out.

On Saturday, I hired a car and took Alan up into the hinterland. While Brisbane is great — the hinterland is spectacular. We didn't have the weather on our side – our morning was a complete washout as it bucketed with rain. So we drove through it North and then looped back through the Glasshouse mountains in the afternoon.

The following week I went to DDD Adelaide and by the time that was finished my brain was full!

Worth noting that Frankie turned 3 this month as well. It is hard to think back to when he was a puppy, but flicking back through the photos so much has happened. I was never a dog guy, but I've enjoyed having him around, and yeah, I love him - he's very hard not to!

Photos

Watched

I spent the start of the month fully immersed in The Expanse - rewatching the TV series and smashing out another audiobook in the series.

I ended it watching the fat suit glory that is The Penguin. Also viewed Deadpool & Wolverine and Belfast.

Listened

I smashed through the second season of The Coming Storm which was excellent and the fourth season of Expanse on crop circles.

A big fish in a small bowl looking out

2024-11-25T00:00:00Z

The Fishbowl and the Ocean

A few years ago, I ran a fascinating workshop with Joyce Seitzinger and Kim Tairi about being a networked professional. Each of us took turns running different activities, exploring how we thought about ourselves and our networks. It was the kind of workshop where we didn't just facilitate it, but we participated in it.

What stuck in my head from that workshop was the map I made. It wasn't geographic but symbolic. For myself, I drew a picture of a glass fishbowl with a large goldfish in it. The bowl sat atop the ocean. Inside that ocean were all the other things going on in the world.

That's how I felt — a big fish in a small bowl, looking out at the ocean.

There are many reasons for that analogy. One was simply geographic. I lived in a regional city of about 60,000 people in rural Australia. I worked at a University in learning technologies, and my position was unique within the organisation. Over time, I connected with a few others in Australia who were doing similar roles, but it still felt like I was in a very small fishbowl. Through blogging and Twitter, I discovered the ocean—seeing bigger things out there and engaging more broadly.

The thing is, I never ventured into the ocean. I stayed within my fishbowl and looked out. Little snippets of what I said occasionally made it into the ocean; it might attract a little flurry of attention, but it passed.

Moving the Bowl

I haven’t grown out of that analogy. Five years ago, we moved to Adelaide. The move held promise—working at a more prominent and prestigious university—but it’s still a fishbowl. My work has been internally focused, with little external engagement beyond our partners. There was no culture of sharing or publishing our work. At the same time, it didn't sit on a shelf — the work was practical, and my team used it to create our course development process. We were too focused on getting things done and never promoted the broader impact of our work.

This year, I've taken a few of opportunities to start to build that external component out. To put a few things out into the ocean again and see what happens. I started to lob things back out into the ocean and try to work outside of my bowl. I revisited a project I began years ago and built out sites for the learning framework we'd developed using learning types and patterns. It started as something quick and easy for my team, but something I could do with my skillset. Two weeks ago, I presented at the OE Global conference, discussing how these elements fit into a broader learning design system.

The project where we developed and implemented this system has ended. The university is now consumed with the merger between the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia. Despite the marketing promises of co-creation and collaboration, my experience has been hierarchical and exclusionary. The system we built aligns perfectly with merger goals — it isn’t being used. Decision-making remains centralised and opaque, driven by personalities or committees to hide behind. It’s deeply frustrating to see good work sidelined.

Despite my efforts, I’m still in the fishbowl.

The Social Fishbowl

So, I’ve been reflecting on how to make 2025 different. Part of that reflection involves breaking the bowl and moving into the ocean. That prospect is terrifying — the ocean is full of unknowns, predators, and challenges. But it’s also where things thrive and grow. I'm thinking of turtles, salmon, and eels that head out to grow and develop in the sea (and where most of the little ones get eaten!).

Over the past weeks, the mass exodus from X and the hype around platforms like Bluesky have dominated discussions in my social spaces. Mastodon has provided me with a more intimate, algorithm-free space where I and others feel safe to be vulnerable. It feels like a fishbowl in its own way, in that it's not the ocean. It feels safe, calm and small. But the ocean represents a bigger audience and broader connections. The appeal of platforms like BlueSky or the old Twitter was the ability for ideas to make a splash and create waves of engagement. In contrast, fishbowl spaces foster smaller, more personal interactions. While valuable, they lack the reach needed to broaden opportunities — opportunities that are increasingly linked to careers and livelihoods. They also come with dangers — lock-ins, spam, trolls and another Elon.

With Bluesky, I can see the draw of visibility, audience, and connection. Social media in these ocean spaces create moments of frenzy — drops in the ocean that sometimes spark meaningful interactions. Conferences and platforms provide similar opportunities for connection. I see the attraction and why, like moths to a flame, people are drawn. The ocean is as amazing and full of life as it is dangerous.

The Organisational Fishbowl

At the same time, I feel I’ve outgrown the fishbowl of the university and the inertia of deeply hierarchical organisational structures. The politics, hierarchy, and a lack of autonomy have become stifling. I don’t feel in control of myself or my work for the first time in over a decade. The absolute grind of turning up for that every day is demoralising, and it conflicts with my core values of independence and understanding. I've tried to advocate for change and proposed changes to what's going on and contribute to making real change.

Universities have become organisations that seem incapable of meaningful change. They change regularly, but it's never meaningful - just another cycle of centralising or decentralising, restructures that look like the old ones, and unnecessary workforce turnover because the organisation cannot recognise the difference between labour and knowledge. The "change management" process has become a pseudoscience—an empty ritual that justifies pre-made decisions. Universities are institutions of learning that fail to learn themselves. They repeat mistakes, default to hierarchy, and rely on consultants to rationalise their choices. It’s maddening.

Breaking the Bowl

I need to break the glass of my fishbowl and explore the ocean. I can feel the pull of the waves. That’s where I need to be.

An Open Design System for Learning

2024-11-19T00:00:00Z

The conference was on Open Education, and my aim for this presentation was to share the work I have been doing in developing elements of a Design System with the idea of providing it as a start to an open practice for learning designers. It was a 20 minute presentation - so I do glide across a lot and not hit a lot of depth as a result. This is a bit of a test for presentation posts, I'm assessing the value of putting a talk here vs slides. Obviously this has more narrative, but also a bit more effort to pull together. Anyway enjoy and feel free to give me any feedback (contacts at the bottom)!

What is a design system?

To start off, I want to introduce you to Design Systems. They are common in web & graphic design - but not necessarily in other "design" disciplines. I have been leading a team of learning designers for the last few years, and one of the big challenges I've been working on is developing a shared set of practices. A system for how we work. Given that learning design is relatively new as a profession, it made sense to apply something that works in another design discipline to this space.

I really liked this definition from the Interaction Design Foundation:

A design system is a set of standards to manage and scale design. It includes reusable components, design principles and guidelines to achieve consistency and efficiency
— IxDF

What are the benefits?

Developing a system must have some clear benefits, so let's look at them first.

Efficiency

A design approach creates efficiency by reducing decisions and the work involved in making them. If this is your first time working on large projects, it can be difficult to grasp how many decisions need to be made and how many meetings, emails, research, and discussions are required.

Instead of approaching each decision on a one-off basis, design systems provide repeatable solutions to common design problems^[1]. A systems approach to design reduces the number of decisions people must make which also helps to establish more consistent results.

Facilitate collaboration

A design system creates a lingua franca for the team developing the course. Having a language and a vocabulary to speak to one another reduces misunderstandings and talking past each other. When we can speak the same language and be on the same page, we can collaborate more effectively – especially when the work requires a team.

Scalability

Design systems embed the building blocks of design into teams and workflows to create consistent learning experiences, even when a design is distributed among numerous designers and other team members — academics, course authors, media production, and course builders. A shared language and shared components also mean that designs can be quickly developed by those without a huge amount of experience. By empowering the team involved, we can scale the resourcing requirements more appropriately and towards more important and valuable work.

Actionable Data

Once you have components, you can count them. You can see how and for what they are being used and can then assess their contribution to the overall experience. Being able to 'see' what's happening in your course allows you to seek out issues before they go live and, from a diagnostic perspective, understand your pain points.

Design sprints & iteration

A design system allows you to design faster and get more done in a shorter period of time. Ideas can be sketched out and planned faster by using components. A huge benefit of a design system is the ability to adopt a more agile development process, one that focuses on iterative development.

Snowball not Waterfall. Instead of a linear process where we start at the start of a course and end at the end, we have adopted an approach where the work is more focused on building layers of fidelity and information across the whole, rather than focusing on a purely linear and piecemeal approach.

What does a design system look like?

There are three key components involved in a design system.

The first is Principles - the motivations & drivers for your project .
The second is Language - the words & the visual language that you will use across your project.
The third is Components - the more elemental parts of your system. The patterns & styles that you can reuse.

What did we do at the University of Adelaide?

To help explain the use of a design system, let's look at the example through the work I've been focusing on at the university.

Principles

A lot of course development focuses on the resources, the delivery, the teaching, the technology and the tools. But we were a team of learning designers, so it’s probably not a surprise that we wanted to shift our perspective and focus on learning. Our journey started by defining what we wanted the learning experience to look like.

We developed the Adelaide Online Learning Experience^[2]. This framework consisted of five areas we wanted every course to address:

Clear
Contextual
Interactive
Challenging
Personalised

These principles framed our thinking about the courses we wanted to develop. They became embedded in our processes, shaped our ways of working, and drove our decisions. If something didn't align with these principles, it didn't happen.

Language

We then needed to define learning and what it meant to us as a team to ensure that we had a shared approach. What we do in the Education space is related to learning, but it's often in an indirect way. We help create and build resources for learning, assessments of learning, instructions, and activities that promote learning — but at the end of the day, learning is not our domain.

Each person learns in their own way. I found this challenging to get my head around until I was introduced to schema theory - the concept that our brains function as a map of connections.

In that sense, we all develop our own schema, linking information with our perceptions, physicality, locations, relationships, sights, smells, and sounds. Learning is the ability to take new information, concepts, and skills and connect them to our existing schema — to make connections between things and add to our network. To learn, we must form a connection, so learning is the process of creating new connections.

Learning Types

The next step was agreeing on how learning is done — what students do to learn and make connections. Diana Laurillard helped by introducing the concept of Learning Types in her conversational framework, mapping the dialogic relationship between teachers and students. As a team working on asynchronous online courses that didn't really allow this kind of conversation, we needed to adapt these to our circumstances, and we took the opportunity to do so.

Type	Definition
Assimilative	Learning through presented information
Investigative	Learning by seeking information
Formative	Learning by trying
Discursive	Learning by engaging with other perspectives
Productive	Learning by creating artefacts
Evaluative	Learning through feedback
Social	Learning with others

We developed these seven learning types, describing how we form connections in our schema. Finding out the one that works is a challenge that depends as much on the topic as it does the learner. But having these types means that we can talk with our course developers, discuss learning, and find commonalities in our approach.

We paired these types with activities, and this became our shared language. If we wanted to create a specific type of learning - then it was paired with a particular activity for our course developers to complete. This made visible the kinds of work and where the effort is more transparent.

Type	Activity	Definition
Assimilative	Content	Creating information for the student to learn from.
Investigative	External Resources	Curating information for the student to engage with.
Formative	Practice	Providing opportunities for learners to try things out.
Discursive	Discussion	Creating opportunities to share and engage with different perspectives.
Productive	Assessment	Students produce artefacts as evidence of learning.
Evaluative	Review	Creating opportunities to learn from reflection and feedback.
Social	Interactive	Creating opportunities to learn from others.

Example

Activity	Type
1. Introduce a concept via a video	Assimilative
2. An activity where students are asked to find their own example of the concept	Investigative
3. Share it with the group via the discussion board	Social
4. Have a go at trying to summarise the concept into a meme	Productive
5. Share and comment on other's work	Evaluative

Learning Sequences

We immediately noticed that a good learning experience does not consist of a singular learning type but is constructed by combining different learning types and arranging them in a sequence or lesson.

A well-constructed lesson provides multiple connection points and opportunities to connect the lesson to the student's prior knowledge or experience. Because everyone's schema is unique, the more diversity, the greater the chance of creating connections.

Good learning design increases the surface area for learning and the opportunity for connection.

Visual Language

The learning types became an invaluable part of our language system. We associated them with the colour palette here and used that as a visual indicator throughout our workflow – creating a cohesive visual language as well. The colours are used throughout our workflow to help define learning at different stages and levels. Recently, I've added icons to add a visual descriptor of the learning type – but the colours are a feature used throughout our work.

One that works in our planning and whiteboarding stage – in Miro – or via Post-Its

Our homemade development tool that we created to author, manage and measure our entire development process.

Through to our reporting tools - allowing us to see the experience of learning in an unprecedented way.

Components

An essential part of a design system are the components. These reusable elements speed up the process and allow work to be developed more quickly by short-cutting the decision-making process and having some ready-made elements that can be utilised. Components need to be small elements, building blocks and pieces that can be fitted together to form the whole. A common metaphor is atomic design^[3], where there are atoms that form into molecules that make up organisms.

A Pattern Language

The idea of a Pattern Language came from Christopher Alexander, an architect who wanted to empower his clients to define a space's features and functions. He realised that there were common "patterns" that could describe these features and functions and that these patterns could be reused to solve individual design problems.

The value of creating our own “pattern language” of descriptive design elements that can be used and reused across contexts, technologies, modes and modalities of study would be enormous.

No Templates

Templates are the most common approach to developing courses at scale. They can help provide structure, but they do so in a restrictive way. They make the student experience one of repetition, sameness, and conformity, which isn’t the kind of experience we should strive for. Templates are fine for looks and consistency but not the experience or the kinds of engaging learning we want. Templates are the “sausage factory” for learning design, mushing everything together and squeezing it into the same shape.

Our approach was to move far away from the template approach and embrace patterns. The patterns acted more like Lego bricks—pieces that can be recombined and shaped according to the specific needs of the course and discipline.

So, I built a library of common patterns related to each of the Learning Types so that we could help develop and scaffold the creation of activities.

They provide prompts for both the learning designer and the course developer, which can help shortcut the design process and make it participatory. These are grouped according to the learning type or activity and provide a prompt and scaffolding to aid the creation process.

Example Lesson

Using the learning types and patterns together allows us to create rapid prototypes and construct lessons quickly based on the information around the topic and the kinds of learning that suit what we want the students to learn and experience. An example lesson:

Starting off with assimilative learning and provide an Orientation to the concept,
Then, you might want to engage in some investigative learning, so we might ask a Question for students to go away and explore — maybe to find a definition of the concept.
You might bring them back together and provide them with our agreed-to Definition.
You then provide more details about the concept and include an Explanation of how it works in practice.
Then, you want students to put what they have learnt into practice, so give them a Case Study to work through.
Once they've completed that task, they can evaluate their approach to the case and Reflect on how they made their decisions.
This might be a good time to illustrate the concept with an Analogy, something they can relate to.
You will then provide some Instruction on how to use the concept.
It's essential for the students to see how that can happen, so you demonstrate how the concept can be applied using a Worked Example where you walk through applying the concept.
Then next task is for students to go and find their own example of the concept being applied and Share Examples with the class.
They then write up their Observations of what the class found, looking for ideas that are different or unique to theirs.

The lesson design is agnostic to the mode, modality, and technology available, using the learning types and patterns. Because it is structured and formed around learning, this same lesson can be adapted to run face-to-face, online, and using both available low-tech and high-tech tools.

Combining the types and patterns is easy, and you can quickly outline an effective learning sequence. Using that iterative snowball approach might involve choosing the type of learning, assigning a pattern, and creating a couple of dot points. From that, you can iterate and add details as you go and change and evolve the course.

In this example, we have a large connection surface; learners can engage with the concepts in a variety of highly engaging ways. This learning sequence could be easily adapted to run online or in a classroom and tailored to suit the cohort of students you’re working with.

Other components

One of the other components we have in out design system is a Style Guide for our LMS. This helps us know what things will look like in platform and aids the decision making process as well. It's been developed specifically for our LMS and needs - and is the least open part of what we've done. I would recommend exploring some web design systems for inspiration.

Where are we now?

Our system has been embedded into our practices. The Principles, Language and Components support our design process and our collaborations. Three years on, and we have a process that is efficient, collaborative, scalable, data-supported, iterative, and adaptable. We've been able to achieve a lot in that time frame:

Two fully online undergraduate programs consisting of 36 courses
We've worked with more than 50 academic staff
Produced more than 660 videos, 740 interactives and over 2300 images across those courses.
Built over 3000 pages of content and 6084 hours of learning.

We've created some videos covering that work and the processes we've developed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR5PW51ImJI&t=2s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPv_zKrab7k&t=5s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhXJx7BUwf0&t=4s

I've also created site for both the Learning Types and Learning Patterns that are open and available to use:

Our project is now wrapping up and the team is moving into other projects, but I am really proud of what we have created and can see a huge benefit of openly sharing what has worked for us and to seed the idea of a Design System for Learning.

Where to next?

I’ve spent the last couple of months pulling together the types and patterns into resources available online. They are available for you to use - but I am keen to develop this further. If you'd like to incorporate these resources into your own process, or have any discussion on how to do it and what is possible - please get in contact with me via Email or Mastodon.

Thank you.

Based on this article from Contentful. ↩︎
The Adelaide Online Learning Experience was developed to underpin the quality assurance framework used internally at the university. ↩︎
Atomic Design has been broadly adopted in the web design community. It is specific to web design, but the thinking behind how things can be structured and made up of atomic elements is useful. ↩︎

October 2024

2024-11-04T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

I think I'm reeling from how quickly 31 days have passed! The big news — the kitchen is finished. It started the day after my birthday, on July 22nd, and all the jobs were finished on October 22nd. It has been an absolute saga - but it is now done! Everything works. We have a full suite of appliances and plumbing up and running. In between tradies we got motivated and painted the kitchen a new shade of white, so it's looking fresh! I am happy with the result... I just could have done without all of the drama.

While it's been a bit of a month at home, it's felt busy. I've spent a fair amount of time trying to clean up the garden - facing down a mountain of weeds. The sun is back and warm so there's been a few days to get out and enjoy the surroundings with a few nice long walks in Belair National Park and along the coast.

Work has been getting on. My team seem to be doing well, a couple are getting higher duties recently, and a couple have gone for other roles and got them as well. So, the team is going to change a bit. That's OK with me - we're not working as we once did, and to be honest, I expected this to happen.

I am struggling with this "new" way of working. I've gone from leading all aspects of a major project for the last three years to answering emails and helping people fill in paperwork. It's a real letdown, but it is what the job is, not what I am. I've made peace with that this month and started to give less of a fuck the job itself. At the same time, I've got really good feedback from a range of areas of my work - running workshops and working with academics on developing a new curriculum. I've enjoyed aspects of it - but at the same time I feel like I'm stuck in low gear.

The changes with my team have been weird but also a sign of the times. I've been lucky to have a high-performing team and have worked to create that and a collaborative culture, which means my guys are all in demand and capable of stepping up into new roles. There is absolutely no recognition from anyone about what the effort took or how it was created - but we're not a learning organisation.

I finally got the OK to get some videos up on the official university YouTube channel - which I'll share in a different post - and while I had very little to do with them, they capture the team effort we've put into Open Universities Australia programs the last few years.

In other efforts - I've been trying to get my shit together. As usual, at this time of year, everything feels like absolute chaos, but I feel like I've been trying to get my head around everything. I've tried a few things and failed, but I am learning what works. I still feel I am missing an actual routine and something I am in control of, but it's hard to balance all the things in play at once. I am flagging it now as a family task - and for us a unit to work on life in a more structured way, so we'll see how that goes.

Events

Key events that I had nothing to do with were the increase in our clan size with two babies landing in October - Finley and Ellsie. Excited to meet these two humans in the near future!

Mrs K and I went and saw the pre-tour TISM show that was a lunch time gig here in Adelaide. For anyone outside of Australia This Is Serious Mum are legends of the 90s indie scene bridging genres and taking massive hilarious swipes at everyone and every cultural phenomenon in the zeitgeist. In trying to explain them to my daughter it was definitely a feeling of “you had to be there” but I absolutely love them. Worth checking out Old Man River, Whatareya, 5 Yards and this video to get a sense of the band!

Photos

Consumed

I have absolutely smashed the audiobooks from the Expanse Universe - Leviathan Wakes, Caliban's War, Abaddon's Gate and Cibola Burn all done and dusted in the month. I do love the style of these, and they seem made for audiobooks and TV. I've gone back to the show now with that extra bit of knowledge of the characters and plot and have been enjoying it. The casting is great in the show, but some of the changes to the plot I'm not such a big fan of.

There is a recent special series of Tech Won’t Save Us that I do want to call out - Data Vampires. This series is a super engaging look at the growth and impact of hyperscale data centres and their effects on the communities, resources and environments around them. This is hugely relevant given the demands by AI for these systems, and how this contradicts the exact actions we need to be taking to avoid climate collapse.

Probably more interesting was the last episode that introduced me to Nicolas Bostrom’s influential ~~theories~~ fever dreams have completely distorted the discussions possible about AI and technology. In one of those serendipitous events I was also catching up on some saved articles after being forced out of Omnivore and switching things to Readwise. Superintelligenceg from Maciej Cegłowski not only does a great job explaining Bostrom’s thesis, but dismantling it with a simple set of counter arguments. Worth a read.

Finishing

2024-10-20T00:00:00Z

In my career, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing a couple of large-scale projects come to fruition and finish. There’s always hoopla and hype at the beginning that fades pretty quickly once the work begins. But when the project lasts a couple of years, the end is, at best, anticlimactic. Most of the enthusiasm is gone by then. Instead, what gets you to the end is momentum and the ability to work as a team to get you through to the finale. And once you’re there? Not much.

My experience working in large organisations is that despite spending large amounts of money getting a project up and running, they forget the project ends. They fail to celebrate the effort taken to complete the project and that there was a real and tangible outcome to all of that work.

My team and I have come to the end of a three-year project. There are a few thousand hours worth of work wrapped up in what we’ve done, which is to put two full degree programs up online to run in the Open Universities Australia (OUA) marketplace. Each individual course has been designed and developed to be run entirely asynchronously without the need to attend any classes (they are optional), so a lot of content and activities have been created for these courses. They’re incredibly robust, well-designed, and professional. There are so many intricacies in each one of the courses that there are hundreds of examples of good practice, learning design and content authoring.

Knowing how the institution responds to a project drawing to an end, it was really up to us to celebrate what we achieved. The recognition for what we’ve done wasn’t going to come from the organisation, so we needed to celebrate our own efforts. One of the things that I’ve been trying to develop personally is thinking beyond the job and focusing on my career. That means that at the end of this project, the job is technically done, but from a career perspective, we need to make sure that we can reference our work in the future and demonstrate what we did during the project. The team is currently working on this, bringing together a portfolio site that will contain information about all the courses we worked on, with screenshots and case studies covering what we've produced.

The other part of this that we have been able to finish is recording what we've done, utilising the skills across the team to develop three videos. The aim was to try and capture some key elements:

The project overall & innovations behind the scenes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR5PW51ImJI

The design process we developed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPv_zKrab7k

Our reflections on the curriculum design process

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhXJx7BUwf0

I've never made a wrap-up video like this, and I am proud of the result, even though this had little to do with me and was all my team. I actually don't mind being on camera!

The team have now moved on to other work - we are all immersed in developing courses for the "new" university, and the courses will continue to run, but our work developing them is all done and dusted. While we start this project the aim is to pull together our portfolio site when we have time and space.

Trying to capture 3 years of work is a challenge. The videos don't necessarily tell the story of the experience, they allude to it and the challenges we faced, but they don't tell it. They don't cover the trials and failures we encountered, the lessons learnt and applied, the evolving nature of the work and the different approaches we took. The "agile" approach we took that prioritised iteration over perfection, which challenged everyone on the team as nothing was ever done until now, when it is well and truly done. They also don't capture the relationships and how every individual involved grew and changed and adapted to face whatever was coming. At the end of the day it was a human scale effort, that required us to keep that constraint in mind even when the spreadsheets said otherwise. We developed a new design tool, created a best practice approach to course design and development, and all of us came out with new skills and experiences to draw on. I really have loved bringing this team together and managing the project through from it's rocky start through to today.

I lack style

2024-10-07T00:00:00Z

I've spent the last couple of days trying to get myself organised.

I have notes and to-dos everywhere, across apps, accounts, and calendars. I have multiple pending to-dos and priorities. I have shows and series on the go and a desire to consume them all. I have a favourites list, bookmarks, and read-later lists overflowing with content. And I can't make head nor tail of it.

Everything is a priority. And in that space, nothing is.

Everything and nothing is the same.

Yesterday, I was trying to find something I had read by Steph Ango but hadn't recorded somewhere in my notes. While browsing their blog unsuccessful in finding what I was looking for, I read a couple of Steph's small, concise essays. They are deep, considered, and quite beautiful in their own way, similar to a caligrapher's brush.

The latest one What can we remove? and the line sprung out at me.

Systems want to grow and grow, but without pruning, they collapse. Slowly, then spectacularly.

I feel like that's me at the moment. The last week was supposed to be a holiday. It instead just became a week away from work. Things had been getting wound up continually over the last few weeks, more and more piled on, and so this was supposed to be a time to unwind. But instead it snapped back hard.

We spent a day in the car driving to Victoria, having put the dog into the kennel in the morning. The next day I received a frantic phone call from the kennels that Frankie was ill and bleeding everywhere. He needed to get to the vet, it was serious. We were lucky that one of my best friends had moved Adelaide in the last couple of week and was happy to be our emergency contact. I hadn't thought we'd need him straight away. We spent the day mostly panicked rather than relaxing while we waited for news. The next morning I was on a flight home, Frankie couldn't go back to the kennel and we were still unsure as to what was wrong.

By the time I landed the vet had given him the all clear and I could pick him up in the afternoon after they kept him on a drip for fluids and observation. He turned out to be fine, having had the equivalent of a panic attack at the kennels that expressed itself physically. He needed a couple of quiet days but by the middle of the week he was his old self.

So rather than a holiday I had time alone. I was hoping to use it productively - to get things done and do more of all the things. But I didn't.

I watched some TV and spent days in the garden weeding. It is the time of year when it's dry enough to get into the garden before it is overwhelmed with weeds. I listened to an audiobook and resigned myself to joining Frankie in recovery mode. I liked this post from Doug Belshaw about the Four Work Modes, and realised that recovery is what I needed. Novelty had been where I had been operating for quite some time, reactive and scattergun without focus.

Focus. I keep coming back to that - and my lack of it.

There's been too much on. Too much to focus on. My Job and House and Family and Work and Career and Finances and Relationships and Social and Recreation and Health and Spirituality - all the time and all at once.

In the Four Work Modes, Doug pointed out that quadrants differ in terms of Energy and Routine. My Energy has been waning over the last few weeks, having been High at work for some time now. Now I was in Recovery, overstimulated and undernourished. What was missing from my experience was Routine. It's something I have been trying to work on since January but I've found it hard bed one down that works.

I walk the dog 6 out 7 mornings in a week. That's been good, except when the weather disrupts it. That change has been positive. It also doesn't seem to work in terms of making other changes - like going to the gym, trying to do that after a day at work has not happened.

Steph has another post that clicked with me - Style is consistent constraint.

Style emerges from consistency, and having a style opens your imagination. Your mind should be flexible, but your process should be repeatable.

My everyday life lacks style. I've never gone out of my way to define it, but style and routine are missing aspects of me. I have a style when it comes to work, writing, and creating—but not in living. I think this is mostly because I've never given it a thought, just moving through time and space. Similar to January and wanting to define my personal vision, I just hadn't thought about it before. So that's my challenge now. To go and find my style and build out a more positive routine.

September 2024

2024-10-01T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

Another month, huh?!?! Well, it's supposed to be Spring, but I am learning that doesn't translate to immediate warming or a sunny disposition here in Adelaide. According to the Kuarna calendar, we're still in Winter or Kudlila, which runs through July, August, and September. In this period, the earth is washed (kudlinthi), and conditions are windy (wait). That matches! It's hardly been warm, and there seem to have been only a few glimpses of broad sunny days.

At home, we still don't have a fully functional kitchen. I managed to get a local handyman to come in and help fix the floors so we could slide the new fridge into place, and I did move most of the items into the new cupboards and cabinets. The oven and dishwasher are working, but we are still in benchtop limbo, with a date of the 8th of October for them to be fitted. Once they're in, we can finalise the plumbing for the sink and get the cooktop in!

At work — the chaos continues. I've resigned myself to not being in control or able to influence anything any more. It's defeating, but there's no point railing against reality. There have been some good moments working directly with Academics and getting them to rethink some of their existing strategies and assessments. The process is still so focused on individuals that we are missing the opportunity for broader change. I made alternative recommendations (and repeatedly argued for them), but we're continuing with a process that seems wholly inefficient and unsustainable over 18 months - but hey, that's the job.

And that would have been the end, but I did realise that my job is not my career. While they tend to cross over, that's not always the case. So, while I've been getting my work done, I've also been trying to pull together more future-thinking efforts. Back in January, I made it a goal to run a Learning Design workshop, and last Tuesday, I did that at the HERGA Conference here in Adelaide. To get there, I've been working away on a couple of projects - a big refresh of the Learning Patterns website and developing two new ones - Learning Types and Pattern Learning. The idea is to begin a side hustle under the Pattern Learning guise and offer some workshops and consulting options. So, I've put a bit of effort into the branding here - trying to rely on my skills in design and what I can control myself. As Stephen Downes put it,

My first thought on reading this is that this is clever branding. Tim Klapdor writes, "Learning Types is a resource developed to create and share a typology of learning to aid the design and development of engaging learning experiences." We're all familiar with the categories, but I like the (b)right colours and logos.

Yes, that's about right. The branding is important as it links a lot of my work together. The types are linked to the patterns, which will link to the processes I've been working on and developing these workshops to teach. The workshop was just 40 minutes, but it was a good test of what I could cover quickly. I've gone from a 10-minute presentation to a 40-minute workshop in a month and a bit, and I hope to have a full-day workshop by the end of the year.

I also still have a software project in the background that we're hoping to commercialise, but that's not really in my hands to do anything about directly.

The other big event for the month was when one of my best and longest friends moved to town. He and I go back to year 4 in primary school, and it's amazing to have someone close by after five years of being on our own here in Adelaide. It's been great to have someone to hang out with in a way that is just second nature. He's also been there for us during an emergency with Frankie. I was supposed to write this post while relaxing with friends in Victoria, but I'm at home alone with the dog. After a night at the kennels, the staff found him in the morning with blood everywhere. My mate stepped up and got him to the vet and stayed with him there till he was admitted and in their care. After a day of completely freaking out, I flew home the next day and picked him up from the vet. Nothing serious in the end, so we're very relieved and so glad we have a friend like that around!

Photos

A few photos from the month.

Read

Kardashev Street: Planetary energy system changes at street level - Like the way this article framed changing the energy system as a driver for change. We are so far below the potential to just capture what the sun produces, that just upping out solar production would be a game changer for the globe.

Watched

I finished off Season 1 of Silo. It was my second attempt at watching, and I think I was in the right mood this time. This is a slow-burn style of show that builds over time, and while the resemblance to Fallout is undeniable, this is a completely different beast.

Life of Crime 1984-2020 is a documentary that spans almost 35 years of filmed footage. There's no voiceover, it's all told through the protagonists, with occasional questions from the director, Jon Alpert. The film is a sad ride to the bottom for the trio of Freddie, Rob and Deliris. It's heartbreaking to see them struggle and try to redeem themselves and just fail so outright as they destroy themselves over time with drugs. There are patches of light and redemption along the way, moments where it seems like things will change, but ultimately, they are let down. More by a society that writes people off, rather than giving them a hand up, gives them a high five.

Listened

I finished off another season of Scene on Radio - this time Season Three on Men. I do love this show and series - there are so many great moments and stories in there that really dig into men and masculinity. S03E11 - drops this bombshell on shifting from hierarchical thinking to relational - from linear to ecological.

John Biewen: Yeah it just becomes hard to say "I dunno!" The words Terry Real uses to talk about this issue are shame and grandiosity. He says, as a couples therapist, he spends a lot of time trying to help men "come down from" grandiosity, as he puts it. And to make a shift from hierarchical thinking - either I'm winning or l'm losing - to a relational way of being.

Terry Real: When you shift from that dominant hierarchical thinking to relational thinking, you shift from linear thinking to ecological thinking. You're not above the system, you're a humble subcomponent part of the system, you live inside of it, and it's in your interest to keep it clean and healthy.

You are not above the system, you live in it. You are a sub component of it.

Celeste Headlee: Keeping the system clean and healthy. Whether the system you’re talking about is a relationship – say, a marriage – or whether you’re talking about the literal ecosystem.

The delusion of dominance is also important:

Terry Real: The delusion of dominance over the feminine, including Mother Nature, will kill us. Let me be clear about the stakes. If we continue to believe that we are technologists above the rule of nature, nature will prove otherwise. And the consequences will be severe. And they are coming.

In a similar thought-provoking episode of The Informed Life the discission with Michael Becker on Knowledge Work was really interesting. I really liked

“Value is not created in your output. The output is the byproduct of your value.”

I was interested to hear about Micheal when he discussed output software, and how that output shapes your thinking. I found the "shapeless" way of working in software like Miro, Obsidian and Markdown in general really interesting. Markdown for me has been a game changer, especially being able to write and present your ideas from the same document (see iA Presenter which I used for my HERGA presentation). With our software project I am starting to see that this might be crucial for us to get right and move away from a "locked-in" output we're currently working in.

Binged Season 1 and most of Season 2 of SNAFU this month. I love the story and the topics in both seasons. There's a really great movement and you can see the threads of the story being woven in each episode. I also loved the bonus episode discussion with Rachel Maddow about her Ultra series, which is similar in it's "uncovering" of a historical story.

Also SNAFU the acronym = Situation Normal: All Fucked Up. I'll be using that more.

The Serendipity Engine

2024-09-10T00:00:00Z

A few years ago a colleague and I were working on a tool to enable better organisation of groups for learning. The tool ended up being a combination of a simple survey and a couple of unique sorting mechanisms that we developed.

In many cases, we aimed to group 'like' students together based on their answers - their location, area of study interests, etc. But during our discussions, we asked ourselves - what if we wanted to do the opposite? What if instead of grouping like students, we want to go the other way and group students together based on differences? A simple example might be grouping students by their preference for roles in a team, in that instance you would want a variety of roles in each group, not all of the same grouped together. But in other instances, you might group different students to create friction and possibility. That kind of sorting became known as the serendipity engine.

The serendipity engine groups learners in ways that increase the chances of serendipity - of sharing, discovery, connection, conflict - and learning together.

It wasn't a guarantee that anything would happen, but it increased the odds that something unplanned and unstructured would occur.

We aimed to enable group learning to be different and to create engagement by creating opportunities for collaboration, cooperation, sharing, and discussion and for differences to arise through the co-mingling of people and ideas.

By pushing different people towards each other with a shared purpose to produce something, we could create a whole variety of different learning opportunities.

Sometimes, it is through conflict and the creativity required to move past that which is where the real learning opportunity arises. Sometimes, it's in not dealing with the conflict and having to experience some level of disagreement and failure. There are so few real opportunities for us to delve into that process because conflict is one of those things where you have to be in it to learn from it and learn how to cope with it. It's not something you can just read about – it's experiential.

This all came up over the last week as I've been thinking about how serendipity relates to my current work on learning design. I've been developing my ideas around learning types and patterns and planning on running a few workshops on using them for learning design. I aim to get people to think about learning experiences more holistically and to think about moving between different types of learning as ways of engaging with different types of learners.

In many ways, a marker of the success of the learning experience is the variation of learning offered to students because each of these creates opportunities to learn - to engage with different types of students and connect with different ideas, concepts and experiences in their schema.

The aim of our design is to increase the conditions for serendipity.

And rather than fumbling through it, the concepts of learning types and patterns allow us to design for it. Rather than seeking to template everything by defaulting to the specific formats and structures that are so ubiquitous and forced on us by the technology and tools we use, what if we designed for serendipity instead?

In what seems like a serendipitous occurrence - Doug Belshaw mentioned his idea of Serendipity Surface in his latest Weeknote. He outlined the term to describe cultivating an attitude of curiosity and increasing the chance encounters we have by putting ourselves out there. On this podcast on YouTube Doug describes coining the term Serendipity Surface to describe cultivating curiosity, increasing random encounters and possibilities by putting ourselves out there. He sees it as the opposite of reducing the "attack surface" in security; it's about expanding opportunities.

I like that term, so perhaps the aim is to use the serendipity engine to increase the serendipity surface of our learners.

August 2024

2024-09-01T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

Can winter end? It was another grey and cool weekend to round out August. We had a splash of warm weather a couple of weeks ago - a couple of glorious days of sunshine, but since then it's been back to grey skies, wind and rain. Temperature wise it's been very mild, but the greyness has got to me a bit and I am so looking forward to sunny days. Another week of this crap weather is predicted, so not a great start to spring.

This month felt like things were going a bit off the rails, so I took a mental health day where I sat down and ... wrote a list.

Not the most exciting thing in the world, but it is life-changing. The effort of just trying to clear my mind of the clutter was cathartic. In my teenage years of spiritual exploration, I dabbled in the occult and via the early internet stumbled into the writings of Aleister Crowley. One of the things that actually resonated was his book on Yoga, where he described the process of emptying the mind. Rather than thinking of nothing, what was required was not the absence of thought, but to have thought through everything. By systematically going through each thought and thinking through it, you can reach a meditative state.

That's the long anecdotal way of informing you that making a list of everything going on inside your mind is the only way to get clarity on what you actually need to do.

And for me, the list was very long.

What I got out of the exercise was a bit more clarity on what was going on inside my head and why I felt troubled. There was just a lot going on, and my mind was bouncing from one thing to another. To that end, I went back to try and organise things out - putting things into categories and priorities. I forget that I need this to function... I tend to organise myself, go on that path for a couple of months and then everything falls in a heap, including me - mentally and physically.

I doubled down a bit on Obsidian as a way to organise my brain - and I keep coming back to Johnny Decimal as a practical way to manage other stuff around me. But at the same time neither is setup correctly yet — that's going to take some time and effort dedicated to it. What I did implement was some of Doug Belshaw's ideas from his Weekly and Daily Planners. During this period, I felt I've needed something like this, especially as work has become much more unstructured. I haven't gone analogue or adopted this exact model, but I've incorporated the ideas into my Week Note set up, which has been going really well for me.

Alongside all of the hype and drama of work, we've been renovating now for over a month. Kicking off the day after my birthday, we sailed through July and into August without a kitchen. And the month has come and gone, and ... still no kitchen. There are cupboards but no appliances or plumbing. There are lots of semi-complete tasks and benchtops that need to be sorted before we can be anything like complete. There are also a few issues with things being straight, particularly the floors that mean our new fridge barely fits into its new spot, but more importantly, it can't sit level. So the drama will continue for another month!

Events

A highlight and something very new for me is that I have a friend in town! One of my best mates has moved to Adelaide in one of the most seamless moves I have ever seen. I'm looking forward to having someone close by that I've already connected with. New friends are great, but that old friend that already knows you, and you them, it's just so nice and comfortable!

I'll add in some photos from August - and one thing that has been great is the light. Some of the sunrises and sunsets have been amazing (usually due to the way the low sun hits the clouds).

Watched

I've sat through a few movies in August from Godzilla Minus One, Alien: Romulus and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare to some quality couch time with Alise watching Deadpool 2 and The Heat.

TVwise we devoted our family time to Time Bandits but also got through House of the Dragon (not going to recommend), The Umbrella Academy and making a big dent in Silo. There's also been some international rugby to watch as the Wallabies rebuild.

Dealing with Burnout

2024-08-12T00:00:00Z

At the end of last year, I attended the DDD conference and one of the presentations really resonated with me – the one about burnout. The speaker went through some of the symptoms, side effects, and manifestations of what burnout does, and it was a light bulb moment. “Aha, this is what people talk about when they talk about burnout.”

I also recognised that I’d burnt out, not just once but probably multiple times over the last couple of years. Each time it was slightly different - different circumstances and pressures, but it was still burnout. I vowed at the end of last year to make some changes in regards to that.

Using some time off that I had in January I went through a really big reset on work and life. I needed a different perspective and worked through the Focus Course to help establish that and to be honest, I've felt much better this year. But at the same time, work has really been challenging.

We’re working through a university merger, which I think is the biggest ever. It’s all brand new (so we’ve been told on repeat) and so it's a major thing to deal with. I expected work to be hard this year, and it has been, but in very different ways than I anticipated.

If you’d asked me a week ago, I probably wouldn’t have said anything about burnout. In a lot of ways I feel "underworked" from what I had anticipated. But this toot from Mandy Brown described burnout not just occurring because you’re busy but because you’re feeling under-utilised:

Something I oft talk about with my clients: the worst burnout I experienced wasn’t the result of overwork but of being underutilized and feeling useless. We have to get specific about burnout if we’re going to address it: https://everythingchanges.us/

— @aworkinglibrary

This resonated because what I’ve been struggling with the most over the last few months is not too much work - but being ignored when it comes to my work and expertise.

From a professional perspective, I’ve achieved quite a lot over the last five years. We are just finishing off the final batch of courses for our 7th fully online program for the university. I’ve been involved in all of them in different ways, they also resulted in me burning out and taking on lots of responsibility for getting things done. I did do this knowingly, I always figured that this was moving towards something bigger in my career. This was all an opportunity to learn, grow, change, and know what not to do in the future.

The last few months have not been that. The last few months have not been building on the expertise of myself or my colleagues, who’ve all worked on creating different programs and doing the work that we’re required to do right now. That is to do course development on an unprecedented scale and in very little time. The scale part is the new piece, but over the years myself and my peers have been doing this across multiple areas, projects and programs. This is what I've been preparing for.... and now I've been shut out. Rather than the leader I've been working towards and taking on the challenge ahead, I feel completely disempowered to do anything.

So here we are, with me sitting here feeling on the edge of burnout. Not from stress and overwork, but from feeling useless and underutilised. And so now I've recognised it, I have to think about preservation and pulling myself away from the edge.

That means unplugging and uncaring – doing less rather than more. Not taking ownership of things, not caring about the consequences of other people's actions. That's not mine to own or be responsible for.

July 2024

2024-08-04T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

July just flew by. Probably because a lot happened during the month that's kept things busy. Ms A was away for a week visiting family during the school holidays, and the dog had a week at the kennels, so there were a couple of "quieter" weeks during the month.

My walking regime has been OK, but the gym completely fell of this month. I need to reconfigure my routine during August so that I am prioritising this time and burn off of calories. I think it would do my mental health wonders, but as always, these are always the hardest things to do when you're in a funk.

Work.... I don't think things have gotten any better. My complaint is the lack of planning or organisation regarding the work that needs to be done. I've tried to intervene positively and prompt basic things like to-do lists and schedules to be developed and time put aside to collaborate, but nothing happened in that space. I think that's the end of me trying to change anything now. I have to draw a line when it comes to wasted effort, and that's now. There is no point in continuing to try and affect any change - there is absolutely no appetite for it.

The course is set, and there is no turning back now.

At the same time, I am concerned about the effect this will have on my team and all the other personnel involved. No one seems to give a fuck anymore from a practical capacity about work and welfare. Sure, they say all the right words in public, but the reality is that every decision undermines trust, refuses to acknowledge any of the realities of being a human (getting sick, being tired, stressed and overwhelmed) and diminishes the key structures that allow people to remain resilient - the team and the people around them. Rather than seeking to build up the existing support structures, the focus is on some theoretical notion of leadership and teams that are so far removed from any practical reality you can tell that only people who lack any experience in this area could have thought it up. And rather than utilising the skill and experience at their fingertips, and against all advice they keep returning to their imagined reality as the way things will get done.

Events

Well my big event for July was my 44th Birthday. Unlike previous years, we did plan a bit of a celebration and a night out with friends feasting at Peel St and an after-dinner cocktail at Bibliotheca. I also had a couple of pints of Kilkenny and a Chinese meal at the Brecknock Hotel Corner Bar - an old pub that's been divided into a cozy homestyle Irish bar in the small front bar and a massive Chinese restaurant in the rest of the building.

The week after the biggest thing to happen to our home started - the kitchen renovations. Having dreamt this up almost as soon as we moved in, after about 3 years, we're finally underway... slowly. The unique angles in the house obviously played havoc for the cabinet makers during the installation, and we're now stuck without a viable kitchen as all the other dependencies kick in. We currently have cabinets in and benchtop templates ready to go to the stainless steel fabricators, but that's it. There's no more forward momentum until the benches are in, so no usable kitchen. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We had a week of ongoing dramas with the installation - missing elements like taps and sink, new fridge not fitting through the doorway without requiring pin-point manoeuvring to get into the house and a few "hold my beer moments" with the other appliances. I think we're on track now, but it is a bit of a wait-and-see when it will actually be finished, so at the moment, the house is a mess, there are no usable benches for meal prep, and it's not fun attempting to cook anything at this point in time.

I also spoke at the TALAS Symposium - an opportunity to share practice and ideas with our UniSA colleagues. It was a good opportunity for me to share the work around Learning Types and Patterns that I've been doing in the background. It also gave me the impetus to pull together a revamp of the Learning Patterns website. It's not 100% public (but if you know where to look) it's up online so I can do some testing with it. I've updated the CSS, now have a dark mode, and swapped out the entire site to be a single page with details popping up using the new Popover API! I'm super happy as it's performant, works with Translation features and has almost zero javascript. Hopefully, pulling all of this into the public-facing version soon.

At the same time as all of this is going on there are snippets of joy. There was a koala in our yard one morning! One of my best friends is moving to Adelaide! We climbed a hill and had an amazing view of a pod of dolphins frolicking in the bay! And the sunrises and sunsets have been spectacular - and I'm awake to see them!

Photos

Ooops - I forgot about June photos so added them to the Flickr album too.

Watched

I had a bit of a stroll down memory lane with Axel F. The next season of Vikings Valhalla, which I like but it never quite gets me that into the story - I think maybe its the character switching - each of the stories are interesting, but you're constantly switching between story arcs. Also finished off the Boys and The Acolyte - both underwhelming but entertaining.

Listened

There were some great podcasts I made my way through during July.

Both seasons of Ultra by Rachel Maddow - a really great and unknown story for me about the rightwing, and literal Nazis in American politics. So good and poignant and ultimately human story.

I smashed through season 2 of Buried. I love the story but hate the episode length. So frustrating that when you're finally getting into it and it ends, and then theres a couple of minutes of credits, ads and preroll. This season is on PCB contamination and the unlikely hero, Douglas Gowan

I also went through S04 & S05 of Cover Up, The Anthrax Threat and The Conspiracy Tapes. The Anthrax Treat was quite eye-opening in how wide-reaching and large-scale that attack was and that so many people died. The Conspiracy Tapes was something else, quite Jon Ronson in the sense of it going back and tugging on the threads back to the source of so much of the conspiracy theory culture that exists.

I also finally got around to finishing up Scene on Radio's Seeing White season. I got a huge amount out of this series and thoroughly recommend it as one of the best explorations of race out there. While the context is American, so much of the concept of 'whiteness' resonates here in Australian society. A country that had a literal White Australia Policy has a lot to reconcile with, especially as we have grown into a truly ethnically diverse nation. The history, the topics, the stories and perspectives shared in the series really were amazingly compelling. It took me a while to get through the series, I've had to stop and think at certain points along the way to really unpack what was just introduced. The latest of these was when the idea of Markedness was introduced.

June 2024

2024-07-07T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

Well winter certainly descended this year. I felt it more than usual having switched to walking the dog in the mornings. The 6:20am wake up was now in complete darkness and so got to witness a few sunrises. We’ve had a few cold days - no frosts, but the days where it’s windy are icy.

The weather has challenged my whole exercise regime. I’ve kept up my long walks with Frankie on the weekend, but I have not visited the gym that often. I find the short days of winter take it out of me. It’s hard to be motivated and stay motivated. There are quite a lot of personal projects that have not received the time they deserve, and part of that is just feeling mentally spent at the end of the day.

The main reason for that is the merger. I’m now fully involved in merger work and being challenged by how things are being done. There’s a lot of rhetoric about codesign and collaboration, but they are just words on a page. There’s very little productive collaboration or engagement baked into any of the processes, and we are defaulting back to the good old hierarchy. And I’m so far down the ranks that it’s impossible to influence decision-making, flag risks, or contribute to anything meaningful. Despite 5 years of experience doing this exact thing, I, and most of my colleagues, have been siloed and ignored.

All the talk about well-being and being people-centred flies out the window in this situation. I keep trying to limit my personal investment in this thing - it is just a job, but it’s so hard to do that from a professional integrity perspective. I don’t let projects fail, I don’t let mediocre work continue, I don’t keep making the same mistakes. But that’s also when I can influence the process and what’s happening. I don’t have that now, so it’s just one frustration after another.

So, the professional face goes on at work, but there are cracks. I know I come off sometimes as a critic, but offering critique is not the same. It’s just that managerialism brings a complete lack of practicality or awareness of the work required. Knowing the jobs to be done is not the same as how the job is done, which becomes more obvious daily. There’s a massive disconnect between the numbers on the spreadsheet and how to achieve the expected outcomes.

My beef comes from our current work that requires 1800 courses to be developed in 18 months, all produced in 10-week cycles. This is the first project I’ve ever worked on where no one can or will tell me, “What is a course? What are the expectations of what will be in a course within this time frame? What is the deliverable? What does ‘done’ look like?”. I have led projects, managed them, planned, developed, cost and implemented them from inception to completion - this is the first time I don’t know what we’re doing!

Anyway, life outside of work has been good. My Aunt and Uncle visited. However, Frankie was not a fan of a new male in the house and made my Uncle feel quite intimidated. He is such a different dog around others, especially men in our home. I know it’s the protecting nature of the pack, but we will need to do some training on this.

On one of the weekends, we headed out to K1 winery and did a tasting in their very pretty cellar door, looking across the pond and the trees still in their autumn hues.

I did manage to do one creative thing — building Alt Adelaide as a parody to the branding due to be unveiled on the 15th of July. Curious how it pans out.

Watched

Bodkin - watched with the family, a dark humoured murder mystery.
Sugar - interesting film noir style detective show with a bit of a twist.

Listened

I've been listening to a lot of Scene on Radio over the last few months, but I got stuck on the Seeing Whiteness series. I stopped not because of the quality, but because of an idea from Chenjerai Kumanyika - who spoke of Race as a Technology.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Yeah but I have to be honest. I'm proud of Blackness but I've come to see it less as my, you know, an identity, and more as, like, a technology.

John Biewen: Meaning?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Yeah, it’s kind of a weird word, but I see it as a technology because I see Blackness as not something that is hardwired into our biology, that just determines who we are. Instead it’s something that we use. And I have to think about it like that because I have to recognise the way that it can also be used against us. And when it's being used against us, I cast a sceptical and pessimistic eye toward it. Right? But, you know, I'm trying to be sensitive to, like, where Blackness, where the technology of Blackness fails. You use that technology, and it doesn't tell you what you need to know about a group of people or a person. But also to navigate in this white supremacist country and to live with a sense of political clarity and joy and possibility, I also tap into that other side of Blackness I was talking about earlier. And I'm optimistic about, you know, tapping into those resources

That stopped in me in my tracks and I needed to stop and think through that. I still want to unpack the idea more, but I've started listening again.

The State of the Merger

2024-06-28T00:00:00Z

I wrote this post a few months ago when merger work was well underway. I didn't post it then, hoping things would change. But to honest they haven't. While progress has been made, each step along the way follows a script that's pretty similar to what's below, regardless of the size and scale of the individual piece of work. If I were to describe my view of the current state of the merger, it would be this:

Imagine you’re an architect. You meet a client. They have secured financing, the buy-in of some pretty influential backers, and a mandate to build one of the greatest buildings in the world and put Adelaide on the map.

As an architect, this sounds great. It's a dream job, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So you sit down with the client to start forming a brief, but they’re distracted.

“There’s so much to do. We need to start marketing this thing, get the plans in, and get ready for tenants now!”

What you say sounds great, but let’s start with some fundamentals - what kind of building do you want this to be?

“The greatest. World class. We are going to be a magnet for overseas investment and visitors while providing a key service to the state.”

That’s fantastic, so what is this building going to DO that allows that to occur?

“Well, it needs to be flexible. We want the highest possible quality experience for everyone who visits. And for those who can’t make it, the same quality experience online! Yes! We have to have the greatest experience for everyone. This is going to make us world-class.”

Wow, that sounds amazing, but WHAT is IT? Tell me, what is the core experience you want to deliver?

“Well, we need it to be modular so that people can customise their experience. We need flexibility so they can come to us from anywhere.”

OK. So I think we still need to understand what are they coming FOR?

“Look, we want to be a people-first organisation, and we want to reflect the diversity of our people, their culture, and that of the First Nations. We have to be accessible and ensure we have people’s well-being at the forefront.”

That sounds really worthwhile. But we want to get into some details now. In order for us to draw up any plans, we want to make sure we understand the function of the space. To ensure that we can build the best buildings, we find that knowing what you want them to be there for and what you want them to do while they are in the building is important. Mistakes made in planning can be really expensive later on. It’s best for us to get as full a picture of what you need, and we can do the design work and sort out the details.

“Well, that’s great. We need to get the plans off to the council in 15 days. We’ve set up meetings next week with our staff, and they will tell you what materials to use and the dimensions they come in. Ok, well, that was a great meeting. I have to rush! Have a branding meeting for the new logo. Bye!

They leave, and the door shuts.

Your phone buzzes continually for a minute as 25 notifications inform you of meetings you’re now attending.

Good luck!

May 2024

2024-06-03T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

The month of May was when everything went off the rails. I came back from my travels, got sick and needed a couple of weeks to recover from that. It wasn't COVID, it wasn't the flu, but it definitely knocked me on my arse and I needed quite a bit of recuperation. The disruption to my routine really resonated throughout the month, and it just felt like everything struggled to get back on track after that. The last week, everything kicked back in, but man it took a lot.

So the vibe? Well I feel a bit lost. I need some time to get my head back in the game, but that's challenged by finding the time and space to do so. I need to get things back on track in June.

Work-wise, we were in full steam in terms of merger work, which was good and bad. I really don't feel that the process was as productive as it could have been. But at the same time, I quite enjoyed facilitating the workshop and getting back to working more closely with academic staff.

Events

The Aurora, or out attempt to go and see the aurora. Ms A and I packed the car with Frankie and hit the road to head south to where the best viewing was expected. As we drove away from home and the city we could easily see the pink glow through the windscreen. It was great! But we kept heading south... and then nothing. The aurora died down, and the clouds came in! It was a bit of fun, and we did see pink! No photos despite packing the camera and tripod. The next night we headed down to Moana beach and enjoyed walking the dog at sunset with the aim of hanging out till dark in the hope of another aurora showing. While there were no lights, the sunset was off the charts! Such amazing light - the moon was out, it was amazing! (see photos)

Watched

I went to see Furiosa at a special screening put on by Krix Speakers where they had done a reference setup of the movie at the Wallis Cinema in Noarlunga. The movie itself was just OK - it was not anywhere near as good as Fury Road - but the sound! It was amazing. The seperation was amazing - nothing was muffled and the way that the V8 engines blended and became musical in the soundtrack was beautiful. There was also a lot of leather in the movie - so lots of squeaking I'm not sure I would have heard before.

I watched Fallout and loved the 50's aesthetic and quirky humour of the series. I've never played the game, but I got sucked into the world very quickly. I do love the ethical and moral quandaries it deals with and the depth that it goes into. There's a lot to the series - and so I might need to pick up the controller for a play.

Ms A and I watched both Dune movies together. I needed a bit of a reminder of the first movie before sitting down with the second. I was surprised with Ms A's attention span lasting for both movies (watched over a couple of weekend, not back to back). They are visually stunning movies and I loved the lore and soundtrack too. I would love a Krix cinema experience of it!

Listened

Season 3 of Long Shadow In Guns Guns We Trust was phenomenal. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to understand guns in America. At the end of the day it's still a mystery that nothing has changed despite the carnage, but it was interesting to chart the history and learn more.

A great series was the ABC's Expanse. All three seasons are great, tackling the Argyle Diamond Heist, the sinking of the Blythe Star and the Pine Gap spy base. Each one is told by a different reporter and has it's own vibe and production, but each story is compelling and riveting. Perfect to binge on.

April 2024

2024-05-12T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

April has felt like a big month. There was quite a bit of travel, social events, and family time packed in, which led to feeling quite disjointed and out of routine. Most weeks weren't full work weeks – they were broken up with public holidays and leave.

I feel bad about addressing most of my health goals and letting a lot of the big effort items fall to the wayside, and I have felt guilty about it. I also feel very tired, with the first 1/3rd of the year being full-on and a lot has been happening. That's led to a loss of routine and a real inability to stay focused and get things done. I've got to put some time aside this next week to bring things back into focus and set my attention back on what matters. I can see that my default state is to drop back into being reactive, leading me to not make decisions, not communicate properly, and feeling scatter-brained in almost every aspect of life.

I was due to do an audit of my Focus Course progress this month - I haven't done it, but I realise that I actually need to set aside some time to get it done. That said I feel a good chunk of the big picture items - my vision and values in particular - has really helped steer the ship and stay on course throughout the chaos.

The other thing I wanted to note - this was an unlucky month. On my trip to Wollongong I left cables and my kindle at a friends place, lost my glasses for the first time in my life (20+ years of wearing glasses!). I also had a trip to the emergency department for a minor issue. I've come away wondering what's going on or if it's just my time for a streak of bad luck. Hopefully this is all for the time being.

Events

The month kicked off with the Easter weekend which was some great family and social time.

The next week saw the start of the school holidays and the family headed over to Tasmania for 5 days. Some dear friends move over there a few years ago and we haven't seen them for a couple of years, so when flights were on sale during the school holidays I jumped on them and booked us in.

Tasmania is the smallest state in Australia, an island off the island (or mainland, a word you only use in Tassie!). It's been 14 years since Mrs K and I had been there last, one of our first "grown-up" holidays. I thought that Tassie had been through a boom since then, you here a lot more about in the news as it's become popular with retirees, but the reality is that the state's population is still very small, just 571,165 people. Driving through Hobart I was expecting it to be bigger, but it's just a dot in terms of a city with a bit of sprawl up the river Derwent.

Up the river we went to see MONA – the Museum of Old and New Art. The largest private gallery in the Southern Hemisphere MONA is a statement. I'm not 100% sure what it says, given the owner David Walsh made his money as a professional gambler, but the museum seems to be hewn out of the rock and contains a broad and eclectic collection of art and artefacts. There are strong themes of sex and death throughout - and in some cases it comes across as a bit try-hard and teenage-angsty. But at the same time there is a uniqueness to the works and the experience over all. There were a couple of works that I really enjoyed – the Fat Porsche being one - but MONA is more about the experience, and some of the pieces just need to seen, heard and smelt. Speaking of the experience - I feel really sorry for the army of teenagers and 20 somethings required to be employed simply to tell older visitors not to touch the artworks. Having spent a large amount of time being around toddlers in my life, these Boomers were incredibly disrespectful and annoying, wanting to poke and prod the artworks in every space.

We then drove our hired Tesla Model Y (which I will review) through the gorgeous countryside to Launceston. We met up with our friends in their new home perched high on the hill above town and were back in the groove quickly. Our girls had been together and best friends in daycare, and they just slotted back into their ways within minutes. It was great to see their friendship, which had been pretty distant, spark up again so quickly. They were inseparable for the rest of the time we spent there.

Over the next few days, we descended into the rainforest, completed a maize maze, went to the beach, wandered the city, saw some monkeys, visited a winery, drank a lot of Pinot Noir, climbed a mountain, and genuinely connected with our people and the country. For the last evening, we drove back to Hobart to spend time with our extended family there and got to enjoy the views from their amazing house and the experience of the most sincere hospitality on the planet! There was also an afternoon of whiskey cocktails.

After arriving home we quickly washed Ms A's clothes and the next day she flew up to Sydney to spend some time with her Aunty, Uncle and cousins. I went back to work and ran some workshops to aid the design of courses for the new university as part of the merger work, which was ... interesting. It wasn't organised well, so there was a lot of on the fly problem solving - but we were working with a great group of people throughout.

We had a nice, quiet adult weekend where we probably tried to recover from a very hectic week before I flew off to Wollongong for my uncle's 70th birthday. It was a bit of a family do, and it was great to see my mum, brother, sis-in-law, niece, aunt, uncles and cousins growing family. We had a great long lunch with amazing Italian food and carried on at my other uncle's local haunts. I had some time to catch up with a prior colleague, Lindy, and catch up about life, the universe, and everything over a meal and a bottle of wine. I also got to see Kate, catch up on the family goings, and discuss the state of higher education.

Photos

Quite action-packed and some great photos to boot!

Watched

It's Super Rugby season, so a lot of Rugby! Watched The Killer - which wasn't great, and binged through Halo - again not great but held my attention for 2 seasons (but I am a sucker for Sci Fi).

Listened

I can't recommend enough The Outlaw Ocean. This superbly reported and told a set of stories gave me a real insight into a world I knew very little about - what actually goes on out at sea.

March 2024

2024-04-01T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

March this year was a lot of fun from the family and social aspects. We spent a lot of time together as a family, getting out and doing stuff together. Ms A. has settled into high school life and has started making new social connections and so we have had a bunch of visitors to the home. This has led us to the discovery that Frankie has a "self-defence" mechanism where he excretes a god-awful rotting fish smell when strange men (dads sent in to pick up their daughters) come into the house! He's all bark and no bite, but the smell is savage!

We started on our V2 of kitchen renovations, so I've been busy pulling together our ideas into a format for the joiner to draw up some plans and give us a quote. That's taken up a large part of my creative energy for the last couple of weeks. I'm really happy with the result - maybe less so with the cost, so I'm hoping we can make a couple of changes to reduce some aspects, and now it's off to the bank to see about a loan. We've been lucky, given the rising house prices, that despite not doing anything to improve the value apart from sitting on it, the local neighbourhood has risen quite a lot, so it shouldn't be an issue for the bank.

On the career front, I'm not feeling that great. The Job is a struggle. I love my team and my peers, but there is a constant background from leadership ... not leading. If you're going to lead, you have to act and do things that empower your people - at the moment, it is the complete opposite of that. And if there is an opportunity for the operations team to move and get things done, it gets shut down. So rather than moving forward, we are spending extreme amounts of energy and capacity moving backwards — because despite the team's need to move forward, we are being dragged back into the old default ways of working — hierarchy, power dynamics, information asymmetry, whispers and favourites. I don't know if I feel this more than others because I'm more aware of the issues, but I can't seem to move the needle on this. I have tried to communicate the issues and offer a ton of solutions, and yet there is zero engagement, let alone any acknowledgment. The culture is becoming more and more toxic around me, and while there is a desire just to put my head down and stay out of it, it's impossible.

This has led to me having less energy to devote to my career other objectives. The job is just one part of all of this, my aim is to build up more aspects of my career beyond the job. And that's happening! I had a couple of real bright spots this month with a couple of people reaching out over LinkedIn to discuss my work and some web stats pointing to some intriguing engagements.

I had two fantastic conversations with learning design colleagues about the work I've been doing around Learning Design Systems. They were great conversations and made me and the work I've been doing feel valued (sometimes more so than The Job!). I loved the fact that both conversations came from people stumbling across my work, finding blog posts and websites that I've worked on but never fully "finished". It annoyed me as I did submit a paper to Ascilite last year, which Reviewer 2 didn't like, and so it didn't go through, and while I understand the system, it was disappointing. I didn't have the energy to push back on the decision or really look at resubmitting elsewhere, but I probably should have because it was an attempt to document the system as a whole. I think I might stick it up on here on the blog.

The other interesting find was the use of Learning Patterns. I turned on some basic web analytics to get a sense of engagement and saw a spike in visitors from Spain. Hmmmm, I wonder why? Looking through some of the logs I found this resource "Challenges of medical education. Importance of planning". I don't speak any Spanish, but I love the fact that this exists and that the video demonstrates how easy it has become to translate something on the web these days — a click of a button in the browser and all of a sudden, my English site becomes natively Spanish! I hope they say good things in the video - but to be honest, I love the fact that this exists!

Taken from a bigger perspective, the career progresses well even if The Job is spluttering along!

Healthwise - things are OK. I'm doing well on the walking and general activity. My Apple Watch informed me I was averaging 10km a day - so that's good. I need to work on getting to the gym more - adding an extra session or two would be great, but have found the balancing act of schedules hard to manage. Eating is OK too, but could certainly be better - this last week wasn't great with socialising, being out and Easter all happening.

Events

I went and saw Mr Bungle with Dave and Stu. It wasn't what I expected or anticipated - being basically a thrash metal gig rather than anything close to any from California. It had its merits, and it was good to see members of Slayer and Anthrax, as well as Mike Paton, strutting around the stage.

Ms A and I also went to Womad on the Sunday. It was a stinking hot day, getting up into the 40s and so the struggle with the heat was very real. We saw Wildfire Manwurrk, Connie Bailey Rae, Witch, Dubioza Kolektiv (probably the first band that kicked it the day off as the sun was going down and they had a great selection of ska/gypsy/reggae and rap. Was great fun!)., Ibibo Sound Machine (great club funk sound) and Moonlight Benjamin - who were my pick of the day. We watched the whole set and it was mind-blowing! Described as a "voodoo queen priestess" Benjamin was truly amazing and captivating. I swear she was casting spells on stage and had the audience captivated. She had the perfect frontman persona, strutting on stage and working the audience. The rest of the band was great with a fantastic Vox driven raw and heavy blues rock sound.

Clare and I celebrated our anniversary of being together - 24 years! Had a great meal out at Bandit in Unley and did the Feed Me Menu there (not this one!).

Photos

Watched

I got through a few different shows - but would recommend the following documentaries:

Love Has Won
Telemarketers

Listened

I'm still listening to a lot of Four Stroke Baron.

Big month of podcasts this month and quite a few I would recommend:

The Behind the Bastards series on The Terrible Secret of Steve Jobs is really well done and quite horrific. I have a real issue with hero worship and this is basically why - despite success in many areas, a lot of people are horrible in others. Their work isn't a reflection of their behaviour in other areas of their life. While Jobs can be lauded for his ability to shape the tech world he was also a stinky goblin and deadbeat and abusive Dad.
The Gatekeepers is a really useful series on the history of social media and the discussion of them as gatekeepers. The series threads the historical perspectives of silicon valley and the narrative it has constructed for itself (challenging the powers that be while being very much of and for those same powers) and contrasts that with their actual effects on societies. The Rest Of World episode is really important in this story but it is hard to go past the emotional trauma of The Vortex.
I smashed through Season 2 of Things Fell Apart over a couple of days. I am a huge fan of Jon Ronson, and I love his foray into these butterfly effect stories that seek to trace back the origins of ripples we feel today. Highly recommend the series and I think I will need to listen again.
Ed Zitron has been doing the rounds in my feed this month. He was on the Steve Jobs series on BTB, also made an appearance on Tech Won't Save Us and has launched his own podcast Better Offline. My pick of the early episodes is The Rot Economy. The episode seems to be an attempt to mix a conversation and Ed's more scripted elements and doesn't quite work in that seamless flow - which might just be a teething problem in an early episode, but the topic is spot on.

Read

The Rot Economy episode of Ed Zitron's podcast led me to one of Ed's blog posts.

Public and private investors, along with the markets themselves, have become entirely decoupled from the concept of what “good” business truly is, focusing on one metric — one truly noxious metric — over all else: growth.

“Growth” in this case is not necessarily about being “bigger” or “better,” it is simply “more.” It means that the company is generating more revenue, higher valuations, gaining more market share, and then finding more ways to generate these things. Businesses are expected to be - and rewarded for being - eternal burning engines of capital that create more and more shareholder value while, hopefully, providing a service to a customer in the process. In the public markets, that means that companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft were rewarded for having unfocused, capital-intensive businesses that required mass layoffs when times got tough, because the market loved the idea that they’d found a way to save money. They weren’t punished for their poor planning, their stagnating products, their mismanagement of human capital, or their general lack of any real innovation because the numbers kept going up.

This analysis is pretty spot on and can be evidenced in a number of ways:

Zuckerberg burnt through $10billion, didn't produce a product and remains in charge.
The massive variations in HR over the last few years where we see swings of up to 20% of their workforce being hired or fired.
The on going degradation of services and products to the point we now have a new term — "enshitification".
The lack of any real and meaningful innovation from Silicon Valley for the past decade.
A lack of real products from Silicon Valley - we've actually gone beyond needing customers or delivering services - it's literally just the Ponzi scheme now - see Crypto!

Job vs Career

2024-03-11T00:00:00Z

I started 2024 with a bit of time off to spend contemplating my current state, assessing it and starting to plan out the future. One of the big issues and points of conflict and dissatisfaction during 2023 was my job. I had to really dig into this idea and came to the realisation that it was my job that was making me unhappy — not my career.

That distinction — Job vs Career — wasn’t apparent before.

The Job had become all-consuming and demanding. Having some space and time away from it gave me a better perspective, especially since the two aren’t the same. They’re not even interchangeable.

A career contains a multitude of jobs. Some of them are the ones you get paid for, but many of them aren’t. And that’s often where the confusion comes into play. The paid job begins to bleed into other areas, and you associate the paid job with all the other jobs. They get lumped together as a career, but they are distinct and need to be kept separate. It’s our mind that blends them together, so every so often, we need to pull focus, reevaluate and paint in the edges to make it clear what our jobs really are.

One of the selling points of the Focus Course is focus, both to see things more closely and direct our attention.

In reflection, I can say that for the last few years, I’ve paid too much attention to my paid job and not my career. I’ve allowed the job to expand beyond its parameters and edges to consume everything around it—my time, attention, and priorities. What I need to do, and what I plan to do in 2024, is to switch that.

I want to focus on my career, not my job.

That’s not to say I won’t be working or pulling my weight; what I’m saying is that my focus will be my career and the multiple other jobs that make that up. The other jobs to be done are learning, writing, sharing, connecting, communicating, and organising - all the things that I need and want in my career that my job can’t provide.

February 2024

2024-03-04T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

So 2024 and a 'long' February. I could feel the weight of that extra day 😁!

February kicked off with a return to work and the start of high school for my daughter. Ms A has adapted quickly to high school life, I wish I could say the same about work. It came as a bit of a shock, but one of the great things was that despite a couple of issues coming up while I was away, my team stepped in and solved them while I was away! So my inbox was reading through a bunch of email threads that began "Thanks for all your work on getting that resolved." and me going back through the chain to find out WTF had happened.

Going back to the weekly routine has been a challenge. I got very used to having lots of time to exercise and ponder the world around me. Exercising has mostly consisted of walking the dog in the morning daily, a weekday gym visit, maybe one on the weekend, and an extended hike on Saturday morning. This has aligned with my aims of exercising and getting out into nature - so I'm really happy with how things have gone in that space. I'd like to make more room for the gym, but getting to and from the office, cooking, and chores means there's not a lot of time and energy left.

I've been commuting into the city on the train daily. This has been great as I'm able to write on the way to work and do this every day. I think February has been my most prolific on the blog for ages, and I feel really good about it. I haven't got around to writing much about learning design, which is one of my goals, but every Saturday during my hike, I've been taking voice notes and have been pulling a lot of scattered ideas together. Given that I don't think in words this to me is progress. The words are coming; they're just not all there yet or as coherent as I'd like.

I've been making roads towards my side hustle. I've got a logo, domain and email setup – just need some content now! (If you read this and are curious - DM me, and we can chat).

There was some shocking news from a colleague who had only recently left the team that their partner had died suddenly. It was a massive shock to myself and the team. I am flummoxed on what to do in the face of other people's grief as I know how private and personal that process is and needs to be. We can always share the loss, but not the grief - that's up to us to process, and we all do it differently. I gave to the GoFundMe that popped up as being interstate made it impossible to really do or contribute anything. I'm deeply shocked and emotional about the family and the loss. Anyone losing a parent is a callback to my own experience of losing my dad and the ongoing pangs of grief and sadness that come with it. That mortal coil is a thing and we the fact we are here is always precarious, but damn we get our hooks into those around us and we get ripped apart when they go.

I finished the Focus Course, and you can read up on my notes and progress. I'd happily recommend doing the course and have used a lot of the concepts back at work and I feel much more confident about life the universe and everything. And that's honestly where my vibe is at. Things are moving, and they are good.

Events

So it's officially Mad March here in Adelaide - where we cram in every possible cultural event into the last two weeks of February and three of March. The Fringe is on and I've been to a couple of shows already. I've got my ticket to WOMAD - just a day of the festival this year

Photos

Super Rugby - It's back! This is going to be the year of rebuilding Australian Rugby and this is where it all needs to start. There's already been turmoil with clubs on the verge of going bust and a threat to whole competition, but at the same time the game remains the same. Some great matchups coming and looking forward to what comes from this season.

Listened

Chameleon S07 The Michigan Plot - This is another one that questions the tactics of the FBI, but a bit more of a tangled mess. Dealing with a militia plot to kidnap a sitting governor, it's a captivating story full of bumbling fools, untouched bravado, bullshit and horrific casual threats of violence.

Dark Net Diaries - Another great episode on The Pirate Bay. I loved the more philosophical elements of the discussion in the episode. I have always liked Peter Sunde and his coverage in the media. The way he tried to challenge the status quo was admirable, and I loved the discussion of the law in Sweden and the huge differences between it and the US legal system.

Read

Subprime Intelligence - Loved this piece from Ed Zitron. I cleared out a couple of posts from my drafts on AI this week as they'd been bugging me. As soon as I hit publish then along comes Ed with this knock out piece. So many links and research - this is exactly what's needed around AI.

Losing the imitation game - Another AI post, this time from Jennifer Moore. This is a great explainer about the hype and technical operations of AI that seems to get lost in the noise.

Understanding and Meaning

2024-03-02T00:00:00Z

So my last post got "Downes'd", which is nice, but at the same time, Stephen's commentary can be challenging. In his brief commentary, he laid out his issue:

OK, sounds great, until you push a bit on what counts exactly as 'understanding' and 'meaning'. What is 'understanding'? Knowledge of causal principles? Not robust enough. General laws and principles? Too inflexible. A model or world view? Sure, now we're getting closer. But that's what AIs do! Kids learning 'why' - what sort of answer do you give them? Cause, principles, theory. Right? So what is there to 'understanding' that AIs don't do. The same sort of questions arise around 'meaning'. Do we mean 'intentionality'? 'Intensionality?' "emotions or tone" Aw, we already know AI can respond to these. It's too easy to simply say "understanding & meaning."

So, let me expand a little more, as I think it's useful to delve a little deeper.

Stephen provides a couple of options for framing understanding, but I'd like to keep it simple. Understanding is not just the knowledge of a thing; you must also grasp its cause or explanation. It is a deeper sense of what the thing is, but also how it has come to be. It isn't just knowing the definition of the words but the context in which you would use them.

Let's apply that definition: The thing in the example of ChatGPT is text. Yes, it knows that object quite well and intimately. But it doesn't grasp cause or explanation. As I said:

ChatGPT didn't learn the topic, it did no research, it did no validation, and it contributed no novel thoughts, ideas or concepts.

Yes, it can demonstrate knowledge of a specific domain. A model of that knowledge, yes. However, a model is not the same as understanding. The 'worldview' this AI has isn't worldly, connected or contextual - it is within a specific domain. There is no connection to other models or concepts or bodies of knowledge or to the world it inhabits. Those are the elements that generate understanding. These particular models are purely mathematical - they are calculations of the most probable correct answer. This is what Large Language Models do - calculate. They don't do anything else to achieve their end results - which can be impressive and look like intelligence created them - but that's not how they were achieved. The LLM never understood your request, it just performed a series of complex pattern matching and weighted the results to what calculated to the most correct answer.

Understanding on the other hand, based on the definition about, would include triangulating that answer more broadly and across a broader area of knowledge, experience, connections, and contexts. It would also include coming back without an answer - or with additional questions and clarifications. Or not providing an answer if the context and what was asked was wrong or inappropriate.

AI, as it stands, has none of those features so it cannot understand.

When it comes to meaning, Stephen offers a couple more suggestions:

Do we mean 'intentionality'? 'Intensionality?' "emotions or tone"[?]

For me, meaning has more to do with seeking an answer, asking why, and seeking to find out about the cause and effect and reason for things to occur. In that sense, it is about intentionality and less about the others. Seeking out and finding meaning is beyond an algorithms capability because it is not sentient, alive or intelligence. Stephen's next line illustrates that perfectly:

Aw, we already know AI can respond to these

Respond — exactly. It doesn't engage in making meaning, it can't because its just calculations, and even they have to be kicked off by an executable command. There's also oodles of examples that show how badly generative tools can respond. They don't understand the meaning of math, humour, sarcasm, fingers, nuance or language as a vessel for emotion. But we can and do.

There isn't a single step in the algorithm that involves making meaning from what it outputs. It is pattern matching. It's good at that yes, but that is not making meaning. Readable, legible, spelling and grammar - they are patterns. Meaning is not. AI is just code — anything beyond that, and it is us creating (or buying in) the illusion. These are the parlour tricks I've mentioned - it looks intelligent, and if we speak of it as intelligence, we lend credence to it being thought of as intelligence. But it isn't. It's just code.

Now look, I'll be honest - I'm getting outside my comfort zone here. I don't have the background to jump into a philosophical debate around the different interpretations of meaning and understanding, as they seem like contested concepts across multiple disciplines. What I contend is that regardless of that nuance — what is being done by generative AI is not an example of intelligence. That all of the generative tools out there today do not represent anything intelligent. They don't function like that.

There is a huge amount of confusion about what "AI" does, how it does it, and what it seems to do. There is a mislabelling (which is intentional) to rebrand machine learning and other big data concepts as "intelligence". By labelling this technology intelligence, we perform the gestalt and apply the concepts that sit alongside it. We apply traits and behaviours that don't actually exist. By doing so we become part of the hallucination of AI.

Doug Belshaw linked out to a great post by Jennifer Moore who makes this argument much better than I. She goes into the operations of AI, how an LLM works. I'd already picked this up from my own research and experience, but I don't think I could have explained it as simply as she does.

Terms of Service

2024-03-02T00:00:00Z

I’m being spammed by a bunch of companies that are updating their Terms of Service. These long legal documents have become the default for every web service as a self-made get-out-of-jail-free card. They tend to outline how they aren’t liable for any loss you would encounter, they’re not responsible for maintaining their services and your data, and any loss or damage you may encounter using THEIR service is YOUR problem.

They are written in legalese, an impenetrable dialect of English full of loopholes, double meaning and antiquated terminology that only a minority of the population can decipher, usually only to the extent that an entirely contradictory point of view can be extracted from the same text.

There’s also the presentation. These aren’t meant to be read. They’re usually hidden from view rather than presented to the user. They have no readability or accessibility features and usually lack basic formatting or stylistic elements like headings, indentation, etc. There’s also the microscopic font size and language used. Legalese obviously had no copy editors or understanding of their audience to present them with valid and useful information. There is only the kitchen sink - which will be hurled at you if anything goes wrong.

So I’m curious… how valid are these as legal documents?

I mean seriously, in an objective verdict-by-your-peers way. If you presented a terms of service document to a jury, would it be seen as valid? Yes, the words exonerate the companies, but don’t they have a duty of care? If they take your money, that is also contractual. So, can you sell a service and then deny or not deliver it because of a loophole you created?

The other thing I'm interested in is the process of gaining agreement.

“But you signed it…” but did I?

I don’t think I’ve ever “signed” anything online. Despite the technical geniuses in Silicon Valley, I have yet to encounter any technology capable of capturing my signature - the physical act of me signing my name as authorisation and acceptance. Most lack anything like a pen to complete the task or the resolution that would allow anyone to meaningfully verify and compare signatures. Is clicking a button or ticking a box an adequate equivalent? No physicality, no unique identifier, no sense of authorisation. If a bot can do it, then it’s not really a signature, nor should it qualify as an equivalent.

I’d also question the timing of the “acceptance”. Most services require you to accept the TOS before you can even use the service. How can you make an informed decision without even having a chance to see the service or interact with it? You don’t buy a house, car, or a microwave without the ability to test it out, look around, press some buttons and see if it’s suitable. So, how can an online service justify requiring you to accept a legally binding document BEFORE you use it? How much legal weight are we willing to give the TOS?

Just a quick FYI that I've added my own Terms of Service to the site.

Intelligence requires understanding & meaning

2024-02-25T00:00:00Z

OK, here's my position: intelligence requires understanding & meaning. Therefore, if you want to call something intelligent, then it must be able to exhibit understanding and meaning. AI, as it stands, can exhibit neither, which leaves it as being Artificial. Or fake – which is technically correct.

I am over the promises and hype behind AI. What's become abundantly clear to me over the last year is that it's ALL 👏 JUST 👏 HYPE 👏. To go around claiming that ChatGPT is AI is not only misleading, it's grossly overstating its capabilities. My prediction is that this overhyping will lead to the claims being challenged legally in the next 12 months ^[1].

For something to generate text without an understanding of what those words are or what they mean is not intelligence – it's a forgery.

ChatGPT didn't learn the topic, it did no research, it did no validation, and it contributed no novel thoughts, ideas or concepts. Other people did all of that already. ChatGPT just colonised all of that data - hovering it up without any permission or legal right to do so, just like all the great white guys of the past - and now it can Copy/Paste that information to you in a timely manner because it's spending $US700k a day on compute. These models don't know the meaning of the words they generated because they base their sequence on probability, not correctness. The words aren't checked for correctness or understanding, but comprehension based on similar blocks of text.

"Yeah, but it generates new things!"

Does it? On it its own? Does it just come up with entirely new and novel things without, say, a prompt?

No. You provided the prompt. You had to provide the prompt, or nothing would have happened. You provided the creativity. You did the heavy lifting of thought by generating the prompt. What you outsourced was the labour. You could have crafted the text yourself, but it would have taken effort. Instead, you outsourced your request to a server farm to process it based on the similarity of the words you were searching for in its colonised and stolen data set.

It's not intelligent; it's sophisticated — both the mathematics and the hardware on which they're running.

The fact is that the equation doesn't seek to understand the text or find meaning in it. For it to work, it doesn't need to. Instead, it creates shapes and patterns in a mathematically definable format that it can use to compare and predict similarities and fit because, at some point, other people told it what was correct. It's had years of person-hours telling it where it went wrong and where it was right - we have that too – it's called childhood.

The thing is, kids learn why. They don't just learn the patterns of behaviour; they learn the causes and effects. They develop an understanding not just of the shape, but the reason for it. They can understand and create meaning not just from the simple but from the complex. Good parenting, guardianship, and solid relationships do this, and it takes effort and time. It is very different to the behaviourist conditioning of "right" and "wrong" ^[2] these models utilise. Children learn across modes, media, instances and locations, social and individual spaces, cultures, and languages. ChatGPT does none of that. It doesn't understand. It cannot relate to emotions or tone; it doesn't need to make relationships or maintain or grow them. It doesn't count what it doesn't need.

It simply spits out words. Just words. Like Clippy.

The above is just about words, but we see the same model being applied to other areas — image generation, voice cloning, videos, search, and soon-to-be every app you touch. They operate in the same mode - adapting pixels and bits based on training data they colonised and stole. And we feed them more data without question. Every app that comes out now is there to hoover up the next data set. Yesterday, they came for your words; now, they come for your prompts. Producing more forgeries along the way, and not just some dodgy text - but fake nudes, political lies, news reports, state propaganda, disinformation & misinformation – stuff that will have a real and tangible impact on the world, on you and your family and friends.

Don't buy into the hype or the "someday-isms". Look at what's around today. Ask yourself - will AI do anything to fix this, or will it just make it worse?

Will it help you connect with your kid or your partner?
Will it help with climate change or add to it?
Will it create more insidious spam?
Will it just add fuel to the fire?

The thing is — regardless of what we choose, all the worst things will happen. Maybe not to us, but every nightmare will happen somewhere in the world because this technology doesn't understand or mean anything. It doesn't understand the implications of what it creates. It doesn't know the meaning of the words or what the pixels in the image mean to someone - it just makes them happen.

Rather than a superintelligence, we are creating a subprime idiot ^[3].

Read the first post The Hype Machine is Breaking Us.

The biggest threat to AI will be the myriad of legal challenges coming it's way. Governments are too slow and stupid to react, and markets will have lured in all the suckers and have made off with their billions before anything gets settled. ↩︎
Audrey Watters' work on the influence of the behaviourists on technology and Silicon Valley (see Teaching Machines) is worth tapping into here. ↩︎
While this was in my drafts, this much richer post, Subprime Intelligence from Ed Zitron, was published. I recommend reading it as it contains links and depth that support for the opinion I shared. ↩︎

The Hype Machine is Breaking Us

2024-02-22T00:00:00Z

What I’ve noticed with every conversation about AI is the hype. The unbridled enthusiasm, constant media coverage and headline-grabbing are simply unavoidable. It is omnipresent in everything day to day, driving conversations, think pieces, reporting and 'thought leadership' to an absolute saturation point.

The hype points to the undeniable financial underpinnings of this technology more than its actual capabilities. What is the groundbreaking evolution? Where is the evidence that this is revolutionary? All we have are parlour games, smoke, and mirrors. Passable text but never exceptional. Useful but never ready. Brilliant but unstable and untrustworthy. And with an increasing amount of terrible side effects - from more intrusive and 'customised' spam through to fake nudes and reality-distorting media, all producible at pennies on the dollar on an unimaginable global scale. To be honest, these aren't the side effects - this is the product. Fakery on a global scale.

Yet the coverage is overwhelmingly positive and enthusiastic. Why?

The thing is, I've seen all this before. Multiple times. This is the hype machine in full force because what is at stake is not the future of mankind - but the price of stock. This is the Silicon Valley hype machine in full swing to drive an investment fever in order to prop up the latest tech Ponzi scheme designed to make VC firms another ungodly sum of money before the hype deflates, and we're left with yet another set of broken promises.

Let's go back to recent history in tech - big data and the blockchain. Remember them? They were going to revolutionise everything too. They were going to change how we operate as humans on the planet and free us from the tedium of work. It was going to be sunshine and rainbows for everyone.

But they didn't deliver any of that. Instead, every government institution went and spent millions on bullshit infrastructure like a 'data lake' to still have no idea about their customers, users and staff. They are still incapable of making an informed decision because data doesn't do that - people do, but we spent all the money on the lake, so now they don't decide. They don't function. This isn't just government. Every organisation has spent the last decade accumulating data to the point where they have normalised surveillance and destroyed any notion of privacy. And for what? The Likes? The Shares? The hits and impressions, the eyeballs and the attention. All of this has rolled into the world's biggest distraction — the planet is burning up.

We became so distracted that we didn't even question the legitimacy and absolute lunacy of the blockchain. The 'trustless' technology that worked out you can Ponzi scheme faster by removing people from the equation. Blockchain birthed the financial institution preferred by criminals and pedophiles the world over, which, as of February 2023, requires the same amount of electricity as Australia to process just 0.11% of the world's economic transactions.

The hype is the game. The game is all just about money.

The product isn't the AI text of videos - it's our ability to hand over money to the already rich to allow them to get richer at ever-increasing speeds.

It even has a price tag now - $US7 trillion.

While this was in my drafts this much richer post Subprime Intelligence from Ed Zitron was published. I recommend reading it as it contains links and depth that support for the opinion I shared.

Margin Week

2024-02-20T00:00:00Z

Margin was the secret sauce that sold me on the Focus Course in the first place. Shaun discussed and posted about the flywheel of productivity, but also the negative counter-productive wheel as well. What I’d got out of a previous blog post was that I was certainly on one of these wheels, and it wasn’t the good one.

The last few years had slowly spiralled out of control, and I found myself lost in busywork, being completely reactive, prone to procrastination and having repeating bouts of burnout. I needed to change, and what was coming out of this course was some of the mechanisms to do that.

We were introduced to the 7 Areas of Resistance, which were set out as common impediments to change because they undermine our ability to focus.

Inbox addiction
Urgency mindset
Distractions
Lack of planning
Counterfeit rest
Busywork
Perfectionism

Inbox Addiction was a key one for me. This isn’t confined to email, but our tendency to check our online life and dip into the firehouse that is the modern social feed. I’ve become pretty dependent on my phone as a tool for distraction, scrolling around at every pause in daily life. This clip came up in one of those feeds somewhat surreptitiously:

Mindfulness. Yeah I guess that’s what it is.

The Urgency Mindset was in regards to prioritising urgent over essential. This is a behaviour that I have grown into and with sober expense when it comes to my health and wellbeing. I’ve struggled with getting my priorities right, more so my decision making when it comes to my priorities. Essential are things like exercise, family time, relationships and networks, but not giving them the attention they deserve because of whatever is on fire or due tomorrow is not good. I need to address this better this year and have started to mark out some key boundaries at work and set some more realistic expectations for myself.

To be honest the whole list applies to my life at the moment and it’s why I’m here! Out of the remaining items I found the idea of Counterfeit Rest quite interesting. True rest is the kind of activity that give you energy rather than take it. I’d actually started to think about this a bit earlier having read something similar. At the end of most work days my brain felt like it was fried and so rest became a mixture of scrolling on my phone and watching shit TV. It didn’t make me feel more rested, in fact it probably made me more tired and more distracted. All I was doing was adding more inputs into my already stretched brain. More inputs, more options, more choices = more distractions. But if I spent the same time playing guitar or writing some code or editing photos, or writing – then I felt better. I felt that even though I'd given something of myself, more had come back in return. Rest wasn't just about sleep, but a more holistic practice of recharge. Given our electric lives I think we spend more time and effort ensuring our devices can recharge more than ourselves!

This area of my life needs some more work. There is a lot of solidly built up habits that revolve around my phone and I need to break that habit, but I need to come up with some better practices. This is on my to-do list and I'll probably write up something if I find some that work.

The next exercise got us to jump into our Urgency Mindset. I really liked this quote from Stephen Covey included in the workbook:

Urgency addiction is a self-destructive behavior that temporarily fills the void created by unmet needs. And instead of meeting these needs, the tools and approaches of time management often feed the addiction. They keep us focused on daily prioritization of the urgent. […]

It’s important to realize that urgency itself is not the problem. The problem is that when urgency is the dominant factor in our lives, importance isn’t.

This concept of urgent and essential was really clarifying for me. The definitions used:

Urgency is usually defined by external factors.

Things that are essential are fundamentally important, regardless of external factors.

In a lot of ways the simplicity of this is to focus on the meaningful aspects of life — your health, wellbeing, family and relationships - as these are essential to life. Everything else isn't as important because its not essential to our lives. We can argue that our jobs are, but in reality work might be or an income, but not our jobs.

Urgency, therefore is relative while essential is absolute.

Now it was on to Margin.

Margin is breathing room.
It’s the opposite of overload.

This idea of space and capacity is central to the concept of margin, and to be honest, I could feel that. At work, I felt like I was sprinting all the time, but the race I was in was a marathon. This meant fatigue and burnout were not just inevitable, they were guaranteed. Without space to rest and recover, I was going to degrade over time. It was already happening. My health wasn't great, my family time had been distracted, and my ability to care had been challenged. There wasn't space for everything, so I was pushing out the essentials and had replaced them with the urgent. I needed to change that around.

The meaning around Margin itself was essentially

Margin is the space between our load and our limits.

This required a bit of unpacking from my perspective. I couldn't tell you what my baseline load was, nor my limits. For years I've just been operating without thinking. Working in a field with knowledge rather than physical labour, finding and accepting those limits was challenging. I have a drive to do more, to do it better – but I can't do everything, and that's the only limit I'd found – not everything.

Obviously, this wasn't sustainable and bordered on the absolutely ridiculous. There were hard limits if I looked. One was simply what I got paid for – there are only so many hours in a week that I get paid for, so all work has to fit into them. If it doesn't, then it's not my problem to solve. I needed to prioritise what was important at work, what were the essentials vs the nice to haves. Completing my timetable in the habits week helped me deal with the biggest constraint in life — time. There's no way to create more of - just to spend less time in specific areas. Time wasn't the only area, though; there were a couple of other areas in life that needed margin.

Time
Health
Emotions
Finances
Creative/Mental

The next challenge was to create margin in each area in two ways:

Increasing our capacity
Decreasing our load.

Increasing our capacity essentially was around ways to raise our limits and how much we can take on. We could do that through a number of practices such as intentionality, routine, deep work, discipline, saving and strengthening. Decreasing our load was looking at ways we could automate, eliminate, delegate, set boundaries, have self-control and focus.

So for each area that's what we did - come up with a way increase our capacity and decrease our load. Doing this we would restore margin into our lives (or at least craft a path to do so).

So for me I chose the following:

Time

↑ planning the week and month ahead
↓ creating clear boundaries at work

Finances

↑ create some new income streams
↓ spend less - no new big expenses

Emotions

↑ more time outside with family
↓ less time wasted scrolling around feeds

Creative

↑ switch off my devices and find a flow state
↓ less time wasted scrolling around feeds

Health

↑ more exercise and physical activity
↓ less bad food

You might notice a bit of a double-up on the scrolling around - but I feel that insidious behaviour is impacting a couple of key areas of my life and that it's taking up too much of my attention (despite the fact I do it to escape!).

My Focus Declaration

The final part of the course was filling out our Focus Declaration. The statement drew on a bunch of the activities we had completed during the course and summarised what we achieved. So here is mine

Because I value understanding and independence, I want to focus on my career and begin moving toward my desired outcome of being able to have a choice in the work I do.

I know that small, consistent steps can result in big change. Thus, I will begin to make time in my schedule for developing a side hustle.

In order to protect my ability to focus, I will work to restore and maintain margin in my time, by planning the week and month ahead and creating boundaries at work.

Signed
TIM KLAPDOR 17/2/2024

It took me a little longer to finalise the last week and return to my Focus Declaration, but I actually appreciated the extra time.

So, in the end — would I recommend The Focus Course?

Yes, 100%. I've started to use a lot of the techniques in other areas of my life, and I've come back to my notes on numerous occasions. I feel better about work and life. I've made peace with some critical aspects of my job and have really enjoyed embedding some of my habits. I still need to break my phone addiction, but at the same time, the device has let me complete a few of my habits. While I'm yet to publish much on learning design, I have been writing and creating words (via text-to-speech) using my phone. I've found the commute to be incredibly productive as I've shifted to taking the train every day rather than driving. Increasing my outputs rather than my inputs is my happy place, and I feel like I've got traction and am moving in the right direction. I actually feel like I have a focus that I haven't had in years — not just on the everyday, but on the bigger picture too. I know more about what I want out of life and what I want to achieve, which feels empowering.

Yes, do the course!

Habits Week

2024-02-19T00:00:00Z

This week of the Focus Course started with a list of any current habits or routines we had - both positive and negative. I had some good routines at work with my team, which I'd developed and worked on to establish and set them up. Some of my chores had a rhythm - being the cook for the household helps. Getting our dog made daily exercise a strong habit; without it, he would go mental and take us with him! But apart from those, I found I had a lack of positive habits. There were many negative ones – getting on the phone, not planning anything for the weekends, mindless scrolling, playing time-eating games. These were often focussed around escape - trying to get away from work or the mounting chores and tasks at home.

The next step was to develop ideas for habits, routines, systems, and activities across the 6 Areas of Life. This was really about how to align these with our own vision and values. The next step was to pick those up and pick a single activity for each area and map out the required time commitment and frequency of the activity.

Having gone through the previous weeks and become much more aware of my goals I actually found this to be much easier than I expected. So my habits that I wanted to add in were:

Spiritual & Inner = Nature Time of 2 hours and to do this weekly. This activity will move me toward my inner personal goal of connecting to place because it's time away from screens. It is time to engage with beauty and feel the weather.
Physical Health = Hard Sweat for 1 hour a week. This activity will move me toward my physical health goal of feeling confident to take on more challenging activities because it will push me harder, and I earn rewards from the effort and a feeling of achievement.
Relationships = Phone a Friend for 1 hour a week. This activity will move me toward my relationship goal of connecting with people because I will actively connect with old (and new) friends and build regularity of catching up.
Rest and Recreation = Plan the Week for 1 hour a week. This activity will move me toward my rest and recreation goal of taking time for me to create margin and space because I need to be conscious of my time and make better use of it — not treading water or being reactive.
Career = Write and Publish about Learning Design for 2 hours a week. This activity will move me toward my career goal of creating value and a reputation because it helps create business opportunities and a sense of giving and fulfilment.
Finances = Side Hustle spending about 3 hours a week. This activity will move me toward my financial goal of starting a new business because every step towards this goal gets me there faster and will make me feel more in control of my finances.

The next step was putting them on a weekly planner and seeing how that would all work. There were a few things I went and added to my planner so as not to make this idealistic - but something that would be possible to do. So I included my work hours, commuting, walking the dog, chores and cooking time, and some other areas of life I felt were missing from my schedule - family time and date night. It's not that I'd miss those, but I wanted to include them on my schedule as things I need to do.

OK, so I didn't get around to writing this up straight away. It's been about three weeks, and I've been living the schedule, and it's working! I've managed to follow it. Getting to the gym has been challenging since coming back to work, but my work schedule has been pretty up and down, and we're getting into a bit of a flow with the new family schedule too. What I've noticed is that the general pattern of life feels good, not overwhelming. I've had time to myself and have been progressing toward all of my goals which is a great feeling. The habits are working!

Broken Streak

2024-02-12T00:00:00Z

I also didn’t close my green circle - the exercise ring on the Apple Watch. I was pretty tired by the end of the week as the new work schedule kicked in. The dog had a play date so my regular exercise didn't quite happen. I went to bed early, and right as I was heading off to brush my teeth, I looked down, and my exercise ring wasn't quite closed. I could have put on my shoes and headed out around the block and closed that damn circle, but I didn't.

Normally, I'd think that this was a failure, but to be honest, I'd forgotten to rest. In all my planning and trying to be more focused on the future, it's all been about doing things and getting things done. I keep pushing down rest as being idle as wasteful, but it's something I have to be more conscious of and pay attention to. I think I need to schedule rest and idle time just to add buffer and recovery to my habits. Rather than ignore it, it’s more about making space for it - to be conscious of it and that it is a rational need.

It also made me think about the gamification trap many of us have fallen into. Some of that data is really good and motivating. Those streaks have helped move my inactive body into an active one. I'm seeing results from the health data from the changes I've made to diet and exercise. They help quantify change. They also don't tell our story. They don't understand the long haul flights or travelling, illnesses or sick kids that mean exercise isn't even an option. I appreciate the prompts sometimes; they help chores become habits, but they lack nuance and awareness, which, if they were truly "smart", they would understand.

Dualities

2024-02-11T00:00:00Z

Music is a big area of this curiosity and expression. I am drawn to the more complex music and often find myself drawn to hybrids and fusions of styles, tastes and sensibilities. I grew up playing metal throughout my teenage years, which in and of itself plays into the nature of dualities. Here is a whole genre that toys with dualities - of being brutal and beautiful, emotive and reflective, layered and simple, funny and hurt.

I recently came across Four Stroke Baron via r/progmetal on Reddit. They play a heady mix of heavy progressive metal and new-wave sound that is quite unique. I've had their songs on repeat for a lot of this year so far, coming back to the haunting sonic scape of [Cyborg Pt.II: The City](https://youtu.be/7scFocWRan0 for another hit again and again.

This morning I was poking around online and came across the film clip for another song Sundowner. The 3rd person point of view clips are great (I was blown away the first time I saw Lok står när de andra faller). What I love about this Sundowner is how it captures this clip captures the duality of the song. There is the fun and joy of the opening riff and vocal line, but the song soars and changes throughout. It descends and rises, is dark and joyful - and the transition between these dualities is beautifully captured in this tiny transition in the first minute of the song.

via GIPHY

I love these little moments in songs and film, and this little clip gives me such joy. The ability to transport you between time and place, space and emotion is jarring and the shock is like a little shot of adrenaline.

You can enjoy the rest of the song here:

January 2024

2024-02-01T00:00:00Z

The Vibe

The vibe has been chilled. I've had pretty much all of January off from work, which has provided some much-needed rest and space to think. It's been a staycation - half planned, half because of circumstances (wife with COVID and some financial constraints). At the end of 2023, I was probably heading towards another burnout. I think I had two episodes in that year alone, but this time, I recognised the signs and, with my leave approaching, was able to switch off and not go down that path. Christmas away with family was a quick defuse of the situation, but I felt that I wasn't really present for my family during that time.

January kicked off back at home — with a plan to eat better, exercise and get my shit together. Part of getting my shit together was enrolling in the Focus Course. I came across the course via a blog post earlier in the year that discussed the busted flywheel that leads to burnout -

This really resonated with where I've been at work for the last year, but maybe longer. It does describe where I get to in terms of work and life at my lowest points. I don't suffer from depression - but this flywheel perfectly describes me at my worst. It's great being able to recognise something, but I needed to make changes. With two weeks of the focus course complete I have gone back to look at my core values, articulated a vision for my life that I feel good about, and started to work on some goals. This all ties in to making some changes to diet and exercise and I feel much more mentally prepared for the new year. The sense of impending burnout has gone and now I feel more focussed.

There are still two weeks of the course left, so there is plenty more to do, but my next big step is to feel more practised. To embed the changes into my everyday life. The challenge comes from going back to work and school and the drumbeat of the everyday returns.

Going back to the gym has been good. I do enjoy doing something more physically engaging and feeling better connected to my body - which often feels more like a flesh suit my brain is wearing.

One of the things I have been thinking through and working on has been to create a side hustle, something that I can challenge myself with but also open up some new possibilities. I've spent the last 7 years working on designing better learning experiences and I've created a bunch of resources and processes to do that. My plan is to build on that over the year and create some opportunities to share that. I'm hoping to have a starting point up online in the next month... so keep an eye out.

Photos

A couple of my favourite snaps from the month.

Recommendations

Based on what I've been watching, reading and listening to I'd recommend the following:

Watch

Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland - A harrowing documentary told through historical footage and interviews. It reminded me of lunchtimes I had while working up in the north of Ireland and living in Derry.
A fascinating video on Australian vowel sounds. A lot of the technical stuff is over my head, but I love that you can accurately describe these very nuanced aspects of language and sound.
Binged on The Bear S01 and S02. It's an interesting mix of themes and vibes, it has a 'feel good' tone while dealing with really traumatic themes.
Beef – Interesting story, great characters and premise. I loved the final episode.
Mr Bates vs. The Post Office was an interesting portrayal of events in the British Postal System where Post Masters were blamed and held liable for software accounting errors. I can see a lot of similarities with Robodebt - and also what the next round of AI applications will be like. We have been warned.
O.J. Made in America I made it to E04, the courtroom episode, which was the first time I'd seen the crime scene photos and been exposed to the DNA evidence. That was a horrific murder, and he got away with something terrible. The courtroom events were made for the tabloid media, and shockingly, it was allowed to take place. The final episode is wild. OJ fell off the radar here in Australia and his ending was not something I recall hearing anything about.
Black Bird - amazing series on Apple TV+. Truly great acting and storylines that run the gauntlet between deeply humanising and horrific and terrifying. The power of contrast is used perfectly throughout the series, balancing out the horrific and the beautiful. The pick of the series is The Place I Lie.

Listen

Darknet Diaries - binged this podcast series on cyber attacks and defence. There are lots of really good stories explaining professional skills in more depth, and this matters.

Read

Design Systems Burnout

This article was a nice framing of the idea of systems work. I understand the feeling here about working in a system and the feeling of burnout. But I liked the two articles linked out - All Work is Care Work & A unified theory of fucks and I can relate to those connections. The reasons for systems work is care at scale. Rather than care as a one-to-one specialised commodity, can we provide greater independence and self reliance?

All Work is Care Work

I want to call this piece out on its own for its message about work:

All work is care work. Not a statement of fact, more an outlook, a mindset. What if you asked, of your tasks and projects, “For whom am I caring?”

The answer can be yourself. That’s a valid answer. It’s often not only yourself but yourself and another – or more than one another. The reader of the published article or book. The neighborhood. The future children and grandchildren and/or your childhood self. The forest, the planet, all things living.
...
Maybe true care, even when directed, turns out to be warmly concentric. By caring for one whom, you’re also caring for many other whoms. Maybe true care has no hard edges; it radiates outward.

A unified theory of fucks

Both above articles referenced this piece by Mandy Brown. This is great on a couple of fronts. I liked this description of burnout:

I used to tell this story, about my theory of fucks. The theory goes like so: you are born with so many fucks to give. However many you’ve got is all there is; they are like eggs, that way. Some of us are born with quite a lot, some with less, but none of us knows how many we have. When we’re young, we go around giving a fuck about all kinds of things, blissfully unaware of our ever-dwindling supply. Until one day, we give the last fuck we’ve got, and we notice that the invisible bag of fucks we’ve been carrying around all these years is finally, irredeemably, empty. We have no more fucks left to give.

But I liked this more hopeful and engaging description:

This is one of my answers to the question of, why give a fuck about work? Why love your work? It won’t, of course, love you back. It can’t. Work isn’t a thing that can love. It isn’t alive, it isn’t and won’t ever be living. And my answer is: don’t. Don’t give a fuck about your work. Give all your fucks to the living. Give a fuck about the people you work with, and the people who receive your work—the people who use the tools and products and systems or, more often than not, are used by them. Give a fuck about the land and the sea, all the living things that are used or used up by the work, that are abandoned or displaced by it, or—if we’re lucky, if we’re persistent and brave and willing—are cared for through the work. Give a fuck about yourself, about your own wild and tender spirit, about your peace and especially about your art. Give every last fuck you have to living things with beating hearts and breathing lungs and open eyes, with chloroplasts and mycelia and water-seeking roots, with wings and hands and leaves. Give like every fuck might be your last.

And this message:

Because here’s what I’ve learned: if you give your fucks to the unliving—if you plant those fucks in institutions or systems or platforms or, gods forbid, interest rates—you will run out of fucks. One day you will reach into that bag and your hand will meet nothing but air and you will be bereft. You will realize the loss of something you did not know you ever had. But if you give a fuck about the living, about all your living kin in all the kingdoms, they will give a fuck right back.

Working in and around systems fucks get lost in the system, but there is value in the system if it is about the living. Focus the system on empowering those it touches, that will earn you fucks!

Strategy Week

2024-01-29T00:00:00Z

Strategy Week in the Focus Course was all about manifesting our vision and values. We started out with an introduction to the 8 Laws of Focus.

Clarity
Boundaries
Ownership
Margin
Sowing and Reaping
Tradeoffs
Action
Attention

These made a lot of sense, each one describing a way of bringing things into focus, like whatever the machine is at the optometrists that swaps lenses in and out.

We then went into the 6 Areas of Your Life

Career
Relationships
Physical Health
Inner-Personal
Finances
Rest & Recreation

These areas often overlap; what happens in one space affects another, and one goal can help achieve another. The big aim of the week was to take each area and develop goals for different time spans - someday, 5 years, 1 year, 1 month, 1 week and today.

This was some big thinking, but I felt prepared for it. Mrs K and I had a habit of doing 5 years plans when we were younger. We joked that they always needed to be rewritten every 3 years as we made some dramatic decision that would uproot our lives. We haven't done that for a long time though. Once you have a partner, house, child and steady job, there is a tendency to stay that way and not be adventurous. For a while, that was good enough, particularly as we dealt with the trauma of The Fire. Moving to Adelaide was a big move, and then COVID hit, and I am only realising again how traumatic that was. We lived off adrenalin and cortisol for two years, waiting for family to die whilst being at our most remote and distant. We were forced to retreat and disconnect and be unable to connect with anyone new right when we arrived in a place where we knew nobody.

It was time for some goals!

To be honest, I jumped the gun on this a little. I had started thinking about this before I really started this week in the course. During my thinking time hiking through the bush, as I pondered values and vision, I also started to think about goals. We have a house (well, a mortgage, at least) - what's next? I have a decent-paying job - so what comes next? In the next 5 years, where will we be as a family? How different will our situation be?

Having my values and vision made this task a lot easier, and I really liked working in those different timeframes. It was thought-provoking, but that's why I'm here. I was able to marry my vision to some clear goals and get some of that clarity and focus I've been missing in my life across all six areas without too much hassle. For the first time in a long while, I feel like I made progress rather than just treading water.

I'm not going to share everything, but I think my Someday Goals act as a guide to how I'm thinking about the future and how that sits with my values:

Area	Someday Goal
1. Career	Work is optional and I have a choice about it. Rather than dominate life, it becomes an auxiliary function.
2. Relationships	Maintain a strong family bond with both sides. Have friends to share travel and adventures.
3. Physical Health	To take better care of my body and embody my physical self.
4. Inner-Personal	To find a sustainable connection to people and place.
5. Finances	No mortgage or debts. To have a haven - a place to go for refuge and safety.
6. Rest & Recreation	To feel I have the energy and capacity to give and be able to choose when and what to give.

They provide a bit to play with in the other timeframes, but I was able to flesh out actionable and achievable goals for each area, which I'm happy about and can work towards feeling better clarity around why I'm doing what I'm doing.

Vision Week

2024-01-28T00:00:00Z

I am writing up a brief reflection for each week of the Focus Course. Week 1 was Vision Week, and I was keen to jump straight in!

We were first introduced to the 5 Components of a Focused Life

Life Vision - Why
Goals - What
Action Plan - How
Schedule - When
Habits - System

There is a flow mapped from each item to the next (1st to 5th), and it's suggested that if there is a specific problem with one of these components, it's best to go upstream and find the issue.

This posed a pretty big problem for me... I'd never considered having a Life Vision. Or perhaps what's more likely is that the key milestones and goals that I set early on in life I'd achieved, and I haven't ever gone back to revisit those goals. So, I was pretty quickly having an existential crisis! Why am I here? What the fuck am I doing? That was kind of the point of doing the course right - to diagnose what I needed to change.

So of I went with my trusty dog by my side to hike through the hills and ponder.

What is my life vision?

Part of the work for the week was to develop your personal values, so I worked through each of the activities, which provided some guidance and asked the right kind of questions, but at the end of the workbook, I wasn't satisfied. It just didn't sit correctly.

I'd tried to cheat a little and use the personal values I'd come up with two years ago during a team building exercise which I repeated midyear in 2023. They felt current and correct then, but then again a lot had changed both at work and at home.

So, it was back to the drawing board. My original values were Understanding and Accountability.

Understanding still felt correct. It summed up my holistic drive to understand, to learn, be curious, have empathy, be creative and accepting of others. This felt true to the point where I could feel it in my bones.

Accountability was where the problem was. I think this stemmed from a time and place and a frustration with the lack of accountability at work, in politics, in society — I had figured if I felt so deeply about it, it must be a value I hold true to. In many ways it is, but it doesn't capture why... why does accountability matter?

I returned to the list I had floating around (I'd created a spreadsheet and used scores to shortlist before!). What I wanted was something that was more encompassing of multiple ideals. I was originally leaning towards authenticity, but that wasn't me; it was almost more of an ask for others. I respect truthful, honest, and authentic people, and I want to be around them.

So I looked back at times I felt good, happy and challenged positively — and I think it comes back to feeling Independent. Having autonomy and being able to be true to myself, honest and open. There is a self-reliance and survival component to it, but I think I also understand the need for help and aid that is required to gain independence — it is something that is worked for and earned.

My two values of Understanding and Independence felt better. They felt right. And so with that, I went back to the tasks, and while I didn't have to change much - things felt much more aligned than before. With my value in place I could go back to my Vision.

The course provided a simple template for this, drawing on a number of the activities in the workbook:

"In my roles as a ———, I want to express, impart and exemplify the values of ———, by ‚———."

That was fine for a draft, but I wanted to make a vision a bit more personal to give it a bit more spice and flavour!

The world is complex, but I want to seek to understand it. That means moving, changing and being dynamic.

Life is experiential. I want to see the world — walk it, taste it, see it.

I will be accountable for my actions and seek to tread softly and make choices that are good.

I want the world to learn, starting with myself, then my family and those I can touch. Through learning, I can create opportunities for understanding, compassion and friendship.

I want to have independence and help others achieve it so that we can live openly and honestly, being true to ourselves.

Being so zoomed out was such a release and a great way for me to get into that headspace. I was lucky I had the house to myself for most of the week and the time to really indulge in thinking. This summary overlooks a lot of the time and self-doubt I experienced during the week. In the end, it was worth it, and I celebrated with a cold beer on the deck.

Managerial Solutions

2024-01-16T00:00:00Z

During one of my many meetings, I pondered, "What exactly do I do?". How limited are my actions in this process? I decided to write down what actions I am able to actually implement and came up with this short list.

Debate - bring people together to resolve conflicts.
Delete - remove the task, it's not going to happen.
Delegate - apply someone else to the task.
Delay - push back the task to a later date.
Defer - put the task on hold until it is required.
Double down - add extra resourcing to ensure that it gets done.
Diminish - reduce the scope of the task to something that will actually be completed.

Now, this list diminishes the role of experience and context awareness, as these play a vital role in taking the right actions, but nonetheless, the possible actions of the manager are very limited. I think this is why being a manager so often feels unfulfilling and can be frustrating. There isn't a lot of creativity possible within these constraints. Because of that limitation, it's not very attractive to those with the right experience or context awareness - and this is what breeds managerialism - where those with limited experience and context take on manager roles and proceed to make poor decisions.

2024 - Do and Donts

2024-01-10T00:00:00Z

This is to lay out the behaviours I want to see from myself and acknowledge the less desirable ones, as well as a way of checking myself against falling down a rabbit hole.

Dos	Don’ts
Develop a sustainable routine and rhythm to the week.	Lurch from one thing to the next like a drunk maniac.
Sweat every day. I need to work on my fitness and consistently.	Use the weather as an excuse. Match the activity to the weather, one is out of your control.
Focus on career development. Work towards the future.	Focus less on my current job. It’s fine, and you’re already good at it.
Move away from the drama. Start to call it out, but don’t buy into it.	Get sucked into the drama vortex. Face what’s in front of me not the periphery.
Stop talking, start doing. Start making things happen. Make the future.	Stop over thinking and wishful thinking.
More food prep. Take the stress out of cooking and make life easier.	The carbs. This is the default solution for a lack of preparation, but it’s not helping at all.
Be more social. Make more effort to go out, to call people and reconnect with friendships.	Isolate yourself. I recognise the trauma of COVID and the reaction to seal myself off, but it's not healthy.
Connect. Find the others. Get out of my shell and meet more people, build a network, find a way.	Fall back to what was. That's still there, but there's a need to push forward now.

Version 1.0

2024-01-05T00:00:00Z

So here it is — version 1.0!

I've been keen to get Heart Soul Machine up and running for a while now. I've put it off for ages, wanting time and space to get it all perfect in my head. That lack of action prompted me to just go ahead and build it. Perfection is the enemy of good. 100% of nothing is zero.

This is a space for me, not everyone else. I wanted to create somewhere beyond the performant nature of social media. Somewhere social and connected, but my own space.

I thought it might be useful to go into a little bit about what is happening behind the scenes of HSM - what is the machine?

The site is built with 11ty a javascript based static site generator or SSG. An SSG essentially outputs your entire website as static HTML pages. This means you don't need to run a special web server or maintain a database. I create the content as Markdown files, build out the templates I want and the SSG smooshes them together. I just use the command line to BUILD, and it outputs a folder full of files I can deploy anywhere. What the SSG does best is allow me to use some basic programming like IFTTT style statements to create extra functionality.

I'm currently hosting the site on GitHub Pages. I've been a customer of GitHub for quite a while, and while it's been bought by Micro$oft it's still performant and provides me what I need. The beauty of a SSG is that the actual files live on my computer. I can back them up and put the site up on any number of services — so I have flexibility built in.

I've tried to do some new things with 11ty, SVGs, HTML and CSS during the build. For that end I've packaged up a few things into the site:

eleventy-plugin-time-to-read - Adds the handy reading time estimate.
eleventy-plugin-rss - Added the default RSS plugin. I've previously made my own, but XML sucks, and this was a 5-minute job.
SVG Factory - I borrowed this from Kevin Weber a while ago, and I use it and SCSS to create all the icons you see around the site.
Eleventy.js Interlink Plugin - I'm an Obsidian user too and was keen to incorporate one of the best features of Obsidian - Wiki Links! Now, I can use them in the site build without worrying too much about 11ty's weird internal linking.
Social Previews - I adopted the Social Previews outlined by Bernard Nijenhuis. This creates an SVG for each post and then saves a JPG version of it and adds it to the HEAD of each page as an Open Graph element.
Flexoki - I've been really enjoying Steph Ango's work and stumbled across their Flexoki colour palette. It actually matched pretty closely with what I already had in mind with my initial sketches for this site. So I adopted Flexoki into my CSS and have been using HTML Variables throughout my CSS.
Timeline - I didn't scope this in the initial build, but after I stumbled across Chris Coyier's site, I wanted to include something similar.
Evergreen Notes - Another Steph Ango feature which really resonated. I plan on going through my back catalogue of posts and adding them to the site - but I'm keen to extract the little pearls of wisdom along the way.

Testing the Kia EV6

2024-01-04T00:00:00Z

A year ago, over the Christmas break, I rented a Polestar 2 as my first foray into the land of electric vehicles. This year, I was in a similar predicament - a week away from home in Sydney and needing to rent a car. Europcar came to the party this time, adding a raft of new Kia EV6s to their fleet. The car looks great. I like the design and shape, especially the details in the lights and body panels.

Getting Started

Our pickup didn't really go smoothly with Europcar. I've done a few rentals with them recently and not had any issues - but when we arrived at 7.30pm there was no car ready on the lot and the only one available had around 50% charge. The fact that I had to book in advance and have the booking confirmed for this specific vehicle meant they knew I was coming and what time I would be there. After enquiring about a charge card or credit, I was informed that it wasn't on offer - take it or they can allocate a different car. I decided to go ahead and take the one available as we were hungry and keen to get on the road to eat and make a tour we had booked at Observatory Hill (which I recommend!).

So after about 30 more minutes, the car arrived.

I'd read a lot about Kia and Hyundai as the kings of the EV world, producing great cars with the latest and greatest technology and all the features - fastest charging, big displays, and comfortable interiors. So I had high hopes for this experience. The EV6 is a pretty hefty car. It is probably a medium-sized sedan but sits higher. I was expecting lots of space, and there was in the cabin. The boot, however, was tiny. Our suitcases required a bit of Tetris to get them in and allow the automatic tailgate to close. There is no depth to the trunk at all - it's flat and very shallow. In the profile pic above, you can make out where the rear bumper ends, just before the brake light swoop. That's it. The whole boot is that deep, and the height disappears with the rake of the rear window. This is not family car territory and you would struggle with a pram and shopping.

Shock number two - connecting your phone. Yes, the Kia EV6 has carplay. It's not wireless, so you need to plug your phone in. There are a myriad of USB-C ports around the car. The thing is - they are charging ports - not data ports. There is one USB data port that you need to use for Carplay - but it's USB-A. Plugging the phone in via USB-C port did nothing. Going through the menus and the phone would connect via Bluetooth, but not via the USB. We tried two cables, nothing – the same issue.

20 minutes into hiring this car and I was not impressed. I was hungry though. So we used the unbuilt navigation to punch in our destination, Millers Point, and hit the road.

'Driving Aids'

It's been a while since I've driven a Kia. The last time, it was a work car, and I hated every minute of it. The steering was spongy, the performance was less than enthusiastic and the build quality was questionable. I've had that experience hanging over me ever since. So while I read a lot of positive reviews about these new EVs, I have to wonder - is it true? Have they changed? Are Kia's now drivable?

My first experience wasn't great. The car beeps, a lot. The nav likes to talk, a lot. Turning on your indicator displays a rear-facing camera on the side you are indicating up on the dash. Late at night on an unlit street, that just means your dash flashes black, and you're not sure if you've broken the car. Your speed is off to the left of the dash, and the dead centre is a chart showing how Attentive a Driver you are.

On the way into Sydney from the Airport, it was sensory overload.

Trying to drive was impeded by the complexity of the car and the distractions provided by the multitude of 'driving aids'. The car beeps, the steering wheel tugs, the nav warns of an impending school zone, speed limit change, camera, lane option — and all I want to do is concentrate on driving in Sydney traffic and make sure I'm going the right way.

Zombie Mode

So this is a thing. There's a YouTube video and everything. This was the second time I'd turned on the car and .... nothing. The car came on, but I couldn't drive. I couldn't change gears, put it into drive, nothing. My wife pulled out her phone and started Googling, finding the video above fairly quickly. But to have hit this issue on the second time in the car did not bode well on my overall experience so far.

It is an EV

The next day, I got out the manual, worked out the USB issue with the help of my mother-in-law's handy cable and got Apple Carplay running in the car. Now I could use the navigation I was used to, the display I was used to and concentrate on the car to drive with. I set up the seat and driving position better. I tried to get the Heads-Up-Display (HUD) working, but couldn't for the life of me adjust it to fit my preferred driving position. I'll admit I am all torso and ride high in the seat, but nothing abnormal or that a taller driver wouldn't encounter. Back on the road in daylight and the indicator cams made sense (to some degree). Yes, I can see behind me, but I'm looking down to do so - my eyes off the road and what's in front. The cameras also don't show anything that I can't see from my mirrors. This seems like gadgetry for its own sake. The HUD is the same. If the layout of the dash was improved there is nothing I would need from this. Having the current speed on display is nice - so put it in the middle of the dash!

Those frustrations aside, the EV6 is an EV, so you get nice immediate throttle response. The car is heavy, but heavy low to the ground so corners are easy and there is no body roll. Its flat and fast if you want it to be.

The car comes in three modes: Eco, Normal, and Sport. These seem to be configured in a slightly non-sensical way. In Eco, the steering is heavy and the throttle mundane; it forces you to drive more conservatively in a very heavy-handed way. Normal is just that, normal and how you would expect the car to behave. Sport is an odd sensation. The throttle becomes super light and responsive, perhaps a bit too responsive. Alongside that, though, the steering also becomes much lighter. It means you can certainly throw the car around a bit more, but with the super-sensitive throttle, this is set up for a disaster. I did punch the throttle hard at one point and could feel the rear wheels kick out a bit. I almost over-corrected because the steering was too light. In a 'normal' sport mode, everything becomes stiffer, so you get better feedback on the drive. Sport in the Kia is more akin to "Fun Mode" – and I'm not a fan of that. It's what a lot of people will do, but in a way that's not about the driver or driving the car well. I think Kia has really missed a beat here - but it's probably a choice that will be popular and reflects the popular concept of Sport rather than the reality of it.

Charging

So with the car starting at 50% charge there was a need to charge it. I took the opportunity to head to the closest fast charge and see how it went. The Evie 150kw charger has two bays per 'bowser' and will split the charge across the number of cars. I arrived at an empty charger and watched as the car maxed out at 150kw and then ducked out for a beer. The car was at 100% within 30 minutes. I thought I might have a bit longer, but no, this thing sucks down those electrons much faster than the Polestar 2.

Comfort

The EV6 is comfortable. There is oodles of space in the rear seats and the front seats are comfortable. Over the Christmas break we did a lot of ferrying of people and it handled it with style and comfort. The ride is nice, the performance of the car is great and so a lot of the shortcomings I had about Kia were forgotten. This is the best Kia I have driven and it's a great car.

Conclusion

But...

It's a big car, but not overly practical. If your primary aim is driving people around – you're in luck. It's spacious and comfortable. But if those people have stuff – then you're in for a shock. There's not a lot of boot space. There is no hidden compartment or any usable space in the 'frunk'. Then there's the price. The EV6 is not cheap by Kia standards. It's not cheap by general car standards. This is an expensive car – and I'm not sure it suits the price tag. The materials are more 'plasticy' and the 'velour' seat fabric wasn't my favourite. Nor were the white accents on the back seat. I can see this car looking very used very quickly.

For me, 'driver aids' were more gimmick than useful, and some of the basics just weren't done well. The dash layout being the prime example and the UI for the whole infotainment felt dated and the menu system and settings were located in unintuitive spaces. If you want to charge the premium price, the experience has to reflect that. I wouldn't buy this. I wouldn't recommend it unless you're after an Uber vehicle which is unlikely to take anyone to the Airport, because the minute someone turns up with a suitcase it's going to be a hassle.

2023 - A Wrap

2023-12-31T00:00:00Z

2023... WTF was that?

This year felt crazy. It felt like there were a lot more down points this year as plans and projections kept failing and falling over. A lot was happening at work, and that's where most of my energy was drawn into. There were a couple of highlights though:

Fiji - We had a great week in Fiji. There was a bit of drama, but it was such a good break during winter in a beautiful and friendly place.
Port Lincoln - My wife and I headed to Port Lincoln to do the shark dive - jumping into a steel cage to see real-life Great White Sharks in their natural habitat. We saw four different sharks on the day! We spent the other days exploring the local area, the two national parks and some amazing sights and fresh seafood.
Birthdays - My mum's 70th and brother's 40th birthdays were this year. Mum's was a big family event and the first in a few years. It was great to see all the cousins and nieces all together.
Graduation - Seeing Ms A graduate from primary school. It's a much bigger deal than I remember, but it is a significant milestone for her and us as parents.

There were a couple of work highlights too:

Colombia - I gave an online presentation as part of the federal Department of Education & Training's initiative in South America. I did one last year for Brazil, so was aware of the bi-lingual nature of the event and what was involved. There were over 350 people in attendance on Zoom, which I was super impressed by.
ACODE LTLI - A week in Queensland in August is never a bad thing. This institute was a lot of work and effort, though. It was great to get out of my bubble and meet a bunch of new people, as well as get to know my colleagues from Adelaide better during our downtime.

Change at work

There was tremendous change at work, with the bulk of it starting in February and dragging out until August. I watched my career trajectory, or at least the way I imagined it going, crumble in front of my eyes. All the work I've been doing over the last three years seemed to be leading to a specific point, and it seemed to be all on track. That all got completely derailed pretty early in the year, and I spent the rest of the year spinning. Rather than having leadership that steadied the ship and provided clear direction, we seemed to have the opposite — management keen on disruption for its own sake, an inability to communicate and unwillingness to engage their teams, under-baked ideas, no plans for operations and an obsession with adding more and more instability and momentum to the spiral and spin.

December has come, and my previous career path has disappeared in front of me. I've felt increasingly angry, disrupted and troubled by this. I guess it is part of a grieving process, and I need to be comfortable with that being what has happened - grief. There was something clear and tangible that has taken away. There has been a loss, and it seems right to grieve.

I don't think I'm alone in experiencing this, but it's probably the first time in my life I've felt that I wasn't going in the right direction, not just in an upward direction but in general. Much of the effort I have put into things hasn't been rewarded or, honestly, even recognised.

Knowledge Work

Part of my problem is making space for this grieving process to happen, to re-evaluate my position and make some decisions. One of the fundamental challenges of Knowledge Work is it involves your brain and thinking, which means making space and separating work and life is incredibly challenging. I found the two inexorably linked and that both were affecting each other. The problems at work bled into home life. The time needed to think ate into family time. I find this difficulty of knowledge work to be different from manual labour, especially when the job requires a machine or a specific location to do the work. Separation becomes easier if it is physical; there's a clear demarcation point in the day between work and family. At the end of this year I've been completely exhausted all of the time. My brain is done and I haven't been there for my family or able to engage in the other pursuits.

In the week off I've had so far - I can see there needs to be some pretty fundamental changes in 2024. I want to spend the first few weeks of the year working through that. I have to really reevaluate this whole work/life balance concept, but the focus needs to be on me.

Crisis

I've probably hit that midlife crisis point in terms of my career. I have started to ask myself that fundamental question — what am I doing?

I haven't really enjoyed going to work this year. I don't think work should make you sad or angry. The culture has changed significantly over the last year and it hasn't made it a pleasant place to be.

That said the people I work with and those that I have recruited into the team are amazing. One of the positives of the year has been the fact that I've spent more time collaborating across teams and areas. That's been incredibly fulfilling and I honestly think if that hadn't happened this year would have felt a lot darker than it has.

A new plan

I think it's time to evaluate where I am and where I am going. Luckily, I've got time to do that over January as I've taken four weeks off.

Coming up to my 40th birthday, everything was looking good. We made a big change moving to Adelaide and taking on new jobs. Covid hit and that's had a much bigger effect on my life than I thought. There's a trauma that we've gone through over the last few years that still hasn't been processed. So much changed - not just from the lockdowns, but how we interact, who we interact with and the confidence to get out there. Covid was such a big disruption and such a big traumatic event that life returning to normal really means now its normality wrapped around the trauma and isolation that occurred. It's not a return to "normal" but "normal + trauma".

I can feel now a deep need to connect. I don't think I've spent a lot on the other things outside of work — individual pursuits, connection opportunities, socialising and networking. Work has been a leech on my energy and it's had a real parasitic effect on my wellbeing.

So, instead, I want to put effort into those spaces that give me energy and to seek out more joy and positivity.

So here's to 2024!

What becomes of Australian Rugby?

2023-09-28T00:00:00Z

This week, the Wallabies lost to Wales and ended their World Cup run. It was probably the worst match I've seen the Wallabies play. That's it.

It. Was. The. Worst.

Anyone who watched the Ireland vs. South Africa game on the same weekend, that was a game on another level. If you watched the way the Fiji team played against the Wallabies, you could see it there too. The difference was the sense of national identity and way of playing the game. There is a distinct Irish, South African, Fijian, French, and Kiwi style of play. Attached to that is a national pride in their game.

A loss and a win born from that distinct way of playing is bearable. There is pride in playing that style of game regardless of the cost.

The Wallabies haven't had this for a long, long time.

There is a lot wrong with the state of Australian rugby, its governance, structure and operations that have compounded this issue. But at its heart, Australia has no game, no style and nothing distinctive.

This is symptomatic of Australian professional sport in general, which has prioritised the brilliance of individuals over the team for so long that we’ve forgotten what a team is and what it has to do in order to win.

If we want to save rugby one of the most important things we have to do is articulate what Australian Rugby is and what it looks like.

For the last 20 years, we have adapted the game to suit the players we can put on the field rather than build a specific identity around how we want to play the game. What that means is a completely incoherent message for players and fans: as availability, injury, and age of players change, so too does the game itself. As we swap out yet another underperforming coach, we destroy any stability or coherence that had been building. Every coaching change for the last 15 years has just patched over the deep cracks within the game itself. More important than the game is this national identity of what we want the game to be. What it can be.

The All Blacks, Springboks, Irish, Welsh, Fijians and French all have a clear identity of what they want the game to be and how they want to play it. And what that means is that there is a clear baseline of expectations. There is a default way of playing that these teams can fall back on.

Whereas the Wallabies fall apart.

You can see it in the smaller nations, like the Chileans, the Samoans, and even the Romanians - there is a way of playing this game that they've grown into and they love it. And love is what’s missing from the Wallabies. There is little to love about the way we are playing the game. Yes, there are individuals who can exhibit brilliance in every game - it’s far from a team effort, and it’s far from consistent. The hero of one game becomes the villain of the next. As tactics change and teams adapt to those individuals so goes our fortune.

Rather than dwell on what went wrong, I think it's time for us to have a bigger discussion about what we want rugby to be and how we as a nation want to play it.

It’s not to undercut the problems with the organisation and at the grassroots - but we’re never going to solve those until we can articulate what rugby in Australia should be.

Getting this vision right ensures that all the required changes and what must be built to strengthen the game have a shared purpose.

Setting down the foundation of the game that we want to see will attract the right players and coaches. It will aid rather than hinder recruitment and talent development. We’ll spend money in the right places on the right players with the right skill set to play the game of rugby we want to see.

What do I want to see?

Running rugby - we have always had some of the best running players on the planet. We all want to see Aussies with the ball in hand.
Tries - I can take a loss on penalties if we go for a try every time. Aussies want to see the ball across the line or die trying.
Tactical kicking - playing the game from the 9 does little for running rugby or the kind of kicking that encourages scoring tries. A rush defence has holes in it which a kicker can exploit. The 50-22 rule is made for attacking and tactical kicking.
Contested breakdowns - we have a history of the best jackaling forwards in the game. This kind of bastardy is the best kind of defence and should be our first line of attack. We’ve forgotten the art and mongrel we once had in this space.
Attack, attack, attack - there is something about the Australian mentality that prizes attack over defence. We want our team to attack at every opportunity, which means every contest. This isn’t just about what we do with the ball, it’s what we do when we don’t have it. We have to unleash the mongrel and fighting spirit of Australia. This isn’t about being the underdog but about being the dog and choosing to take the fight to the opposition at every opportunity. I’ll take any loss, no matter how bad, as long as we contest and attack at every opportunity.
More than a one-trick pony - As a team, we have to be able to adapt to tactical changes. We need to have more than one game plan, and we need to be able to adapt to change within a play or two rather than 60 minutes later when the game is done. That means better on-field decision-making and more tactical team coaching - not the reliance on individual brilliance we have seen. We have become the most tactically devoid team on the planet, and it’s been the source of many losses.

The problem we have is not the quality of the players; it's that we don't play as a team, and we don't play as a nation. We don't take risks because we fear failure. We don’t play cohesively because we don’t play as a team with clarity of visions and purpose.

Some of this comes back to how we’ve structured our domestic teams. Rather than reflecting a distinctive national form of the game, each state franchise that feeds the professional game plays an entirely different style of game. To expect these players to form a cohesive structure and style of play is ridiculous. This starkly contrasts New Zealand, where the teams play a cohesive Kiwi game with slight variations.

We have to do better, and it starts with creating a vision for what we want the Wallabies to be and how we want them to play!

Hello blog

2023-09-26T00:00:00Z

Hey there blog.

It’s been a while and I’ve been neglectful.

Sorry.

Life has been going on at a pace and with speed. Work has been crazy. As we discuss a University merger there’s been a reorganisation, a new team structure, the loss of an old team and a reprioritisation of work. Not at my choice or behest, but so it goes.

I’ve struggled with this round of changes, and I had to question myself about that. I feel like I’ve always been working on the edge of change, in that ambiguous state between new and old. If I’ve worked in the innovation space for so long, where I live and breathe change – why has this time been different? I think I understand it now, but it took a while to work through it.

A large part of my experience has been around grief. A lot of what has happened has been the end of things:

The team I originally joined is gone. We’ve been disbanded and repackaged beyond all recognition.
The team I assembled anew and recruited for has also been changed beyond recognition.
The manager who hired me went on to pursue something new and ended up leaving the institution completely.
Many of the projects that I’ve been leading have finished – successful in their outcome but without acknowledgement or celebration.

In general, the work I’ve been doing hasn’t evolved in the way that I expected. I imagined riding the wave of developing these new online programs through to a more senior role. I poured a lot of myself, energy and time into that idea and outcome. But things haven’t worked out that way. Decisions have been made, or not, to pursue things in differently – one that doesn’t seem to include me.

And my grief is connected to that. That loss of professional self, one that I’d been working so hard towards. From moving to a new city to working through the pandemic to going through the stress of hard deadlines and deliverables, to trying to manage the toll on my team.

I’ve wondered if the effort was worth it. I’ve played through the “What ifs?” I’ve asked myself why and come up blank.

This spawned grief over my effort and my time. I now acknowledge that there was a huge waste of effort. A lack of acknowledgement of what has been achieved has rubbed salt into the wound. The lack of recognition of the expertise I’ve spent years developing has been hurtful. Recognising that the organisation doesn’t care has been challenging. I’ve cared. I’ve probably cared too much. But the organisation doesn’t have feelings.

A 360° review demonstrated how little care there was. How little appreciation and recognition had been shown to all that work. I focused too much on getting things done that I didn’t see the impact that was having on me, or how others perceived me. From my team, peers and managers — I barely lived up to my own expectations, and I certainly didn’t see much recognition of what’s been achieved. But this is something I’ve been dealing with for a while – the invisibility of my work.

I’ve felt frustrated at work for most of this year. Frustrated and ignored. When the future is a version of what I’ve just spent four years working on — I expected to be acknowledged and included in the decision-making. Instead, I was ignored. I get that not everyone has been on the same journey, but when you’ve been the pioneer, trailblazing and encountering all the ‘firsts’ – you’d think the organisation might want to hear about that. To learn from it. I guessed wrong.

So I fumed.

And I smouldered.

And then it went out.

That frustration just left one day. I accepted what was, and what had been, but now is different. I can make this what I want to be. Nothing has made it better. I don’t think anything has changed at all — except me. The one thing I can control and affect and change is me.

So that’s the aim. To stop doing what I was doing because it didn’t work. To look towards opportunities and to create my own. To embrace change again. What happens will happen, and regardless of how things have been perceived — I know the truth. I know what I did, what I achieved and what came out of those actions. Even if no one else can, I can see it and I’ve felt the difference.

Your Audience Awaits

2023-07-23T00:00:00Z

I wrote a quick post on some thoughts about the launch of Threads, which was a way for me to articulate one of the things I've loved about joining the Fediverse – the really social nature of it.

A week or so on, and Threads is up to 100 million users, and there's been plenty of hot takes and commentary posted. I won't be joining. I don't want Meta in my life any more, and I only stay rooted to it because many friends and family have no alternative online presence.

From the commentary, what I have picked up as a giant "plus" is that it's simple and easy to assemble an audience. Many people joining from Instagram inherit the same followers in this new space. And many people want that. Journalists, critics, and media personalities want an audience — that is why they are on social media. It's not about the social aspects - it's the audience.

And that's not what you get in the Fediverse. There are no followers ready to go. There is no easy way to aggregate people into an audience or disseminate your work. There's no algorithm to boost you or pay to promote you.

From discussions in Pivot and Hard Fork — the benefits of Threads is the pre-built audience you have. The fact is the whole application is gamed around giving you an audience. It's also what brands want, what advertisers want – let's remember that the launch of Threads is not a life raft for those seeking refuge from the ever Right-leaning and sinking ship that is Twitter. It's about recruiting those advertisers and revenue. As Twitter tanks, there's a lot of money to be made by those who are ruthless to jump in and provide a viable alternative with the same goals at heart.

Audience = Money

That's it – that's what Threads is: the cannibalisation of Twitter's audience and advertisers.

Finally, I want to say that this whole "distributed" social network thing isn't real. Threads isn't distributed or federated. BlueSky isn't either – there are no other instances, nor is there any operability available.

There is no real effort from Meta to do anything new or embrace new technology – it just saves them from developing their own. They can avoid contributing anything to establishing a standard. Instead, they pick it up straight away – throw a few hundred engineers at it, and make the technology behind real federation - like Mastodon - look unwieldy.

A gap is going to open up between this next set of apps and those currently forming the entirety of the fediverse. One side will be open, the other will focus on an enclosure, trapping users into an ecosystem and audience they can't leave behind.

Social to Antisocial

2023-07-07T00:00:00Z

Threads has launched, and now Facebook (aka Meta) has entered/reentered the fractured social space created by Musk's Twitter. People are rushing to the platform, mainly because those inside the Facebook realm on Instagram have a zero-friction signup. What is perhaps not noticeable to most of those people is their passive agreement to intrusive surveillance and advertising. At nearly 250MB for what is essentially a text reader, you have to wonder - what have they packed into that code base?

But I wanted to note some ideas about what social media means and perhaps what it should mean as we enter a new phase.

The reality is that social media, as we understand it today, wasn't ever really social. It wasn't about creating social spaces or communities; it was only about leveraging existing social networks and relationships to sell your data.

Facebook's original premise wasn't connecting the world - it was a game of Hot-or-Not. It used existing social networks and university campuses, not its own unique ability to connect people to create an audience. It played into the social psychology of young people but offered little social return or value. Instead, the company's value became the audience it provided, not the social connections or ability to find and form relationships. It provided eyeballs, and all it asked you to do was perform. It wasn't to communicate; that's too boring, and people leave the app and go on with their lives.

No, here you had to perform.

Social media has only ever been social in name. It pillaged your existing networks and communities to harvest data to build a graph they owned. Your relationships became their relationships in an instant. Platforms never encouraged or even enabled dialogue. What they enabled was simultaneous monologues that fit the model of performance. A social space without dialogue is not social – it is antisocial.

And every platform followed the same model — insular, monologic, performative, ad and surveillance driven, and increasingly toxic.

Until the Fediverse.

This small cluster of apps using a shared protocol began to retake and carve out a social space built upon social ideals like federation rather than centralised control. Each space could be its own community, but its participants had the ability to connect with others outside their own space. Communities could also put walls up – exclusion is part of feeling connection - and the fediverse created a multitude of ways to engage in that practice. Things were porous but there were layers of safety and protection available. What the Fediverse didn't provide was an audience. It didn't reward performance, and that's helped keep it sane and real. It's why many haven't joined too. Without a pre-made audience, what is it all for? That question is valid for those who have built a career and reputation based on their audience and their ability to engage with it and perform for it.

That barrier of not having an audience has allowed something different to grow and flourish in the Fediverse, something that feels more social and more communal. It isn't divorced from conflict or harm, but the scale and performative value of attack is greatly diminished.

And then there was Threads.

It's too early to say what the impact will be on the Fediverse, but it won't be good if it shares any of the platforms' attributes before it. The massification it offers is not a positive for the Fediverse. The nature of all things Facebook is driven by performance and audience rather than any true meaning of social.

The Connected Curriculum

2023-06-25T00:00:00Z

For the last four years, I’ve been overseeing the development of online programs at the University of Adelaide, and for the past 15 years, I’ve been involved in the development of courses, programs, media and assessments and aligning those things back into curriculum and program design, constructive alignment and accreditation requirements.

One of the problems that I’ve seen consistently during that time is that each one of those components has its own separate workflow, ways of working and related data. None of these elements connect, talk, link back or feed into each other. They also share a similar disconnection – time.

Most curriculum is developed linearly with very few feedback loops or iterations in the process. If feedback exists, it's usually measured in years, not months or even semesters. Most data and artefacts remain static throughout the process.

Program information is usually developed at the very beginning of the process. If any changes happen when a course is developed, it rarely feeds back into that original documentation. There are often important reasons for making ad hoc changes that add value to courses, but there’s no facility to track what they are, why they happened, or measure and see how they impact things at the program level.

But what if we could connect data about the curriculum throughout its development?

What if instead of static documents, we utilised data throughout the workflow – to not only map out a program but to help detail what and when specific skills and knowledge are not only introduced but developed and applied too?

A Connected Curriculum would provide a way to engage with learning design across a program through courses, assessments and potential specific activities and tasks. It would allow us to set parameters for learning at a high level and, as a course is developed, demonstrate and show when and how that learning develops, where students engage with concepts and how they go about applying them.

You could also map accreditation requirements not just to courses but to individual tasks and assessments. If those assessments are linked to the LMS, you could pull examples of students’ work across the grading scheme from live courses.

Rather than just a map of possibilities, as you create courses, you could feed up information about the student experience into the program view live and as it happens:

How much time have students spent on specific activities?
Have they done group work?
Have they completed specific accreditation requirements?
When and what is the evidence they have?

The reality is that this is completely impossible today because the data model doesn’t exist. The modularity of programs, courses and hours is not specified correctly. One can’t zoom in if the detail isn’t there. There is no “enhance” button that provides data that isn’t there.

The idea of a Connected Curriculum isn’t new, but it is still missing from most organisations working within education. While many aspects have been standardised and now require accreditation, much of the process is still opaque. It’s hard to visualise because of the atomisation of education and ed-tech – where many tools exist to perform ever-specialised teaching functions.

But I can see how it could work. By creating a flexible data model, a clear link between course and program could be made. Using simple tools, like tags and standard nomenclature and a modular approach to course design, it’s not only possible but holds the potential to be a breakthrough in creating higher quality courses.

I recently completed a round of work on some program mapping and then applied this straight into course design, and I can see how useful a Connected Curriculum would be. Having created capstone courses for programs that I had nothing to do with developing, I can attest to how useful a Connected Curriculum would have been. Having gone through accreditation processes before, I can see how important a Connected Curriculum can be – and how much work it requires when it doesn’t exist.

At the moment, this is just an idea, but I can see how it connects to some of the work I’ve already done. A way to connect program design to learning design in more tangible and visible ways would be incredibly powerful for institutions to have and for the staff working across these areas. It would help empower academics and designers at all levels to create better student learning experiences.

Work Heroics

2023-06-18T00:00:00Z

My Work Heroics

These heroics have been an asset in a lot of my work. They encourage my creativity by engaging with problems and seeking solutions. For projects that are off the rails or find themselves in dire straits or all good conscience will fall over — I come along and rescue them. I plug holes, I pull together resources, and more often than not, I throw myself into the breach. As an expert generalist, this encourages and feeds my broad skill set. So, for many reasons, this is a positive for me.

However, for the last couple of years, it hasn’t felt that positive. When problems are occasional, this heroism can be useful and rewarding. For the last couple of years, it’s been a hindrance. The projects I’ve been working on have been new initiatives. They don’t have a playbook and a track to follow. Resourcing was a guesstimate, and much of what I've spent my time doing could be considered known unknowns. There were always expectations that we wouldn't have issues or that problems would arise.

The thing is, rather than the exception to the rule - problems have become the rule. In the beginning, we joked in the team that fires were always springing up. You put one out, and another would sprint up. For the last 18 months, it's felt very different — everything is on fire.

From the comic strip from KC Green – This is fine

What I can see now is that while the heroics got things across the line and helped create success, they did nothing to reduce many of the underlying problems. Many solutions happened at an operational level through dialogue and conversation because most of the problems were human. Therefore, most of the knowledge about this work was tacit. It never had to be written down or documented. In fact - a lot of the heroics were to prevent things from becoming explicit.

Work was done to prevent deadlines from being missed, overcome or remove problems, and work with staff so complaints and issues weren’t filed or issues logged. My work really has been so focused on patching over the cracks and delivering things that are of high quality and timely that the projects look flawless. All of the structural deficiencies don’t show up. I applied the fix before the break has been noticed. I’ve been the hero again.

But now I’m tired.

I’ve tried to address the underlying issues and have not really had the success I anticipated. I seem to have been met with a “Problem? What problem?” reaction. All the work I’ve poured myself into is invisible to everyone except those it directly affects. I’ve had some fantastic working relationships along the way, which has been great. But relationships are invisible, too. So much of my work is intangible, the effort of thinking of a solution to a problem, the mitigation of an issue so that it doesn't happen. If the organisation doesn’t see it, it doesn't really matter. It doesn't care about relationships, even though it likes to say it does. There's lots of talk about Stakeholder Engagement but very little about dialogue, discussion, compromise and understanding - all tacit components of getting things done. The explicit, Have a Meeting, is more important than the tacit, Achieve a Result.

There might be a case for making my work more explicit, but that changes the work.

There might be a case for letting things fail, but failure has consequences.

Do you let things fail when you don’t have to? Do you continue playing out the trolley problem when the emergency brake is right there?

This heroic mindset probably grew from a habit of procrastination. Work that I don’t find engaging gets left to last. Rather than being planned and methodical, I opted to be fast and dramatic. Last-ditch appointments, late nights, last-minute saves - it becomes a habit.

My early career was in small businesses where a fuck up would not just lose me a job but close down a business. My heroics probably got more formalised in this environment. I came to expect it from myself. I could make impossible things happen. I could move a mountain. And I felt I needed to. There was a duty and pride wrapped up in not letting things fail. I could save everyone.

Knowing enough superhero lore, I can see all of this being played out by Marvel and DC characters in comics and movies. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed Ben Affleck’s Batman - there was a distinct “I’m over this shit” vibe that resonated with me. There's a limit to the heroics, and it gets to you.

That’s it, though — I don’t have a solution. Just a description of the problem. I can’t seem to perform heroics on myself.

Two to one, or maybe something new

2023-04-10T00:00:00Z

It’s not a secret, there are plans for a merger of two universities in Adelaide. At the moment, we’re in the proposal stage, investigating the viability of the merger and developing a business case for it.

From a number of perspectives, there is a case to be made. Most of these relate to being too small to operate globally. While that may be true, it does make me question whether the purpose of a university has changed so drastically over time.

Universities in Australia are a function of each individual state and not of the national federal government. They are brought into being by an act of state parliament, and while there is an operational distance, they are a public service run for and by the state. The way the merger is being articulated at the moment sees the contribution of universities quite differently. They are now an “exporter” of education, bringing in a billion or so dollars into the local economy from international students. It’s also being framed as a grow house for the next generation of research and skills required by an ambitious military program. These two components are seen as drivers for change and form the basis of merger discussions.

Essentially, South Australian universities are too small to be recognised internationally and would fare far better on rankings across the board if we merged. This would lead to a proposed increase in student numbers to drive that export function and increased research funding because our reputation would rise.

While I’m not unsupportive of these moves, I wonder if they signal a fundamental shift in how we see ourselves. They are certainly a shift from local concerns and push the university's role into a global realm, one we might not all feel comfortable joining.

It also makes me wonder how this approach informs decision-making moving forward.

Risks and Opportunities

Let’s play out the fact that the merger will go ahead. I think it will because the appetite is there to make it happen - the only way I see it being halted is cost. The universities are working away feverishly to pull together a business model before the state government. Part of that will be to gold plate the plans and ensure there are enough golden parachutes on offer for those at risk of losing their job - there will not be two Vice Chancellors. So let’s just say it happens, I think there are a couple of different ways you could set this up:

Elimination: going through the catalogue of services, systems and products offered by the two universities and choosing the “best” one to continue. This is probably the quickest and ”simplest” way to proceed. Simple, as in the choice is binary rather than multifaceted. It’s faster because of this in the short term, but it is incredibly risky and challenging. Systems tend not to work together just because you want them to. There is a lot of tacit knowledge embedded in staff around how things work, and uprooting that creates its own challenges.
Amalgamation: going through the list and merging features from both institutions. Taking longer than elimination, this would be the development of a “best of breed” approach to products and services. The complexity of this approach is that it requires consensus around what “best” looks like. Best is often an emergent and multifaceted property that depends on the individual's perspective and priority. While this way of working has a lot of people and process challenges, this is an opportunity. Consensus onboards people during the process rather than after. It also can be done quickly if facilitated well - but given existing university practices and a history of death by committee, that is a challenge.
Re-creation: taking the knowledge of both institutions to reimagine their functions and ways of working. This requires more imagination, but it starts with a clean slate and asks “what if…?”. Given the size and scale of change, this might seem daunting, but re-imagining and recreating the university as a new entity is a massive opportunity. If you want to discard some of the legacy and deadwood accumulated in the system and structures, now is the time.

While I can see that, in most cases, a mixture of the first two will be adopted, I want to make a case for Re-creation and spend some time there.

Unbundled from the inertia of existing models, re-creation is an opportunity to change how and why we do things radically. It’s an opportunity to be radical and unencumbered. It offers a massive opportunity to be creative and sets the new institution apart.

This is the time for Radical Ideas. Something new is on the table, and I don’t think it is time to shy away from radical ideas. Instead, we should be seeing them out. One of the biggest problems I see in the merger discussion so far is a lack of differentiation. How will this University be different? How will it be unique? Moving to be more relevant to a global audience means entering a crowded marketplace. You have to have something different to sell. You have to have a value proposition, and at the moment, I don’t see one other than the geographic location. It’s the same degrees offered at every Australian institution, following the same basic structure, using the same tools and teaching techniques in almost identical rooms. What is it about Adelaide University that’s different?

Well, here are a couple of ideas:

Set a unified curriculum.

The curriculum is one area you could differentiate quite easily. The curriculum is ripe for disruption because most universities lack a clear and unified vision. It’s murky and messy and often relatable for students. What drives students is the qualification, not the journey they go on or the road they take. Mainly because they don’t know it’s there in the first place, but also because it relates too much to over-ambitious and vague motherhood statements. What if, instead, we made the basis of our curriculum something more real and tangible? The UN Sustainable Development Goals are real and formally agreed to, not by a bunch of white guys but through global collaboration. They provide clarity of mission and a diverse portfolio of ideas that set a bigger mission for higher education. Aligning with the SDGs sets the University up on the global stage as a way to participate and contribute to their development and longevity that benefits the world. This aligns with the global vision of the new university.

Turn costs into income.

Over the last decade, one of the most innovative actions I’ve seen is when organisations turn costs into income. Renewable energy is one of those, where instead of paying for power ad infinitum, installing solar and wind provides power and generates income. It's a capital investment, but universities are designed to be here for the long term. So what if we apply this idea to other areas? One that Is ripe for disruption is IT infrastructure. At the moment, universities spend ever-increasing amounts of money on IT systems, and that cost is only set to rise. As Cory Doctorow points out, platforms (and, more broadly, businesses in general) follow a pattern of enshittification:

First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Most universities have benefitted from sharp pricing for IT services across the board, leading to the disestablishment of internal IT services in favour of those provided on the cloud. Software and hardware as a service have seen most universities eliminate on-site internal servers (the ones that formed the original Internet) and move everything into the cloud. The same can be said for student information systems and the learning management system - all cloud-based and monopolistic. Almost every University now spends millions of dollars annually as a tax to Microsoft and AWS for hardware and a handful of software vendors to run their core business. Without spending that money, the University could not exist. They are now trapped into paying this indefinitely, and because the competition has been eaten up over time, we are now in a monopolistic vice. Over the next few years, we will see the vice tighten, and the costs rise.

The only way to exit this state is to escape it entirely. Applying the same ideals as renewable energy - what if the new University set itself up to run independently as a sovereign entity, not reliant on 3rd party vendors and their costs? What if it embraced open-source software and collective hardware, not just as a consumer but as a contributor? What if it then sold those services and knowledge to others? Aligned with the SDGs, this could create a global powerhouse of development that would directly improve the University, the globe and the local community. This could start a new industry and sector in the state, which aligns with several defence objectives. This is how AWS started - a cost centre transformed into an income generator. Universities consume so much IT yet contribute little back to the broader community in positive ways. This could change all that while creating a new EdTech sector based here in Adelaide but with a global outlook.

Reimagine jobs and work

One of the most significant changes and challenges over the last 20 years has been in the work required by a university and what jobs are needed to do it. As universities have scaled up, the requirements on staff have changed. The traditional role of the academic as a researcher with a side gig in teaching is nothing more than an antiquated memory. It no longer exists, and nor can it. The requirements have changed so dramatically - volumes for teaching are massive, research requirements border on ludicrous, and the administration required to run a modern university is off the charts. The academy of old is no more and needs to be rethought and reimagined.

To cope with the seismic changes in academia, a new and substantial change has occurred alongside it - the rise of precarious work. To allow the academy to continue with its role, it has filled the gaps with ever-increasing numbers of casual staff. We are now operating in a world where most university teaching is carried out by casual staff, surviving contact to contact on barely sustainable wages, with holidays or sick leave and no career progression available.

There’s also the commensurate rise in professional staff - those required to manage and ensure things are done, even to a minimal degree, in a way that marries the requirements of operating a large-scale and legislated industry.

Work at the University needs to be reimagined. We need to lose the current structures that hide the workers and the jobs to be done while at the same time maintaining a system of power and benefit for a chosen few incumbents of the system. We need to rethink work and how to balance it with life, health and prosperity. We have to move away from models of extraction and exploration. We must be fair, free and sustainable in our approach to work. To utilise technology not as a system of oppression but as a way of gaining freedom. To look at jobs as things we want to do rather than a crushing requirement to sustain life.

Be visionary, be real.

Universities have earned themselves a reputation for operating in ivory towers. Much of what happens within higher education is distinct and separate from the rest of the world. Now is not the time for that. I would love a new University to be explicit with its mission to engage with local problems, to ground research in community issues and to develop knowledge to aid and understand our local communities. Whilst a global perspective is important, we have to see universities as places that are embedded and serve their community as a primary purpose, but with connections that ensure we are situated within a global network. This doesn’t require us to focus on a specific field of research but instead ground it in our own communities. Make it relatable, connected and involved rather than aloof, disconnected and abstract. The UN SDGs would help with that as a way to focus efforts, but being grounded in local initiatives is critical. We must maintain the global perspective while at the same time supporting the lands we stand on.

Learning is life.

In Australia, we have been steadily moving towards a problem the US has been struggling with for the last two decades - how to balance getting an education with living.

On the face of it, this shouldn't be something we should consider. Still, the financial realities, the cost of getting an education with current wages, job insecurity and a fragile economy mean that education is becoming a choice rather than an expectation. When students have to choose between a lifetime of debt and insecure work vs the same wage but without the obligation, education will be the loser. The value proposition of higher education has been diminishing over time. We must accept our role in contributing to student debt and failing to engage with students holistically beyond their learning and teaching.

As a new university, we should be thinking more holistically about our dealing with students. One way to do that is to offer an all-encompassing undergraduate experience that combines learning, accommodation and work. Rather than competing priorities, what if we ensured that they worked together? The acts of living, learning and work all actively contributed to and benefited each other. As students, we created a whole life experience, ensuring that they had the space to grow and learn as individuals in ways that benefit their future.

One simple way we could do that is to recognise that the university requires labour, and students can (and already do) play a role in that. What if we formalised that, planned for it and ensured it fed into a broader experience? We could offer flexible learning arrangements if we allowed students to speed up and slow down their studies. To make it "seasonal" and ensure sufficient breaks in learning for other things to occur. This could reduce most students' mental strain and give them time to gain additional skills and knowledge tangential to study. They could be involved in university projects to enable research and support our global mission, and most importantly, they would be paid to do this. By planning this more holistically, we can make learning with the new university far more beneficial financially and as citizens actively contributing to their community.

Learning is lifelong

Education shouldn’t be terminal and end in a degree. As more and more work shifts to knowledge work and as individuals who are more likely to switch fields and careers throughout our lives, we have to move towards an ongoing education model. One that can be accessed throughout our lives rather than as a one-off. We actually need a model of lifelong learning. In some ways, this may not always be about access to courses but the resources, libraries, facilities, networks, and research that universities contain. What if we made the university a porous experience? One that you flow through repeatedly as your life and career change. You can move through and engage with the University in various ways, and it is priced accordingly. Whilst many have suggested a subscription model, that is certainly part of it, we need to understand that there will be periods of active and passive engagements, so it must be a model that can change and adapt to different stages in life. We need differentiated products that support this model and tiered pricing that not only covers costs but, importantly, instils value. In this way, we can move to a funding model that is less reliant on the ebbs and flows of government but one that aligns with our students and aids them in developing into citizens. It is moving to create ongoing and committed relationships rather than the "one night stand" equivalents we currently have.

Heirs and Hierarchy

2023-03-07T00:00:00Z

I’ve written about hierarchy a few times and often relate it back to being the default structure. The reason I believe this is because it’s a simple structure. It’s something that can be deployed quickly, works fairly efficiently, and can be established and refined as you go along. It's a "good enough" system of organisation well suited to deployment in simple problem spaces.

One of the other reasons that hierarchies are a default is because it’s a power structure with its own power dynamic. For those at the top, the hierarchy is really beneficial. Along with the power to decide, comes wealth in a variety of different shapes and forms. Therefore, hierarchy is often a desirable form and structure despite how well it functions as a system of organisation and if it is performant in its duties. If something innately enables someone and gives them power, there’s a reason to not only deploy a hierarchy but to maintain a hierarchy.

I listened to the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast with Malcolm Harris, which discusses a very different history of Silicon Valley than the narrative that we often get told. The topics discussed were numerous and diverse - from eugenics, racism, nuclear weapons, myths of hippies and anti-authoritarianism, and some retelling (with added truth and context) to the stories many of us are familiar with. It is an absolutely fantastic podcast.

As a consequence of listening, I was triggered to think about hierarchy, not as the default, but because people want it there. There are those who believe hierarchy is a requirement and a preferred state, something they are willing to invest time and effort into establishing and continuing. The history that Harris provides around Stanford is just this. A story of those seeking to set up a new and alternative hierarchy, one based on some particularly nasty ideologies. It’s also a story of their success and how their narrative has come to dominate global discourse and trends. Harris also points to this story being a great lesson on myth-making because, despite the claims of being a hotbed of counter culture and antiauthoritarianism, Silicon Valley was and is built on the militarism of the US in the global arena. Every missile and drone is powered by the chips and software developed in and by Silicon Valley. The technology we use every day was developed and funded under a regime that was not counter-culture; it was the culture. It was powered by an ideology based on dominance and dominion, not free love and peace. Much of the fragility in global supply chains we see today was brought about by the shift to globalisation and offshoring work, which was pioneered in Silicon Valley to skirt US labour laws and from having to deal with unions.

The other key idea I drew out of the podcast was the idea of hiers. It wasn’t enough to establish a hierarchy; it had to continue and in order to do that, you had to breed your successors. This is where Stanford fits in. It was established and still is, the incubator for the next generations of leaders in the hierarchy. But it's important to remember that the incubator of their heirs is based on the underpinnings of eugenics and breeding practices tested on horses at the Palo Alto Stock Farm. Not only was this group of people able to establish new power based on the West Coast away from the dominant familial lines of the East, but they also established a way to continue their lineage and ideology. While perhaps not entirely concerned with the genetics component, Stanford has become a tool for indoctrination into a way of seeing and understanding the world – one that is often completely at odds with the rest of us.

This disconnect is why no one has "innovated" a solution to hunger or homelessness. Despite having the “greatest minds” and access to infinite amounts of capital, Silicon Valley refuses to engage in real problems, mostly because they see inequality as a functional part of the model, not as a problem. You can’t have a hierarchy without someone on the bottom. You can’t compete if everyone is on the same level. You can’t have anything resembling a meritocracy (despite their prescribed belief) if it’s not what you know but who you know. Stanford and all in its shadow thrive on the inequality of hierarchy, and they will go to all ends to ensure that it continues. And they have bred generations of disciples to their ideology — that this is the way.

Before I struggled with the thought that hierarchy was problematic because it was the default method of organisation. What we lacked was imagination for how to do things differently to better suit the way we need to work, particularly in complex domains. The problem was the difficulty in moving anything forward while laden with the inertia of what is easy. Now I can see that there's another element here: desire. Some people don't want change because they seek power. Or that they feel they deserve it. It is their right. That part of the problem is that moving beyond the hierarchy is a challenge because the power it bestows won't be relinquished. That change can only come from prising it from their cold dead hands, and even part of the hierarchy is that there's an heir apparent, just waiting to step in. Moving beyond the hierarchy is not a change that can happen within an organisation but can only be done by replacing it.

The Complexity of Learning Design

2023-02-01T00:00:00Z

I’ve been thinking about learning design as a profession, the kind of work it is, and what we do, and trying to map it to the domains of the Cynefin Framework. This is to help explain what we do as a team to others in the institution and to look at what structures would support our work, especially in an environment of scaled-up development.

The Cynefin Framework contains four domains:

Simple.
Complicated.
Complex.
Chaotic.

Things in the Simple domain are, for better words, simple. It’s essentially an easy-to-follow process from input to output, with the process being both knowable and controllable. This simplicity usually applies to the process, not necessarily the tools or technology used, so much manufacturing can fall into the simple domain.

The Complicated domain requires many more steps in the process. It relates to very complicated work with many steps and stages, but it is still knowable and controllable. It can be helpful to think of the Complicated work as tasks that can be programmed; it might include if-this-then-that statements and for-loops, but it can be mapped and has a predictable output.

The Chaotic domain, on the other hand, doesn’t behave predictably. In many cases, the actors, objects and actions aren’t even clear. Inputs don’t necessarily equal outputs. Things don’t make sense, and it’s very challenging to map out what's possible within the domain with any clarity or reason.

That leaves us with the Complex domain. Many actors and forces exist in the Complex domain, and their effect on outputs isn’t predictable. This inconsistency in output is the key to understanding the Complex domain. While a process might be knowable and, in some cases, mappable, even to a programmatic level, how things influence and affect one another isn’t predictable. Small changes can have significant consequences. There are many points of potential behaviour. How things may or may not interact and relate isn’t predictable.

And there’s a clear reason for this unpredictability - people.

Work that involves groups of people tends to reside in the Complex domain because people themselves are complex. They are individualistic, organic, adaptable and unique in their skill sets, knowledge and behaviours. Every facet of a person will have different impacts on how they work, behave and contribute. So it's not just that the process is complicated; when you add people into the mix, they create variation, which creates complexity.

This is the reality of Design as a practice and profession – with Learning Design being an application of design practice to a specific context (like web or graphic design). Design is the kind of work that is suited and required for the Complex domain because its nature is to creatively adapt and problem-solve to a change and work with variables and constraints.

If we look at some of the factors that Learning Designers have to work with:

Alignment to the course and program learning outcomes
Different delivery modes and models of teaching and learning.
The technologies used to deliver the course as a whole and every interaction and activity within it.
The need to plan and development of lessons that aid student's learning
Help develop content in various media based on each media type's affordances and constraints.
Review the effectiveness of lessons in student learning based on the application of psychology and learning science.
Edit copy and ensure consistency of terminology across a course and multiple authors.
Manage production timelines across multiple teams and media types.
Ensure aesthetic principles are adhered to across the course and program.
Develop universally accessible content and activities for students across devices, access levels and physical capabilities.
Develop assessments that provide evidence of learning that is engaging for students and can provide a spread of marks that reflect student's different abilities.
Align the course to the institutional graduate attributes and professional qualifications based on external bodies' requirements
Knowledge of government standards and practices related to the course and program specifics

To that list, you have to add in the roles that they are required to interact with throughout the development of the course:

Subject matter experts
Course authors
Media production teams
Video producers and editors
Program coordinators
Project managers
Team managers
Their peers
Professional bodies

Each factor and each person involved in the process requires not just an action but an interaction. That interaction might produce the necessary outcomes and outputs - or it might not because people are Complex. They might be stressed, not in the mood, be sick, with family, hungover, unprepared, or short of time - there are thousands of ways each individual could be affected by their lives and what is going on outside of work, let alone what happens within the job!

That Complexity I’ve just outlined is for just one course! When you multiply that complexity across multiple courses, a team, a program of study, and faculties and departments, you add multiple complexities. These multipliers of complexity create a relatively new and unique environment to manage. It is an environment with no levers of control and no direct way to manipulate outcomes. Management relies on relationships, negotiation and compromise - elements that traditional management structures struggle with. Within the University environment, where hierarchy reigns supreme, it is a fundamentally different and often incompatible way of working.

But this is why the Cynefin framework is such an important tool - by identifying the domain you are working in; you can adjust your ways of working and the common practices and structures to match.

That’s where I’ll leave this post. I want to discuss the challenges of working in the Complex domain and unpack what it’s like to manage a team and a range of projects in that space. I’ve also got some suggestions for improving our ways of working in the Complex space to help feed into institutional and management discussions.

Testing the Polestar 2

2023-01-13T00:00:00Z

A couple of months ago, I test-drove the Volvo XC40 Recharge - their first foray into electric vehicles and the only model locally available to test drive. As our petrol prices ballooned over the last 12 months, I’ve been seriously thinking about making the switch, and with my current lease running out, it seemed like a good time to switch. With a lack of available cars in the country and the inability to test drive many variants, I thought it best to hold off.

When we started to look at travel plans for Christmas, the prices of things began to add up. Rental cars have skyrocketed in expense, going from a couple of hundred dollars to a couple of thousand. I shit you not that the Holden Barina compact was at the low end of $2500 from some companies. Doing a bit of research, I found that Hertz had invested in a fleet of EVs and that this could be an opportunity to test out an EV over a period of time. So I bit the bullet, and my Christmas present to myself was to plonk down the money for two weeks with a Polestar 2.

WTF is a Polestar?

I have more than a passing interest in cars - I love to drive and keep abreast of what’s out there. So, I already knew Polestar was a performance workshop that merged with Volvo and has subsequently turned out its own brand of vehicles. A Polestar is essentially a Volvo in its underpinnings but styled and set up in its own unique way — which honestly differs quite a lot from its parent company.

Explaining who and what a Polestar is has been a daily experience pulling into parking lots and chatting with family. I guess this is the lived experience of owning a niche brand.

What’s it like?

To look at, it’s a slightly odd high-riding sedan with a fairly wide and flat profile. The colour is - a bit of a mystery. It’s kind of a grey colour, but it seems to have tints of blue and lilac, depending on the lighting. The car's lines are fantastic and give the car a sense of speed while demonstrating a solid stance. Big wheels and really nice LED lights around the car finish off a fairly impressive-looking car.

An oversized central console dominates the inside of the car. It creates a bit of a cockpit feel for the driver, with a large touchscreen at the centre – about the size of an iPad. There aren’t a lot of buttons to play around with - most controls are shifted to the centre screen. This might seem like an issue - it's just something you need to adapt to, but after a couple of days, you can set things up quickly and efficiently, even when driving.

I have a love/hate relationship with this centre console. It's big and eats up a lot of cabin space. There may be practical reasons for its existence, but it reduces leg space for those who like to man-spread and offers little practical storage. There's a little shelf for your phone, which needs to be plugged in for Apple CarPlay to work, a single cup holder and a console lid that opens up to - another cupholder. There are a couple of hidden shelves on both the driver and passenger sides for small items - wallet or glasses case. The door pockets are also not particularly practical - unable to hold water bottles vertically, which is a bummer. So upfront, there's not oodles of space for accoutrement or expected needs - like two cup holders.

At the same time, the 'cockpit' feel is excellent as a driver. I like the seating position and the way you feel inside the cabin. Everything is well made, with great textures and feel to everything you touch - from the steering wheel, seat fabric, steering wheel, levers and buttons. As the driver, you always feel in control of the car, and everything you need is accessible. The car's design isn't open and airy - it's more closed-in and cocoon-like. Visibility is limited but in a focused way – you see what you need to see. The setup of the mirrors and the additional sensors give you a complete sense of what's around you and what you need to know. Peripheral visibility is the limiting factor - but to be honest, that often gets in the way of focus.

This is a driver's car. It's set up for you to get from A to B and to do so in comfort.

How does it drive?

It drives well. Very well.

The model I've driven is the single motor version with around 380kms of range. I had doubts about its performance based on the stats - but from a real-world perspective, it's everything it needs to be and a lot more.

It doesn't have the sickening acceleration of a Tesla or the dual-motor variants with a 4-point-something 0-100 speed - but it accelerates handsomely. What's great about this car is that the acceleration is available at any time - there's no lag, no gear change - push the accelerator, and there's instantly more power and speed. Driving through the Blue Mountains on the back roads was so much fun. Accelerating out of corners with instant speed was bliss. The car's handling was tight and responsive – it's an absolute joy to drive and throw around corners.

This extends to the practical too - stop-start traffic, highway driving, handling broken roads and potholes - the Polestar does all of these things well. Really well. You're comfortable the whole time, and you're not freaking out about the drive in front because of the adaptive cruise control. The car doesn't shudder when you don't see the pothole or broken asphalt. The Polestar takes everything in its stride.

Most electric vehicles have an energy recovery system or regenerative braking - a feature that uses the wheels to power the motor and recharge the battery. You don't get a huge amount of charge out of the process, but it is an interesting driving feature. It essentially provides the car with two ways to slow down: Use the wheels to power the motor and slow the wheels that way, or your standard brakes to slow the wheels down. This dynamic is one of the best features of an EV and creates the possibility of one-pedal drive - similar to driving a Dodgem car – when you press the pedal, you go fast, and when you release, you slow down. You can still use the brake - but you can do most driving using one pedal. I loved this feature and have quickly converted to it. It's going to be a challenge going back to a normal car.

I took it out on a short gravel road and had quite an exciting experience using the one-pedal drive. Usually, on gravel, the car is searching for traction and slowing the car down with brakes to corner usually means losing traction. With the regenerative braking in the Polestar it essentially sucks the speed out of the car rather than physically braking, so taking corners was a genuinely strange experience. You don't lose traction slowing down and getting that noticeable drift, the only time you got that sense was when you accelerated back out of the corner. It was an added element to the driving experience and one I really liked, having done my fair share of backroads and dirt.

While the dual motor version would add that extra grunt and performance, this is not a car that is lacking in that department. The base model will accelerate faster, handle better and be more pleasant to drive than any family sedan. The battery range is adequate. It's not mind-blowing, but a big part of hiring this car was to look at how you would need to manage the content - and it's not a concern for most trips.

Practicalities

Our hire car was the standard range single motor with the Pilot lite pack. You would want the Pilot pack as it has a range of features that really should be standard at this price point. The pack comes with a neat 360° camera feature, making parking easy. I always struggle with judging the distance behind and in front of the car, so this visual aid was perfect. The adaptive cruise control was also handy, especially in traffic. That sounds odd, using cruise control in the city, but the constant changes in sign-posted speed limits, traffic speed and the plethora of speed cameras and police on the roads make Sydney quite a combative place to drive. The cruise handled this easily, stopping at traffic lights and taking off once the light was green. The lane departure feature was quite aggressive, not something I would use often - except on the freeway.

The car is a sedan, and the boot isn’t huge. It’s quite flat without a lot of height, so getting a suitcase in on its side (the most convenient) made the cover pop up and the boot unable to shut. It ended up being quite a Tetris challenge to get three suitcases in. It's not a dealbreaker and not something that would impact everyday use. There is ample space under the boot floor accessible via a lift-up section, but it is an odd shape. It became known as the “ham bay” as there was enough room for a whole leg of ham.

Charging

One of the key reasons for hiring the car was to assess the viability of owning an electric vehicle. What changes would you need to make to accommodate an electric vehicle and its need to charge?

To start with — range anxiety is a very real thing. The car was at 100% charge when we picked it up, and I was quite nervous about how quickly that number decreased and the speed it did it. The first leg of our journey took us from Sydney airport down the coast to Jervis Bay. Rather than stick to the highway, we took a few of the backroads as we couldn’t check into our accommodation till 2pm. We used about half the battery that day - and the next couple of days I was a little worried at how things would go. There was no public charging infrastructure where we were staying - the nearest was 40 minutes drive away. That nervousness started to abate as time went on. We ran errands and visited the local sights without issue and made it to the public charger with 17% charge.

In hindsight, range anxiety is very real – but it’s something you get over quite quickly. After that first charge I had much more confidence in the car, the range, and the accuracy of its own predictions. The built-in Google Maps has a button to search for chargers nearby. The maps are also scarily accurate with their predicted charge at the destination. So you can navigate with confidence using the car and know what charge you’ll have. I’m not sure if the Polestar app connects in the same way, allowing you to plot a journey away from the car - but that would be a great feature if it didn’t.

I also downloaded and used the PlugShare app - checking in using it and seeing how useful a community-powered tool like this is, as well as the Evie app. Evie and Hertz have done a deal, and charges are free on Evie infrastructure via the RF card attached to the key fob.

One of the big learning curves was finding out about the charging infrastructure - which varies quite significantly. The main difference between charging methods is speed - how much charge can go into the car. My summary of what’s available is the following:

Wall plug - the car came with a wall plug cable, so we did two charges like this at the holiday house we were staying at.
Charging plug - these outlets are significantly faster than your wall plug but need to be installed. They are often found at a location - like a supermarket, car park or some tourist destinations. They’re often free to use and pump out about 5kW.
Purpose Charging - these are actual charging stations with a specifically designed installed and operate similarly to a petrol bowser. Pull up, use the in-built plug and charge away. These are commercial in nature, but at the moment, the NRMA in NSW have made them free, which I took advantage of in Berry. I also used an Evie station located at a shopping mall. Both advertised 50kW, but it seems variable about what you get into the car at the time - but I was getting about 35-45kW.
Fast Charging - similar to above but significantly faster and with higher output. I tried the Evie station at Seven Hills and was pumping in over 130kW into the car.

Practically these options look like:

Wall - About a day to charge.
Didn’t use these - but I’m assuming they are useful for topping up a charge rather than “filling up”.
Over an hour to go from below 20% to between 80-90%.
32 minutes to go from 17% to 88%.

The Opinion

I’m going to divide this into two - one on the everyday use of an electric car, the other on the Polestar itself.

Right here, today, I would 100% say yes to an electric car. I found the whole experience easy to manage, free of show-stopping issues and overall a really enjoyable driving experience An electric car is an amazing thing in so much as it’s just like driving a normal car - but every aspect of it is better. You can accelerate faster, slow down better, feel more in control of the car and lay down as much torque as you need when you need it. It’s an amazing feat of engineering.

So the Polestar. I love the look, and I love the drive, but I had a few practical issues with it. The centre console, for one, but also getting in and out of the car was a bit weird for a person with my height and dimensions. I felt like I should be stepping into the car, but it’s more like sliding across into it - and that’s just a bit weird. Everything else, though, I love.

But… at the price point it’s at, there are a few more issues. The Pilot pack is extra, so to is the Plus pack to get all the creature comforts this car didn't come with. I would expect that if you were going to lay down this amount of money – they’d be included. They are in the Volvo XC40 Recharge, and they want less for it, and you get the dual motors. There’s also the brand new C40 - Volvo's first fully electric car platform, which is in the same price range. So from that perspective, it’s a hard sell to convince me to put down the money.

That said - if Polestar sharpened up their pricing, I would 100% rethink that opinion, but pricing for electric cars is their big issue at the moment. There are a few cheaper Chinese models coming in the next year - but most electric cars have a luxury price tag and they need to reflect that in their fit and features. I think Volvo get that - but Polestar’s pricing isn’t quite as good.

Of course, if Polestar wants to get in touch and offer me a discount or wants a long-term tester - I would relish the opportunity. Going back to my "normal" cars has taken quite a bit of adjustment. There's a lot I miss about the Polestar!

2022 - A Wrap

2022-12-29T00:00:00Z

Wow. 2022 was some year!

It started with a bang, a crash and lots of swearing as my team and I raced to push out our first fully online undergraduate courses. There was also time to hang out with friends in Victor Harbour, although we’re still waiting for the weather to be good when we’re there. It wasn’t the hottest of summers but spending some time by the coast is always nice – there is something about the ocean that puts me at peace.

January also saw the arrival of the newest addition to the Klapdor family — Frankie.

We drove down to the farm where he was born and took him home, and he pretty much stole our hearts. Looking back, I can’t believe he was that small or cute, but he quickly made himself at home.

A lot has happened at work this year. My new team was thrown into the fire getting two new programs under development while simultaneously needing to adapt and change many of the processes we had developed. We were now working at scale, and it was a very different beast from what we had been used to. A lot of planning and debriefing was required because a lot hadn’t gone to plan. There was a lot we couldn’t have planned for, if I’m honest. There was a lot of stress on and in the team, and on reflection, I don’t think I led particularly well. I think some of my team wanted me to take on a more authoritarian role, but that’s never been my way of doing things. Working in innovative roles and taking on new projects, I tend to seek emergent solutions, taking time to reflect and learn before making decisions. That approach, in hindsight, probably worked for the project but didn’t necessarily for the team.

One of the things that did emerge from that period was a re-evaluation of our tools and processes. And I went back into an area where I felt more comfortable and experienced — thinking about technology. I wanted to make our team more effective and efficient, and I strongly felt that the tools we had contributed somehow to that. So I started to sketch out some ideas for something new. I drew upon my previous experience to sketch out an idea for a course builder, what it would look like and how it would function. I had a comprehensive vision of how this could all work… what I needed was the time and smarts to make it happen. That came not from me but from some of our team – Aaron and Hui. They took my sketches and basic descriptions and built a custom tool far beyond my initial MVP ideas. In just a couple of weeks, we went from an idea to something we could test and use. And so we did, and Smart Storyboard was born. (I’m still not sold on the name, but that’s it till we come up with something better!)

Not only did this tool allow us to practically speed up some of the processes it allowed us to incorporate one of my other interests — learning patterns. I now had a vehicle to utilise the patterns and work I’d been doing into the software and make it part of the workload.

Seeing these things come together has been a highlight of my year professionally. Making something like this – having something tangible and usable gives me a lot of satisfaction, as so much of our work tends to be invisible. As a team of learning designers, we make courses ‘happen,’ but how that actually occurs is mysterious and rarely understood. Much of my time has been spent this year on making our role more tangible and understood. There’s a long way to go – especially in getting management and PMs to understand the work in relationships that a learning designer must do to make anything happen. That so much of what we do is unseen and unknown is problematic.

As the year rolled on, I had another WOMAD experience, and it was so nice to come back to the festival as it was. It was, in fact, slightly unnerving – the first really big face-to-face event I’d been to in a long time. That said, the weather was terrific, the music great, and I loved the event’s vibe and sharing that experience with my daughter.

As the year rolled on, things got quite stressful. At work, we went through a restructure that, on the surface, didn’t seem like such a big deal (no one was losing their jobs in our area), but it created ripples that impacted the rest of the year. There were tons of issues with the various courses we were working on, and in the midst of that, a couple of team members left for new opportunities. As a manager, there is a real guilt that comes with that, and I struggled a lot with the ramifications of that and what it reflected on myself and the decisions I’d made.

The middle of the year was a really low point for me in the year. The weather was dire, and I was struggling with an understaffed team. There was a lot on my plate and on the team to get things done and accomplished. COVID went through the family one by one. There was a really challenging recruitment process. A dog that got kicked out of puppy daycare for being too boisterous. Our first trip as a couple (no kids or dog) for a few years got cancelled because of my wife got COVID – and I think that was the lowest point.

I got to that point in the year and just had to ask myself — What was the point? For a couple of days, I just wallowed in isolation and not swimming with sharks (which was part of the planned trip that got cancelled). I didn’t snap or fall into a deep depression. But I was done. I was tired and worn out. I resented my work, especially the extra effort and constant feeling of being in a fight with one arm tied behind my back.

After that, things started to click. Adversity still popped up – a massive storm hit the area and knocked out power for three days, which was a pretty big event. There were family dynamics and pressures to work through. There were issues with team members and projects, and relationships. But it kind of came together in the end.

I had to present our work. I had to write up what we’d done. We kept putting out great courses. We kept overcoming the issues. And I drew strength from that adversity. It was fucking hard work and a hard slog to get there, but I felt things come together.

The things I knew were emerging at the start of the year had now formed up and created systems and processes and output. As a team, we created something. We poured our efforts into doing our work and what we produced was phenomenal. When I looked back at what was behind us at the end of the year, I was shocked! There were so many successes in our rearview mirror that it was astounding.

We’d created a design system for learning designers. We imagined, designed, built, tested and rolled out a new piece of software. We put out 6 online research capstone courses and 8 fully online undergraduate courses for two programs. Plus, we reviewed, QA’d, presented, met with stakeholders, recruited, and contributed to various projects, areas and people’s work. It was a big year but something to be proud of.

And then, to top it off, I got to spend Christmas with my family in one of the most magical and beautiful places on the planet.

I got to hang out with my beautiful nieces, be thankful that we have a 10-year-old and not a 4-year-old, shoot the shit with my brother, sister and mum, swim and drink and eat so much damn ham I don’t think I can look at it again.

2022 was a massive year in the end. I wasn’t expecting it, it just came up and punched me in the face and attempted to drown me numerous times! In the end, I’m proud of what came out of it. Some of my best work – recruiting an incredible team, managing absolute chaos, creating the Smart Storyboard, building out the learning patterns, and sharing the work that I’ve done around our approach to learning design has been really satisfying. Getting to share that at Ascilite – a conference I have loved attending but haven’t for quite a while – was amazing. Reconnecting with people and hanging out with my remote team member was just the cherry on top of a pretty great year.

Here’s to another one!

And one last pic of Frankie.